Strange Way of Life review: Pedro Almodóvar’s 30-minute queer western is a tender miniature

• The western, the longest-lived of all major genres, has been commenting on and reworking its own traditions since the silent era.
• Director and screenwriter Pedro Almodóvar’s new self-styled “queer western”, Strange Way of Life, is no exception.
• But he does this in the novel context (for the western) of a love story between former gunslingers.

Almodóvar and Peckinpah

• A flashback to the start of Jake and Silva’s romance shows the young bucks embracing one another in feverish, delighted passion.
• The women show no outrage, judgment or even surprise at the men’s unabashed display – just a resigned recognition that they’ve lost this gig.
• This helps explain why the surprising key point of reference for Almodóvar’s muted, tender miniature is the notoriously macho director and screenwriter, Sam Peckinpah (1925-1984) – specifically, his epic and thunderously violent masterpiece, The Wild Bunch (1969).
• Peckinpah stays true to heteronormative genre conventions, using the (nameless) female sex workers simultaneously to arouse and repress homoerotic desire.

Mid-life intimacy in Strange Way of Life

• Arguably the most distinctive aspect of Almodóvar’s film, beyond its acknowledgment of same-sex desire, is its focus on mid-life intimacy.
• Strange Way of Life unfolds mostly in domestic interiors – Jake’s quarters and Silva’s bedroom.
• These are very evidently lived-in private spaces – filled with mementos, tableware, carefully pressed linens and other tokens of their owners’ personalities.