Every time two cowboys point their guns at one another on screen, there’s something homoerotic at play. Hollywood Westerns may be loath to admit as much, but not so Pedro Almodóvar, who casts Ethan Hawke and Pedro Pascal as lonesome cowboys reunited after 25 years in “Strange Way of Life.” Commissioned by Saint Laurent Productions (which is also premiering a Jean-Luc Godard short at Cannes), this half-baked half-hour serves as a sexy showcase for creative director Anthony Vaccarello’s latest designs, while barely delivering on the promise that an Almodóvar-made “gay cowboy” movie conjures in the imagination.
At the Cannes premiere, the Spanish director described “Strange” as his response to a question posed by “Brokeback Mountain”: What can two men do on a ranch? Silva (Pascal) gives Jake (Hawke) his answer in the final seconds of the short, and it’s sweet, though it turns out Almodóvar is misremembering Ang Lee’s 2005 Western.
At the Cannes premiere, the Spanish director described “Strange” as his response to a question posed by “Brokeback Mountain”: What can two men do on a ranch? Silva (Pascal) gives Jake (Hawke) his answer in the final seconds of the short, and it’s sweet, though it turns out Almodóvar is misremembering Ang Lee’s 2005 Western.
- 5/17/2023
- by Peter Debruge
- Variety Film + TV
Close-Up is a feature that spotlights films now playing on Mubi. Amanda Kramer's Please Baby Please is showing exclusively on Mubi starting March 3, 2023, in the United States, and March 31, 2023, in most countries in the series The New Auteurs.It says a lot that Amanda Kramer’s new film frequently features the tinkly strains of the Skyliners’ 1958 song “Since I Don’t Have You”: it has a woozily helpless romantic masochism that’s long since been discouraged by contemporary thinking about partnership. Although it may not actually take romantic suffering as its thesis, Please Baby Please—another title reminiscent of a yearning-filled doo-wop track—does embody that song’s aura of lyrical self-flagellation in a host of surprising and bold ways. Kramer’s film retools the gendered conventions around sacrifice and control in a partnership, allowing that audio cue to exemplify the paradox of power and sex in romantic love.
- 3/31/2023
- MUBI
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