It’s easy to grumble that, since the ascension of streaming, everything is content now. Art-house films, blockbusters, documentaries, limited series, multi-season dramas, standup specials, even news broadcasts — they’re all items in a queue, presented for your enjoyment or consigned to oblivion on the caprices of an algorithm. Some of them take longer than others to finish, and if they’re taking too long, you can always speed them up.
But one positive to emerge from the collapse of stylistic and temporal distinctions is the re-emergence of the short. Formerly a stepping stone — a learning experience — for emerging filmmakers, the short film has, in recent years, reasserted its utility as a compact and standalone work of art. David Lynch (who never really stopped making shorts), Paul Thomas Anderson and Wes Anderson have all experimented with the liberating formalism offered by the truncated running times and workable budgets associated with this user-friendliest of formats, because let’s face it: It’s far easier to carve out 30 minutes for a potentially transformative experience than, say, the three hours and 26 minutes of Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon.
In this context, Pedro Almodóvar’s Strange Way of Life represents something of a watershed moment, riding a trend while stubbornly going its own way. The Spanish auteur’s 31-minute film is not available on streaming but is instead earning a wide release in theaters, having opened Friday following its rapturous premiere at Cannes this past May. Outside of the animated shorts that have acted as aperitifs for Pixar features, or the collections of Oscar-nominated shorts that often screen in arthouses prior to the Academy Awards, it’s almost unheard of to experience a short on the silver screen, let alone as a marquee draw. (It will show alongside Almodóvar’s only other short, 2020’s The Human Voice, which I haven’t seen, for an hour’s worth of entertainment.)
Lucky for us, Strange Way of Life circulates more ideas than most features thrice its length, offering at once a reverent tribute to the American Western and a subversion of its norms. Semioticians will be agog at the genre’s visual, aural and narrative tropes that populate the lean running time, from the opening shot of a mountainous vista in Andalusia’s Tabernas Desert that could pass for John Ford’s beloved Monument Valley to the stylized title font and tone-setting theme music playing over it. One shot in particular, framed from an interior doorway looking out into the vast landscape, directly evokes The Searchers.
Familiar tropes abound: There’s a ranch, a sheriff, and a killer, with a telltale limp, on the lam. There is a tender memory enjoyed over the flicker of a campfire. There are more frame-filling close-ups of tortured gunslingers in this half-hour than in a three-hour Sergio Leone spectacle. And there’s a shootout, all of it spurred on by that most durable of Western conventions: The stranger comes to town.
In this case, the figure in question, Pedro Pascal’s Silva, is not a complete mystery, but he’s been estranged from Ethan Hawke’s Sheriff Jake for 25 years. As soon as Silva dismounts from his horse and their eyes lock, it’s obvious these men were more than friends.
In a flashback, younger versions of Silva and Jake, with a gaggle of flirty women in tow, fire their pistols at wine barrels and gorge on the liquid that spurts out in carnal fountains. A bacchanalia ensues, though it soon becomes apparent that the two men are more interested in exploring each other than the fair maidens. The sequence is peak Almodóvar; seldom has the ecstasy of young lust been presented with such delirious abandon.
Loosened once again by drink, Jake and Silva are keen to re-ignite old flames, but it soon becomes apparent than Silva had an ulterior motive for riding into town. Spoilers are tough to avoid in a short, but suffice it to say that both men, over the course of this 30-minute saga, will be forced to choose between love for their families and love for each other. We’ve barely spent any time with these characters, yet we’re deeply invested in their fates. The consequences of their actions are seemingly Dostoyevskian.
Yet the movie allows for laid-back musings. “Ours is a strange fate,” offers Silva, ever the thoughtful existentialist to Jake’s shoot-first ruggedness. It’s a line that evokes the movie’s title, and speaks to Almodóvar’s unusually philosophical dialogue. You get the impression, which is probably true, that you’re watching a Spanish script translated imperfectly into English, which contributes to the lyrical poetry of the exchanges. We’ve had queer Westerns in the past, but we’ve never heard dialogue quite like the elegant intimacies of Strange Way of Life. Almodóvar makes explicit the homoerotic subtext buried under the comradely machismo of the traditional Western.
There is another tension in Strange Way of Life, and it’s in the brevity — the knowledge that, when we become so wrapped up in a 30-minute movie, almost any shot could suddenly be the last. Ever more reason to savor every image, every edit, every spoken word. When Almodóvar cuts away to credits, he very much leaves us wanting more. In its multiple layers — its studied combination of straightforwardness and obliquity, homage and reinvention — Strange Way of Life is nothing less than enchanting.
Shorts are the foundation of cinema. If “content” this exciting continues to be produced, they may represent the best of its future, too.
STRANGE WAY OF LIFE. Director: Pedro Almodóvar; Cast: Pedro Pascal, Ethan Hawke; Distributor: BTeam Pictures; Now running at most area theaters