But how beautiful they are! Pedro Pascal and Ethan Hawke form a duo as dazzling as they are touching in Strange Way Of Life by Pedro Almodóvar, presented in Special Screening at the last Cannes Film Festival. Two years later The Human Voice where he directed Tilda Swinton, the director signs a new, overwhelming thirty-minute short film. “I dream that at the end, the spectator wants to see more, that he feels a little frustrated because he has become attached to the characters”, he confides to 20 minutes.
And we would actually like the story of these two cowboys who find themselves years after having loved each other to last longer. “I chose a short format to see if I was able to master an English-language film,” explains the director. It therefore only takes him half an hour to orchestrate the face-to-face between a sheriff and his friend, former contract killers, whose brief romantic relationship marked them forever.
A remarkable alchemy
“It’s a film of maturity that speaks of tenderness and appeasement far from the destructive passions of youth. I wanted to make an openly homosexual western while respecting the codes of the genre”, analyzes Pedro Almodóvar who admits to having been very influenced by The Secret of Brokeback Mountain by Ang Lee. The sweetness that develops between the two heroes, one openly in love, the other who would like to forget their affair, gradually wins over the viewer.
This queer western also owes a lot to the chemistry between its actors. Pedro Pascal and Ethan Hawke abandon themselves to the sensuality of a plot that one would think was written to bring them together. “They were at the top of the lists of actors that I imagined in the roles and they accepted immediately”, recalls Pedro Almodóvar.
A sublime aesthetic
Financed under the aegis of the Saint-Laurent house, to which we already owed Lux Aeterna by Gaspar Noé, Strange Way Of Life is as aesthetic as it is moving. “One does not prevent the other, recognizes the filmmaker. The heroes’ outfits symbolize their different and complementary personalities. I wanted the film to be beautiful and to pay homage to Hollywood westerns more than to the re-readings of the genre popularized by Sergio Leone. »
Checked shirts and green jackets dress stars touched by the grace of a seventy-year-old director sparkling with mischief who also conveys eroticism through the dialogues. The filmmaker exposes them physically and morally to make them revisit the past, accept the present and perhaps envisage the future.