Pedro Almodóvar is giving us all the queer Western we didn’t know we needed. Strange Way of Life, the Spanish director’s self-admitted response to Brokeback Mountain, will be only 30 minutes long but, if the brand-new trailer is anything to go by, we will all be wishing it was much longer.
In true Almodóvar fashion, the recently released footage reveals a camp, intensely dramatic, fairly erotic flick, with major classic Western stylistic influences. Pedro Pascal and Ethan Hawke’s chemistry seems to be sizzling, and the first look at Manu Ríos and José Condessa is also promising.
The trailer left Twitter positively restless to watch the whole thing, which will be premiering at Cannes next month. Even those not big on Westerns will be tuning in.
I definitely felt that.
Pascal, who has been slowly becoming everyone’s favorite actor since headlining the TV adaptation of the Last of Us video game for HBO, plays a cowboy named Silva. In what is essentially his first mainstream romantic role, the Chilean-born American actor will be sharing the screen with romance veteran Hawke in the role of Sheriff Jake. Silva seeks Jake out after 25 years but the meeting isn’t supposed to be about going down the memory lane of their friendship.
Strange Way of Life is titled after the homonymous fado song by Portuguese singer Amália Rodrigues and was co-produced by Almodóvar’s own production company El Deseo and Saint Laurent – in what is the fashion house’s first cinematic project. There is no information yet about when the short film will arrive in U.S. theaters.
