Along with his fondness for red cars, absurd sexual encounters and earthy Spanish matriarchs, Pedro Almodóvar has a much more melancholy special subject that keeps cropping up in his otherwise dynamic films: the fact of death. Long before making The Room Next Door , his first English-language feature, he has frequently gone on record saying that, unlike the people living in the region of small villages in Spain where he grew up, he has never been able to accept the idea that something living — least of all him — will die.
‘The Room Next Door’ Venice Film Festival Red Carpet Photos: Julianne Moore, Tilda Swinton, Pedro Almodóvar & More
It is a gut horror he shares with Ingrid (Julianne Moore), who reluctantly agrees to help an old friend Martha (Tilda Swinton) to take her own life before her stage-four cervical cancer does. When an initially hopeful prognosis is reversed, Martha hatches a plan to rent a house somewhere beautiful for a month and, when the moment seems right, take a suicide pill she has bought online. She doesn’t want anyone to endanger themselves by helping her to die. She just wants company: someone to sleep in the room next door.
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The demands of their work has meant the two women’s friendship has been sporadic over the years, but it takes on the urgency of a last act. The cut and thrust of ideas, life stories, fears and emotional twists between these two forceful, vibrant women — one a novelist, the other a war correspondent for the New York Times — proves a cinematic goldmine. Almodovar stages it as melodrama, with some extravagantly overblown dialogue, a swooping orchestral score by regular collaborator Albert Iglesias and the director’s customary use of extreme pops of colour. Even the snow falling on New York is bright pink.
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It is a heightened approach to a sombre subject that could get lesser actors into a tangle, but they are clearly on board with both Almodóvar’s theatricality and his intensity. Moore in particular, as the great exponent of the melodramatic heroine in the films of Todd Haynes, is in her element. She brings to Ingrid her own natural warmth, along with a deep reading of her character’s cauldron of feelings, while steering clear of naturalism.
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As Martha, Swinton has the crackling directness of a career reporter who can straightforwardly name her favourite war; there is a more than a whiff of Katharine Hepburn about her, even as she seemingly wastes away before our eyes. An early image shows her head on the pillow, shot from above, her yellowing face seemingly dissolving into the cream of the pillowslip; it is one of many lyrical shots Almodóvar uses to disrupt the static nature of sickrooms.
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‘The Room Next Door’s Pedro Almodóvar, Julianne Moore & Tilda Swinton Talk Life, Death, Euthanasia, Female Friendships – Venice Film Festival
Almodóvar is, as always, keen on using a fixed camera, especially in conversations where he will show each face in turn. Given that is essentially a succession of intimate conversations in small spaces — as small as a bed or a banana lounge — this approach could easily become suffocating. On the contrary, The Room Next Door never feels confined.
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In part, this is a triumph of location scouting: Martha’s apartment has a breathtaking view over New York, while the house where she goes to die has whole walls of glass allowing a full view of the surrounding forest. But it also has to do with Almodóvar’s sense of pictorial composition. Nothing here is dull, including those static shots of people talking; you can be riveted just by the changing colors of Moore’s lipsticks.
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There is also some breathing space when the feminine dyad is also wrenched apart to admit a male third character. John Turturro plays Damian, another writer, who is a former lover of both women and has continued to see Ingrid from time to time. His own work has increasingly focused on climate change and the destruction of the environment; in one of the film’s most provocative scenes, he and Ingrid argue over lunch — taken outdoors, overlooking a sylvan lake — about the place of hope in the face of certain death, whether of the planet or an individual.
“There are lots of ways to live inside a tragedy,” she chides him. He regards her with a mix of affection and disbelief. This is what he admired in her, he says. “You’re one of the only people who knows how to suffer without making others feel guilty about it.” Martha told her simply that she was stronger than she thought she was. When the day of reckoning came, she would discover that.
Martha also tells her, while shuffling across the kitchen to unpack the shopping, that she should remember they’re on vacation. A strange sort of holiday, perhaps, but there are meals, there is birdsong each morning, there is a collection of DVDs to be raided; they snuggle platonically on the couch and hoot with laughter at Buster Keaton. Often enough, death and life are sitting easily together. The Room Next Door is a thoughtful, vital, even radiant film. With any luck, it may even have helped Pedro Almodóvar feel better about things.
Title: The Room Next Door
Festival: Venice (Competition)
Distributor: Warner Bros
Director-screenwriter: Pedro Almódovar
Cast: Tilda Swinton, Julianne Moore, John Turturro, Alessandro Nivola, Juan Diego Botto, Raúl Arévalo, Victoria Luengo, Alex Hogh Andersen, Esther McGregor, Alvise Rigo, Melina Matthews
Running time: 1 hr 47 mins
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