The trailer for Pedro Almodóvar’s Western gay film ‘Strange Way of Life’ starring Pedro Pascal and Ethan Hawke is finally out!
Released April 26, the trailer is over a minute long and features pretty much everything you would expect from its basic premise: a lot of guns, horses, a dusty ranch, and angsty gay romance — and tension — set in Western America.
Watch the trailer here:
The film is actually short, with a synopsis that says, “A man rides a horse across the desert that separates him from Bitter Creek. He comes to visit Sheriff Jake. Twenty-five years earlier, both the sheriff and Silva, the rancher who rides out to meet him, worked together as hired gunmen. Silva visits him with the excuse of reuniting with his friend from his youth, and they do indeed celebrate their meeting, but the next morning Sheriff Jake tells him that the reason for his trip is not to go down the memory lane of their old friendship…”
‘Strange Way of Life’ is Almodóvar’s response to ‘Brokeback Mountain’ which was offered to him initially but declined to direct for artistic freedom reasons. He said that the film “alludes to the famous fado by Amalia Rodrigues, whose lyrics suggest that there is no stranger existence than the one that is lived by turning your back on your own desires.”
While ‘Strange Way of Life’ shows some strong masculine overtones, it is intentional. Almodóvar described the film as “about masculinity in that deep sense because the Western is a male genre.”
‘Strange Way of Life’, which also stars Manu Rios, José Condessa, Jason Fernández, Sara Sálama, Erenice Lohan, Pedro Casablan, and George Steane, will premiere at the 2023 Cannes Film Festival this May.
