The cinematic label for any film under 40 minutes is “a short.” But in the case of “Strange Way of Life,” Pedro Almodóvar’s half hour long gay Western romance with gunplay, the better descriptor might be “small.” Truncated, even.

A tale of two former “hired guns” reuniting 25 years after a brief two month love affair, Almodóvar (“Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown,” “Tie Me Up, Tie Me Down” and “Parallel Mothers”) dances down a fine line between soap operatic melodrama, Western tropes, bittersweet romance and camp.

He puts his two stars, Pedro Pascale and Ethan Hawke, on horseback, but keeps the camera tight for the most part. That makes the movie, with its sublimated emotions and romance — or at least a sexual relationship — rekindled by liquor, intimate.

But the Old West never seemed quite so small as it does here.

Hawke plays a sheriff resigned to chasing down a murder suspect with a locally-familiar limp. Pascal is Silva, his old riding mate who shows up at just this moment to get reaquainted.

The suspect is Silva’s son. Might a seduction spare his offspring?

“Don’t look at me like that.”

“How do you want me to look at you?”

Old wounds are reopened, old plans long abandoned revisited, and hard truths faced. Justice and loyalty demands that the son’s got to be brought in, dead or alive.

There’s even a flashback, showing our two drunken, whoremongering pistoleros (Jason Fernández and José Condessa) shooting wineskins, cackling madly and ignoring the sex workers they’re partying with to drinking from tehir bullet holes with their hands down each other’s chaps.

While the same sex romance may be somewhat novel, and the minimalist plot and narrow focus on a scale with many classic Westerns, it’s hard to imagine the Spanish Oscar winner getting a full length feature out of this. It’s a one-joke short. /Thus, “Strange Way of Life” is paired for release with the filmmaker’s more symbolic and cryptic 2020 short “The Human Voice,” starring Tilda Swinton, which is also half an hour long.

Sure, this hour of filmmaking is by Almodóvar, and is always going to be a little clever, a bit daring and maybe even subversive at times. But premium prices at your favorite art cinema for an hour of movies makes this package (I vaguely remember “Human Voice” but didn’t review it) an iffy recommendation at best.

Rating: R, violence, sexual situations, nudity, profanity

Cast: Ethan Hawke, Pedro Pascale, George Steane, Jason Fernández and José Condessa

Credits:Scripted and directed by Pedro Almodóvar. A Sony Pictures Classics release.

Running time: :31