Pedro Almodóvar’s work is bold, colorful, melodramatic, characterized by larger-than-life women in over-the-top circumstances. His visual style borders on kitschy, and his films are often transgressive in their depictions of sexuality and marginalized identities. As film critic A.O. Scott wrote in 2009, Almodóvar’s work often “leaves the viewer in a contradictory state, a mixture of devastation and euphoria, amusement and dismay that deserves its own clinical designation. Call it Almodóvaria, a syndrome from which some of us are more than happy to suffer.”
“I remember it feeling like going to a new amusement park,” Pedro Pascal told the New York Times of seeing Almodóvar’s 1988 film Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown for the first time. “An entire world of color and play and a kind of naughty rebelión was introduced to my experience.”
Put another way, there is an undeniably queer sensibility to the iconic Spanish director’s films. If John Waters is the Pope of Trash, Almodóvar is the Cardinal of Camp.
For anyone who’s seen Almodóvar’s Law of Desire (1987) or Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! (1989) or The Skin I Live In (2011), it’s hard to imagine Brokeback Mountain in a similar visual palette or emotional key. But as he has said in numerous interviews, Almodóvar was approached to direct the 2005 film adaptation of Annie Proulx’s short story about two cowboys who fall in love and carry on a clandestine affair in the 1960s Wyoming.
He ultimately turned down the project fearing he wouldn’t have complete creative freedom—imagine the American studio exec. with the guts to try to tone down Pedro-effing-Almodóvar—and the film ultimately went to director Ang Lee, whose Oscar-winning take on the story starring Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal was decidedly more naturalistic, reveling in the simple beauty of the western landscape and simmering with the characters’ subdued emotions.
But one exchange in Lee’s film stuck with Almodóvar. “In ‘Brokeback Mountain,’ Jake Gyllenhaal’s character says to Heath Ledger’s character that they should go away and work on a ranch,” the director told the New York Times recently. “Heath says, ‘What would two men do in the West, working on a ranch?’”
Nearly 20 years later, Almodóvar has delivered an answer of sorts to that question in the form of his second English-language short, Strange Way of Life. The 31-minute film, which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in May and will reportedly be released in the U.S. by Sony Pictures Classics this fall, tells the story of a cowpoke (Pedro Pascal’s Silva) and a lawman (Ethan Hawke’s Jake) who reunite 25 years after their brief, torrid affair.
According to New Yorker critic Alex Barasch, Strange Way of Life has many of the hallmarks of Almodóvar’s work: “vibrant production design, funny, forthright dialogue, and narrative swerves from desire to violence.” And whereas Brokeback Mountain was a tragedy about homophobia, Barasch writes that Almodóvar’s film is more utopian: “There are no wives to prevent their falling into bed together, and no one onscreen condemns or even questions the relationship. For the vast majority of the running time…the couple are in their own little world.”
That matter-of-fact depiction of queerness is in keeping with the director’s long history of including LGBTQ+ characters in his films going back to the 1980s. His second film, 1982’s Labyrinth of Passion, featured Imanol Arias as a gay Middle Eastern prince; 1987’s Law of Desire centered on a gay love triangle; the semi-autobiographical Pain and Glory (2019) told the story of an aging gay film director; Almodóvar inserted a lesbian character into Julieta, his 2016 film based on a trio of Alice Munro stories.
He was also well ahead of his time in his depiction of transgender characters in films like Law of Desire and 1999’s All About My Mother. As Rebecca Bodenheimer noted in a 2020 essay for RogerEbert.com, “You would be hard-pressed to find another filmmaker who has so consistently written transgender characters into his films and who has cast transgender actors, some of whom have even played cisgender female characters.”
“He is not simply just a queer auteur but an auteur that designates the queer experience as he sees it the dignity, respect, attention, and recognition it so deserves,” Courtney Young wrote for PopMatters in 2009.
And yet, Almodóvar, who has said he “was bisexual until the age of thirty-four,” has resisted being labeled a “gay director.” As D.T. Max wrote in a 2016 New Yorker profile, his films “suggest that sexuality was not so easily defined.” Rather, Almodóvar told the magazine, “The furious aesthetic of my films has to do with a liberation that is connected to sexuality.”
It’s rare that any filmmaker, let alone a queer one, has had the kind of freedom to tell the sorts of stories Almodóvar tells in the way he wants to tell them. The result is a body of work that has earned him two Oscars, five BAFTAs, and nine Goya Awards, among many other accolades. He’s been called “the most celebrated and critically acclaimed Spanish director of his generation,” and “the country’s most famous director since Luis Buñuel.”
As the New York Times’ Kyle Buchanan notes, at 73 years old, Almodóvar has turned his attention recently to stories about middle-aged gay men in films like Pain and Glory and Strange Way of Life. We can’t wait to see how this master filmmaker treats this under-appreciated and under-examined in the years ahead.
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