Considered Spain's greatest living film director, and one of the world's foremost queer auteurs, Pedro Almodóvar has made his first full-length English language film (though he made a queer cowboy love story in last year's short "Strange Way of Life") in "The Room Next Door (Sony Classic Pictures)." But it's hardly a typical Almodóvar film, lacking his trademark melodrama, byzantine plots, irreverent humor, sexual transgression, and excessive kitsch/camp. It's uncharacteristically straightforward and stylistically austere.
As he began with his two previous films, 2019's "Pain and Glory" and 2021's "Parallel Mothers," Almodóvar continues to deal with issues of mortality and reflecting back on one's life. However, in "Room" he tackles death head on, which might account for the film's soberness.
He's only intermittently successful, yet even with such serious fare, his gay sensibility doesn't waver and his obsession with beauty and pleasure still burns bright. At the heart of it, Almodovar asks the intriguing but uncomfortable question; how much are we willing to do for a friend?
Reconnecting
Celebrated autofiction novelist Ingrid (Julianne Moore) at a book signing, learns that a former friend/ journalism colleague Martha (Tilda Swinton) has cancer and decides to visit her. They haven't been in contact in years, but were close in their twenties when they worked at the same magazine.
They reconnect, with Martha sharing her life story as a war correspondent and as a young mother to a daughter Michelle with whom she's now estranged. Martha has stage three cervical cancer and hopes an experimental treatment will be effective.
As time progresses, the treatment fails and Martha, not wanting to die an agonizing death, buys an illegal pill on the Dark Web, she can use to kill herself. "Cancer can't get me if I get me first," she reasons.
She asks the death-phobic Ingrid if she will help her, just being in the room next door. She's planned every detail, so as to end her life on her own terms. Martha will leave a note for the police, to avoid any suspicion anyone helped her, but doesn't want a stranger discovering her body. She will sleep with the door ajar, but when she actually takes her life, the door will be closed, so Ingrid will know when the end has arrived.
Martha doesn't want to die in her Fifth Avenue apartment, but rents a modern country house near upstate woodsy Woodstock with a picture postcard view. Ingrid must decide if she will help Martha. She consults a former lover Damian (a stalwart John Turturro), who was previously Martha's boyfriend, now a pessimistic lecturer on the impending doom of climate change.
He advises on how she can protect herself, especially from the police, who'll investigate once Martha's dead. Ingrid does want to show her love for Martha, but trying to figure out the best way to do that and support someone who's making a different choice than you might make, is the basis for the film.
Restraining
The film's pro-euthanasia position is based on Almodóvar's loose adaptation of Sigrid Nunez's novel "What Are You Going Through?" There's an inevitability here with few surprises, depriving the movie from being compelling. Room feels primarily like a dialogue between Martha and Ingrid talking about death, so it easily could've been a stage play. This might account for the film's sterile, almost clinical detachment of the subject matter. The dialogue is rather wooden and abstract, almost like reading a hospital case study.
"Room" lacks the histrionics, over-the-top, wild emotionality of Almodóvar's previous films. While there are a few flashbacks (though none with the younger Martha and Ingrid together), the film could actually have used some surrealism, musical number, or re-envisioning it as a mock soap opera, both to lighten and heighten the desperation of their situation. It's too subdued and restrained, but the film has poignant scenes, where Ingrid is able to listen and be present to Martha, asking what she's going through at that moment, accompanying her on this final journey.
You can't get more melodramatic than having to decide whether to help your friend kill herself, so the topic would seem tailor made for Almodóvar's theatricality, yet that's what's missing here, as is any sense of pathos or real conflict. It's never a question of if but only when.
Somehow transferring from Spanish to English, Almodóvar's controlled zaniness has been lost, leaving only somberness, such that the biggest laugh comes when Ingrid mistakenly thinks Martha has already killed herself.
Ambivalence
What Room shares with Almodóvar's previous movies is his perennial theme of women overcoming adversity and close female relationships. It's the progressive intimate bond between Ingrid and Martha, that makes Road work, even marginally. Both Moore and Swinton are at the peak of their craft and are sensational together, carrying the film's weight. It's fascinating that both actresses owe their movie careers to gay directors who discovered them: Derek Jarman for Swinton and Todd Haynes for Moore. Now the gay Almodóvar has united them.
Almodóvar is probably the world's foremost woman's director, so he's able to bring out a no holds barred sizzling chemistry between the two actresses. The cool, cerebral Swinton gets to play the unpredictability of a decisive woman who knows what she wants, yet isn't prepared for the no-win situation she's trapped in, while the usually in control Moore must face her apprehensions about death and an unnerving decision.
Swinton's elegant alabaster Sphinx-like face registers a myriad of emotions, remaining frail yet vital, in her ambivalence on surrendering the life she loves. Moore has the harder, less showy role of providing support without revealing how upset she really is or agitating Ingrid.
Almodóvar's gay sensibility comes out in the eye popping bright bold colors in the idiosyncratic cinematography and costume designs creating his typical visual splendor, reinforcing the film's argument for life, to savor every moment we share with those we love. For all its faults, he still manages to create a movie about death that retains the joy of being alive and watching Swinton/Moore's astonishing performances.
'The Room Next Door' opens Jan. 9 at Alamo Drafthouse, 2550 Mission St.
www.sonyclassics.com
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