The idyll they live Pedro Almodovar and the Venice Film Festival continues going from strength to strength. Remember that in 2019 the festival awarded the man from La Mancha a Honorary Golden Lionthat twelve months later he arrived in the city in the middle of the pandemic to present the short film ‘The human voice’ (2020), his first fiction film shot in English, and two years later he presented here his twenty-second feature film, ‘Parallel Mothers’ (2022), thanks to which Penelope Cruz she ended up winning the Coppa Volpi for Best Actress. And now, Almodóvar has once again chosen the Italian festival to premiere worldwide ‘The Room Next Door’, which is his first feature film shot entirely in English and with which, in addition to competing in this festival, he hopes to go as far as possible on the red-carpeted road to the Oscars.
“For me it was like facing a new genre for the first time, something similar to making a movie Science fiction“, the director explained this Monday at the Show about the change of language. “I needed to feel the necessary call to encourage me to take the step, and I found it in the pages of Sigrid’s book”, she added in reference to ‘What is your torment’, the book by the American author Sigrid Nunez in which ‘The room next door’ is inspired to tell a story that can be summed up as follows: two old friends meet again after many years without knowing about each other; Martha – played by Tilda Swintonwho already worked with Almodóvar in ‘The Human Voice’ – faces a terminal cancer, and asks Ingrid (Julianne Moore), to accompany her in her final days.
Based on this premise, the new film talks about the rebirth of a friendship but, above all, it does so about two opposite ways of seeing death, on one side fear and on the other acceptance, and about the valuable lessons about life that we learn even when we are losing it. Also, and this is something that the director himself has made explicit during his meeting with the press -yes, Almodóvar has given a spoiler for his own film-, it is a plea “in favor of euthanasia.”
For this reason, it is inevitable to connect it closely with another of the director’s most recent works, ‘Pain and Glory’ (2019): if that one worked as a artistic testamentthis is an elegy sung by a man who, at 74 years old, confesses that he feels that each new day is one less that he has left to live. “I find it hard to understand that something alive has to die, and I know that in that sense I am like a child, very immature“He admits. “Death surrounds us constantly, we see it every day in the news, but I still can’t get used to the idea of her”.
In any case, ‘The Room Next Door’ is a genuinely ‘Almodovarian’ film for several other reasons. First, it reaffirms the literary will of his cinema, which is made explicit above all in the emphatic way of speaking of his characters. Second, it reiterates the director’s proclivity to make his references clear: it is a film that verbalizes its kinship with ‘The dead’ -both the novel by James Joyce and the sublime film adaptation by John Huston-, which explores the narrative and expressive possibilities of windows as did the cinema of Douglas Sirkand which seems to be inspired by the best works of Ingmar Bergman when he tries to convey emotions through extreme close-ups of the actresses’ faces. Third, it gives continuity to the type of dramatic containment that Almodóvar has been practicing in his feature films since ‘Julieta’ (2016), and complements it with a restraint on an aesthetic level – the interiors of the rooms are decorated with less garish colors than usual, the compositions call less attention to themselves – that evokes what he practiced in ‘The Skin I Live In’ (2011).
The problem is that this lack of sentimentality And this relative formal austerity does not prevent The Room Next Door from being a machine with too many pieces. While it remains focused exclusively on the relationship between its two protagonists, the film is magnetic, and therefore it is regrettable that the director, perhaps for fear of ending up making a work that is too radical – like Persona (1966) or Autumn Sonata (1978), two Bergman titles that in any case it brings to mind – insists on decorating this narrative axis with fakes, occurrences and distractions.
Its footage abuses ‘flashbacks’ that seem uncomfortable coexisting with the rest of the story, of completely unnecessary scenes in which a reflection on the dictatorship of political correctness begins and immediately closes, and of secondary characters who insist on suggesting that Martha’s death is a metaphor for the death of the planet due to climate change and the inaction of its inhabitants. For better or worse, this allegorical interpretation of ‘The Room Next Door’ is precisely what Almodóvar seems to promote. Today he has defined it as “a response to the hate speech that we are hearing every day in Spain and around the world”, and as a call to compassion towards, for example, “all those unaccompanied children who are fighting to reach our borders and who, according to the Spanish right, should be treated as invaders; I think this is an unfair discourse, delusional and stupid”.
The other film nominated for the Golden Lion presented today is ‘Vermiglio’, the hypnotic fourth feature film by the Italian director Maura Delpero. Set in a village in the Dolomites during the last year of the Second World War, it observes the effect that each season has on the imposing landscape, and sets its sights on a large family who, due to the arrival of a deserting soldier, lose their peace at the very moment when the world finds its own. Blurring the border between documentary and fiction, evoking the metaphorical register of compatriot authors such as Ermanno OlmiDelpero builds the drama of his story – based on isolation, economic hardship, misplaced religious fervour, and cultural prejudices – on constant narrative ellipses that often relegate events to the off-screen, allowing their consequences to be silently hinted at, as subtle as they are resounding.
