Published on January 7, 2025 at 9:02 p.m. / Modified on January 7, 2025 at 9:04 p.m.
3 mins. reading
Pedro Almodovar is one of those big names in international auteur cinema who have never received a Palme d’Or. Despite six feature films in competition at Cannes, the coveted trophy never returned to him. While several now forgotten films won awards, he had to settle for the Best Director Award for All about my mother (1999) and the screenplay for Return (2006). But here is his 23rd feature film, The Room Next Doorwon him the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival last September. A first coronation in a major international festival which salutes its third production in English – and the first on American soil – after the short films The human voice (2020) et Strange Way of Life (2023).
A trophy certainly late, but which does much more than crown an exemplary career: The Room Next Door is a sublime melodrama, undoubtedly one of his best films of the last twenty years with Return et Pain and Glory (2019). It must be said that the Madrid filmmaker found in the novel So what is your torment?published in 2020 by the American author Sigrid Nunez, a story that he could have written himself, as it is at the heart of his obsessions, and which he sublimated by working with two actresses of astonishing density, but with restraint, where his favorite actresses (Carmen Maura, Victoria Abril, Marisa Paredes, Penélope Cruz, Veronica Forqué) were more explosive, because they are Latin.
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