Strange Way of Life: Trailer for the Pedro Pascal and Ethan Hawke western short from Pedro Almodóvar rides its way online

Strange Way of Life has just released its first trailer with the on-brand look and tone of the kind of camp the director is known for. Firstly, with two big actors, Pedro Pascal and Ethan Hawke, it will not be a feature-length film but a thirty-minute short. The poster sports a photo filter not usually found on professionally produced films. The trailer itself is edited in an unconventional style that looks and has the pacing of a throwback to short film serial previews played before feature films during the golden age of Hollywood. And the performances from Pascal and Hawke are very soap opera-y.

The plot synopsis, according to Variety, reads,
“The 30-minute film follows Silva (Pascal), a cowboy who travels on horseback across the desert to meet an old friend, Sheriff Jake (Hawke), whom he hasn’t seen in 25 years. Soon, Silva finds out that his trip was not meant for reminiscing on the past. The trailer shows the two men untangle their complicated romantic history.”

This short will be the second English-language film for the Spanish director, Almodóvar. His first came in 2020 with another short film that starred actress Tilda Swinton, titled The Human Voice. Twenty years ago, Almodóvar was offered the chance to direct what would become Ang Lee’s Best Picture nominee, Brokeback Mountain, starring Jake Gyllenhaal and Heath Ledger. He did not accept it when he feared the studio would not grant him the creative freedom to make the movie with his vision.

Almodóvar would appear on an episode of Dua Lipa: At Your Service and spoke about his upcoming western romance, “This is a queer western in the sense that there are two men, and they love each other, and they behave in that situation in an opposite way. What I can tell you about the film is that it has a lot of the elements of the Western. It has the gunslinger. It has the ranch. It has the sheriff. But what it has that most Westerns don’t have is the kind of dialogue that I don’t think a Western film has ever captured between two men. And now I think I’m telling you too much.”

Strange Way of Life is set to premiere at the Cannes Film Festival this year.