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Pedro Almodóvar’s Queer Cowboy Short Is Too Sumptuous for Its Own Good
It’s a gorgeous but unsatisfying sketch of a thing.
They have boatloads of backstory to be unloaded over dinner and during the morning after, with Silva’s son, Joe (George Steane), being the prime suspect in the murder of a local woman who happens to be the widow of Jake’s brother, someone he vowed to protect (and maybe also had an affair with). If the flashback reads like a fantasy of unfettered and un-frowned-upon desire, complete with the sex workers striding off like fairy godmothers, laughing that they “have nothing to do here,” the convoluted offscreen crime is a much more awkward means of showing the masculine obligations Jake and Silva have become trapped by. Almodóvar has always been an impeccably stylish director, but the lushness of Strange Way of Life ’s interiors, of the uniformly beautiful young men filling out the cast, and the runway-ready jacket Pascal wears (inspired by Jimmy Stewart’s in Bend of the River, but in a shade of emerald green that wouldn’t last a day in the sun) give this film a catalogue-page unreality.
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