Pedro Almodóvar has long been cinema’s greatest sensualist, always eager to plunge headfirst into tales of bedroom acrobatics and familial psychodrama. Many of the filmmaker’s movies seem to yelp with lurid camp from the title down: Labyrinth of Passion. Live Flesh. Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown. Pain and Glory. So you’d think, for Strange Way of Life, his sweaty, 30-minute ode to classic Hollywood Westerns, starring Ethan Hawke and Pedro Pascal as gay cowboy lovers, there’d be more… well, sex.
“I wanted to see if I could do a different kind of sexy,” the 73-year-old explains, in his mischievous Spanish purr. “For example, that moment where Ethan is doing his bowtie, and he’s staring at Pedro’s butt with the bed right in the background… that was very erotic!”
