Move over Brokeback Mountain, there’s a new gay western in town. The movie Strange Way of Life, starring Ethan Hawke and America’s daddy Pedro Pascal, is debuting at the Cannes Film Festival, and Hawke can’t seem to stop showing love for his co-star.
The movie is a 30-minute film that director Pedro Almodóvar calls “a classic Western where I talk about the desire between two cowboys.”
“This is the best place to be in the world now, at least for me,” Almodovar said at the screening, per The Hollywood Reporter. “You are the first audience that is going to see my new movie. You will be the first reaction. We are nervous and very excited at the same time.”
Per THR, who had a reporter at the screening, the movie opens with Daddy Pascal riding a horse to visit county sheriff Jake. They haven’t seen each other in 25 years apparently, but they had a two-month long life-altering love affair in Mexico the last time they were together.
They share a meal and have an “orgiastic” night, whatever that means, but things get tense the next day and they end up having to duel. There are no explicit love scenes unfortunately, but there is a moment where Hawke kisses Pascal’s neck and then you see Pascal’s bare backside on a bed. For some people, that’s worth the price of admission alone.
During a Q&A session for which Pascal was conspicuously absent (he’s filming the Gladiator sequel), someone asked Hawke a question on many minds – what’s it like to play the lover of America’s Daddy?
“I like to be wanted, you know I don’t care. If it happens to be a very attractive, extremely talented man, all the better,” Hawke said.
As for playing Jake, Hawke explained how playing a hidden gay man made for immediate character tension, something Hawke said he enjoyed immensely. Here’s that quote:
“What I loved about the sheriff, about Jake, is there’s a way that we are and there’s a way we want to be, and they’re often not the same. It creates a conflict whether you’re straight or whether you’re gay. There’s ways that we wish we were and we often go through our lives pretending to be that way and it creates cracks in us and it creates lies in us. The process of maturing is having less of those cracks and less of those lies. And I felt Jake was a great character because of that.”
Hawke is an artist, that much is clear. Just hearing the way he talks about film as art is endearing. The camera, he explained, perpetuates love and makes it clear the people on screen are “worthy of time.”
“And the things they’re feeling are important and the things they’re thinking are important and worthy of us all to consider. So, for me, it’s kind of always about love in some capacity. What moves us is what we want, what we love. Desire makes the world spin around.”
That’s scientifically inaccurate but quite a sweet sentiment nonetheless. No word yet on whether the film will make it stateside.
