✨The Case for ‘Strange Way of Life’

To commemorate ‘Strange Way of Life’ now being available on Netflix, I’m bringing back my review from my old Substack, for your reading pleasure. Though this review will contain spoilers, it will not include a synopsis, so it will make the most sense only after you have seen the short.

This review was written not long after seeing the film, September 2023.

In a strange turn of events, I’ve spent a while reading quite a few reviews of this film, long before, and sometime after, having seen it. The responses were scattershot - some seemed to understand the film’s narrative purpose, but not its style - others seemed to take it together wholesale with assumptions about the filmmaker himself, the casting choices, and the involvement of Vacarello’s YSL, and yet still found the story lacking. Some even felt there was no chemistry between the leads, which, to each their own, but one wonders what film they watched. All this to say - I was quite disappointed by the professional discourse on this film.

I am not the kind of fangirl that needs my queer media from out-and-out queer people. I see dedicating your life to the arts as queer enough. Your badge of honor has been bestowed - bring truth and settle fate, dear devotee. I also have far more to say about the film from every other perspective. All this to say - you will see neither vulgar speculation, rank dismissal, or careless erasure (or even much analysis of the actor’s performances at all)as you read this piece. Reverse trigger warning for being a regular human being with decorum, apparently. The acting did its job, the performers are proven talents, and dear reader, the film had more to tell.

There is a major gulf between what the ‘marginalized’ want to say and what the mainstream wants to hear from them, which is how you can get a compact story about regret and repression in a form like this, and have the conversation spiral entirely around how much raunchy sex was involved. Simply - there wasn’t any needed. This piece centered on tension - tension in distance, the tensions of an amputated history - and the tension between being queer, and, as Almodóvar put it, “never being able to live with a man”.

Though Pedro Pascal has made a career of stealing scenes, this is Jake’s (Hawke’s) story. The film posits a theory about the rotting of a spirit unable to accept love, and it does so by bypassing the cultural fascination with gay men being so stereotypically oversexed, physically rough with one another, and otherwise unexpressive - the latter approach, I would posit, is actually the sanitation of queer sexuality into heteropatriarchy. If bell hooks’ interpretation is to be believed, queer is “at odds with everything around it”, and in our culture, there is nothing more at odds with the world than tender love. Acceptance of tenderness, without intoxication, without excuses. Being cared for and being allowed to breathe in the presence of others. Jake, at every turn, multiple times within a 30-minute film, cannot accept this. He dedicates his life to uncaring duty and honor, and cannot make room for the love he does not earn through turmoil, gunfire, and anger.

This is a typical tragedy, and it is only highlighted more by how Silva’s circumstances are stacked against Jake’s. We were never going to come out of this movie with a happy ending, unscathed (literally), or otherwise assuaged. Silva will give, even when it makes sense not to, and Jake will take (oh, the irony), with no capacity to reciprocate. This is the destruction of the self that toxic masculinity promises.

Perhaps, as people have watched the film, they’ve wanted to ignore this theme - it is buried under aesthetics, enigmatic performances, genre, and history - but it is understood by everyone inside the film, and I can only guess that it’s ignored on the basis of it being an uncomfortable truth - this is not about societal challenge, per se - fighting the man, fighting the personified system of oppression - but how, often, we are our own sheriffs, we make the law, abide it and enforce it, and it fucking hurts, but the hurt feels correct.

We take painful rules and we enforce them on ourselves, to the detriment of our spirits, to the destruction and injury of the ones we love, and the ones who would love us. It puts us at odds with those people. It puts us at their gunpoint as they attempt to create an easier world, a world where the rules can bend, sometimes, because of love. It puts us at the mercy of those people, even - when we lose the energy to enforce the rules. It makes staying impossible, and the lives we do choose bitter and joyless.

To be queer is to, even inconsistently, decide that love is something worth breaking societal rules for. Almodóvar has not shied away from the core of the film, in his eyes - that morning after. It spawns everything around it because it is a statement of itself - who would you be, Jake or Silva? I found it impossible to watch without immediately hearing a personal thesis on love from the filmmaker. What love means, what’s allowed and not allowed, what openness and care are and aren’t, who defines manipulation, the tragedy of how love is misunderstood between two people who share so much else in common, but their definitions of love are not the same. One willing to break the rules, and one enforcing them. One of them decides on love, and the other sides with the system (and literally is the system).

I wonder how many people found themselves relating to Jake’s pursuit of the criminal son, but totally rejecting the concept of being closeted. It is interesting what rules we will allow and what rules we will break. It’s a radical thing to think about the world as a lawless Wild West, but I’d remind you the modern police force of the USA was once a slave patrol. There are no rules on earth but the ones we make, however moral and ethical, or otherwise.

If cinema is a cultural litmus paper, the critical reaction to this film was too basic for me.

(The film’s camerawork threw me though. Couldn’t dig it.)

5 stars. Give Pascal more yearning to do.

Stay safe, keep ya mask on, Free Palestine,

UMNIA

Easter Egg for the Eagle-Eyed 🪺

Shoutout to the Pedro peeps who recognized me from TikTok and wanted to say hi but couldn’t - I was on my Zoom to make it home in time, I did not account for Almodóvar talking that long!

Also shoutout to the audience, it very much was giving gay across the board - and shoutout to the twinks that could tell the future and left 5mins into Almodóvar’s Q&A, you’re the real visionaries, and shoutout to the over 40’s men on date night, I loved that for you, and shoutout to the fangirls of all genders, we made it, and shoutout to Almodóvar for reading Yellowstone for filth, you’re so right bestie, and you’ve never been wrong, and thank you for this film.