Strange Way of Life: A Brokeback Mountain Ripoff?
A romantic drama about a gay cowboy and his complicated relationship with his former lover… where have I seen that before? You don’t have to be a film buff to have heard of Brokeback Mountain (2005)—a movie so culturally significant that it was preserved in the Library of Congress. Director Pedro Almodóvar had to be either very ambitious, or very unoriginal and capitalistic, in making Strange Way of Life (2023) reminiscent of such an iconic movie. He claims his 31-minute movie was inspired by an exchange between the two love interests in Brokeback Mountain: one suggests that they move into a ranch together, and the other replies, “‘What would two men do in the West, working on a ranch?’ [Almodóvar told The New York Times,] In many ways, I feel my film gives answer to that.” Although Strange Way of Life indeed provides an explicit answer to this question by the time it ends, it fails to make a meaningful contribution to the queer filmscape because of its refusal to acknowledge the real force keeping gay lovers apart in period films: homophobia.
Strange Way of Life has all the trademarks of a Western film: the title screen uses bright red and yellow Tuscan font reminiscent of Western storefronts, and the opening shots pan over a hilly, rocky desert with patches of dull grass. Wearing a black cowboy hat and a bright green jacket, Silva (Pedro Pascal) rides his horse into Bitter Creek—a small, rural town full of wooden buildings—to greet his old friend Jake (Ethan Hawke), who is dressed in a formal black suit and revealed to be the town’s sheriff.
Desperate desire and enduring heartbreak cloud the room every time the two characters share the screen—Pascal conveys ardent longing with his gaze alone, and Hawke’s cold exterior is underlined with quiet heartbreak and fear. Their characters respectively mirror Jack and Ennis from Brokeback Mountain: a lively, emotional cowboy who longs to be with his guarded, family-oriented lover, who can’t help but succumb to his attraction to the former. It’s the perfect recipe for a touching romance, but the melodramatic dialogue oversells it with jarringly cheesy lines like “Ours is a strange fate,” and “You cured all my ailments.”
The fast pacing, combined with flashbacks to the start of the lovers’ relationship, wasn’t particularly effective, either. Viewers are introduced to the characters before we know about their history, and it isn’t long after they reunite and share a brief, romantically charged dinner that Jake kisses the back of Silva’s neck and the screen fades to black. We blink awake to a moving shot that glides through the room before landing on a close-up of Silva’s bare ass. This all happens within the first six minutes of the film! It follows that any subsequent argument or flashback regarding their romance feels disorienting, as if a stranger had told me their deepest secret before moving on to share mundane facts about their life. Their relationship is difficult to root for or against, let alone understand; the movie ended moments after I started to put together the pieces of how they ended up in their current situation.
However, the movie’s biggest crime is not this half-baked romance, but its existence in an apparent vacuum. Not only are the sets empty, with more tall rocks and horses than buildings or people, but a fear of homophobia in this old Western town is never explicitly mentioned. One could argue that it’s implied, but I think the very concrete fear of hate crimes in Brokeback Mountain gives the film stakes—the two lovers want to be together, but Ennis fears that they’ll get murdered by homophobic neighbors, which is what happened to a gay rancher he knew as a child. In fact, this is the story Ennis recounts after Jack suggests they move in together, contradicting Almodóvar’s misremembrance that he replied by questioning, “What would two men do in the West, working on a ranch?” This avoidance boils down Silva and Jake’s romantic dilemma to a difference of priorities rather than a passionate love that could never be. Essentially, I couldn’t believe that they were truly in love, since there were no external factors preventing them from being together.
In Strange Way of Life, Almodóvar neither acknowledges the important history of discrimination against LGBTQ+ populations nor makes an original film about two gay men in modern times. Especially after learning that Almodóvar declined to direct Brokeback Mountain before the role eventually went to Ang Lee, I can’t help but wonder if Almodóvar actually cares or just wants to live out a missed opportunity to direct a cinematic masterpiece.
Sadie Cho is a senior majoring in English and psychology at Columbia College and the co-Managing Editor of Double Exposure.