Pedro Almodóvar rides into the Western in a Cannes short about gay cowboys
“Strange Way of Life”
Writer by Pedro Almodóvar
Director Pedro Almodóvar
Actors Pedro Pascal, Ethan Hawke, Manu Rios Rated R
CANNES, France (AP) — “Pedro! Pedro!” shouted the Cannes crowd before Pedro Almodóvar unveiled his latest film, “Strange Way of Life,” a 31-minute Western starring Pedro Pascal and Ethan Hawke as cowboys and former lovers.
There’s nothing quite like the fervor that greets a new film from Almodóvar, one of the world’s most beloved filmmakers. But that may have been doubly so for “Strange Ways of Life” even though it’s a quarter the length of his usual output. So frenzied was the scene that many ticketholders never got in.
When Almodóvar introduced his all-male cast on stage at the film’s Cannes Film Festival premiere, some in the audience had to cool themselves. John C. Reilly, president of this year’s Un Certain regard jury, kindly reached across the aisle with his hat to fan one excited moviegoer.
“I was not sure that I’d make a Western in my life but at least I made a short,” Almodóvar said smiling the next day in an interview on a hotel terrace overlooking the Croisette.
The 73-year-old Spanish auteur has been edging closer to working in English. He’s done it now in two shorts — “The Human Voice,” with Tilda Swinton, and “Strange Way of Life,” sponsored by Saint Laurent — and is preparing to make his first English-language feature after abandoning “A Manuel for Cleaning Women,” a film he had prepared to make with Cate Blanchett.
“Strange Way of Life” again suggests Almodóvar works just as effortlessly in English as he does in Spanish. Pascal (who had to miss the film’s premiere) and Hawke play a pair of former gunslingers who meet up 25 years years after a torrid affair. They briefly rekindle their love for another, but one’s stubborn insistence that a life together is an impossibility leads to a violent climax.
Almodóvar, a deeply knowledgeable film buff who has consciously worked in melodrama, noir and screwball genres before, discovered his love of Westerns in his early 20s. He lists John Sturges, Henry Hathaway, Anthony Mann and Howard Hawks among his favorites. “John Ford is unlimited,” he says.
But the genre goes even deeper than that for Almodóvar. He remembers his father trying to teach him as a boy how to ride a horse. (“And I was so afraid that he couldn’t,” he says.)
“The Western was born at the beginning of the century with cinema. What Hollywood did was create the American epic and also stylize their reality,” says Almodóvar, speaking alongside Hawke. “But their reality was very dusty and very ugly. It was not glamorous. They created a style which was completely American and also a completely male genre. I thought that if there were that many men, some of them could desire each other.”
Almodóvar has come closer before. In the early ‘90s, he sought the rights to adapt Tom Spanbauer’s “The Man Who Fell in Love With the Moon,” but says a Western with gay cowboys and Native Americans was a tough sell. Almodóvar also turned down “Brokeback Mountain,” which Ang Lee made in 2005. He wanted to make a more fullfledged Western, with gunfights. Just with holsters slung over the bed post.
“For me, ‘Brokeback Mountain,’ they have the hats, the iconography of the Western.
But they were sheepherders. They were not cowboys. They were not hired killers” says Almodóvar. “The past of (my characters), for me, they were part of a gang like ‘The Wild Bunch’ of Sam Peckinpah. And they have an affair.”