STRANGE WAY OF LIFE (2023)

Amuse-bouche of a Western from Pedro Almodóvar (in English!) whets the appetite for a meal that never comes.  At half-an-hour, more frustrating than fun, as if one segment in an omnibus film lost its mates.*  Like many a portmanteau chapter, you can see where this one’s going right from the start when old lovers meet after 25 years and immediately fall in the sack as if they’d never said goodbye, only to wake next morning with a special request for breakfast.  And it ain’t ham & eggs.  One of the pair has a son on the lam for a murder and needs a little time to get him across the border.  So that’s why you’ve come back into my life!  Back into my big lonely bed!  Ah, the self-recrimination.  Okay, we’re avoiding the elephant in the room: these past lovers are Sheriff Ethan Hawke and Rancher Pedro Pascal working a Brokeback Foothills playbook.  There’ll be a getaway, a horse chase, a three-way Mexican Standoff, and a clever impasse to hold an ending in place thru mutual limbo.  Yippe-ki-yay!  Neatly handled as far as it goes (hot sex left to the boys as young men for reasons of delicacy?), but good grief, didn’t anyone tell these talented fellows that hundreds of Westerns have barely bothered to hide their homoerotic inclinations?  And that the thrill & mystery of something forbidden goes a little flat when you make subtext text?*  Still, nice to look at, Pascal is a helluva an actor (with a nice butt!) and you can imagine the two missing pastiche segments bringing hidden gay angles to the forefront in a variety of genes.  Horror?  International Spies?  Boxing Buds?  WWI Trench-mates?  Okay, not much hidden in those examples, but maybe this portends an English-language feature in Pedro Almodóvar’s near future.  That’d be nice.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *The film has been paired (mismatched?) with Almodóvar's other English-language three-reeler, THE HUMAN VOICE/'20.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  *Try the very first Talkie Western, IN OLD ARIZONA/’28, to see this in practice.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2008/05/in-old-arizona-1928.html