“The Room Next Door,” the film that won Pedro Almodovar the Golden Lion on Saturday, is his first English-language feature, a twilight tale of assisted suicide starring American stars Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore.
The film, which does not yet have a French release date, traces the last days of Martha (Tilda Swinton), a former war reporter accustomed to defying death, who lives alone in her beautiful New York apartment.
In a few flashbacks, he rewinds his life: his daughter whom she never raised because of her job and to whom she never spoke about her biological father, his companions to whom she never became attached. A strong, free, but lonely woman.
When she meets her childhood friend Ingrid (Julianne Moore), a novelist anxious about the end of her life, Martha is in the terminal phase of cancer. Refusing the prospect of a new treatment as uncertain as it is trying, she decides to end her life, by taking a drug bought illegally on the internet.
She asks Ingrid to accompany her in her final moments, by moving in with her in a sumptuous rental house in the countryside, in “the next room”.
The friend will never be far away but will not have to administer the pill, which Martha intends to take alone, one night, behind her closed door. She promises her that no one will ever know anything about their arrangement. But Ingrid will take into her confidence a man, played by John Turturro, who was their companion to both of them.
Almodovarian as hell on paper, the film is nevertheless far from the noise and fury of the kitsch and provocative comedies of the early days of the enfant terrible of Spanish cinema, but also different from the emotional heights reached in “All About My Mother” or “Talk to Her”. It also moves away from his more recent autobiographical vein (“Pain and Glory”) to go frankly towards melodrama.
Almodovar, whose works are increasingly tormented by physical decline and the fear of death, also attempts in “The Room Next Door” some political and social escapes, drawing a parallel between the end of life and climate catastrophe. “The film is about a woman who is dying in a world that is also dying,” he said in Venice, also delivering a plea in favor of the “fundamental right” to “say goodbye to this world properly and with dignity.”
Filming in the United States, in English, was a project that the Spaniard had been dreaming of for a long time. After a few unsuccessful attempts in Hollywood, he chose to set his film on the East Coast, in New York State, the city that opened the doors of the USA to him when he started out in the 1980s.
Almodovar had released in 2020 his first medium-length film in English, “The Human Voice”, based on Jean Cocteau, also with Tilda Swinton. Three years later, he did it again in an even shorter format with “Strange Way of Life”, a gay western starring Ethan Hawke and Pedro Pascal.
For “The Room Next Door”, he once again relied on composer Alberto Iglesias for the soundtrack and on collaboration with major brands for the actresses’ wardrobe.
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