Gorgeous but unsatisfying, Pedro Almodóvar‘s campy telenovela Strange Way of Life is a sexy short feature that proves the ultimate tease as it doesn’t entirely deliver on the sex appeal of its leads and then climaxes before we’ve even moved on from foreplay.
Said leads are Ethan Hawke and Pedro Pascal, playing two perfectly-tailored cowboys (Saint Laurent‘s lead designer Anthony Vaccarello served as the film’s costume designer) who reunite after their passionate tryst some 25 years prior. Hawke, stern and gravelly-voiced, and Pascal, emotional and submissive, make for a fine pairing, but due to the film’s 31 minute length we never truly get to see the extent of the chemistry that’s clearly billowing beneath the surface.
To hand it to Almodóvar, he manages to implement a decent narrative at the film’s core – one involving Hawke’s sheriff tracking down the murderer of his brother’s wife, with Pascal’s son the lead suspect – and, in typical fashion, he adopts a melodramatic nature that works in the favour of this heightened Brokeback romance, where the sexiest scene comes from the younger versions of Hawke and Pascal’s characters kissing passionately as they drench themselves in red wine.
But in providing a decent narrative and teasing brief sexual encounters that revel in their elevated queerness, Strange Way of Life can’t help but feel unfinished as it ends at a moment that feels vastly important to its characters’ relationship. Ultimately, this is less a short film and more a prologue to something grander, or, essentially, an expensive advert for Saint Laurent that gets away with light nudity and outrageously suggestive dialogue; some of the lines Pascal gets to utter are homosexually coded, and it was clear the audience on hand wanted more.
TWO AND A HALF STARS (OUT OF FIVE)
Strange Way of Life is screening as part of this year’s Brisbane International Film Festival, running between October 26th and November 5th, 2023.
