Pedro Almodóvar is a visionary director. Bringing us films like Parallel Mothers and Volver, Almodóvar has constantly pushed the envelope of filmmaking with his work. Now he’s doing that with his latest short film, Strange Way of Life. The western, which has had its own comparisons to films like Brokeback Mountain because of Almodóvar’s own comments on the film, will center a love story between two men.
Starring Ethan Hawke and Pedro Pascal, very little of the film has been revealed beyond the fact that it is a love story and that it is a western, which is by design. In a new podcast with Dua Lipa, Almodóvar sat down with the singer to talk about a great many things and share his love for her work, as we all wish to do when it comes to Lipa and her music. However, Almodóvar was also asked by Lipa about his upcoming film and what he could tell her. And while it wasn’t a lot, we still got some insight into the movie including when it will premiere. Almodóvar stated that the film will be heading to Cannes and so that’s the first time audiences can take in Strange Way of Life.
On the podcast Dua Lipa: At Your Service, Almodóvar revealed that the film will open at Cannes Film Festival. “He’s not allowed to say a lot about the western but he’s going to say something because you are Dua Lipa and he loves you,” his translator said prior to Almodóvar taking over the conversation in English. “The title is Strange Way of Life. It will release in May, it will open in Cannes Film Festival and then we have to wait until that moment,” he said. “But of course it’s a Western, it’s about masculinity, but I don’t want to classify it, but I don’t know exactly what the people are going to say about the western. 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. It’s about masculinity in that deep sense.”
The Short Film Will Add New Elements to the Western Genre
His translator then takes back over, saying “So what I can tell you about the film is that it has a lot of elements of the western, it has gunslingers, it has the ranch, it has the sheriff. It has the town, it has the showdown, but what is 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.” But then they end the segment with Almodóvar saying that he was giving too much away.
With that, we now know Strange Way of Life is premiering at Cannes Film Festival, and we’ll soon get to see a queer love story at the center of a western, and that, to Almodóvar, the dialogue is what sets it apart. That has us even more excited than we already were to see Pascal and Hawke take on the genre.
Check out Collider’s interview with Pascal about The Mandalorian Season 3 below:
