The Spanish master casts Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore in what could be the great Hollywood film of his life.
For his first feature film in English, Pedro Almodóvar tells us the story of a woman who knows she is going to die of cancer and decides to end her life even though the law forbids her from doing so. A film whose apparent subject would therefore be euthanasia, and whose story shows to what extent American law condemns it mercilessly.
There is also a story of friendship. The woman in question, war photographer Martha (Tilda Swinton), asks Ingrid (Julianne Moore), famous novelist and her oldest friend, to accompany her to the country house she has rented and to sleep in the room next to his. If, when she gets up in the morning, Ingrid sees that the door is closed, it is because Martha has taken action. Melodrama (the approaching death), love film (the deep friendship between the two women), detective film, fairy tale (the vial of poison)… This is a very complex story.
In the first part, everything takes place in New York. Almodóvar moved his small theater there with colorful sets and costumes. His humor too (Swinton congratulating a blond bookseller on his haircut). We talk about Virginia Woolf, Faulkner, Hemingway and especially James Joyce (The Dead, including the adaptation by John Huston, People of Dublin, is quoted at length in the film).
As in many melos by Douglas Sirk, Vincente Minnelli or Leo McCarey, we live in an opulent and cultured world. And then the two women go to the countryside and find themselves alone. The Room Next Door then becomes worrying. Because, like The Eternal Daughter by Joanna Hogg (which we think of on several occasions), it is a film about ghosts, dead people who are not dead, ghosts (Martha’s daughter, who always hated her mother). Almodóvar – who we say is currently filming, at the age of 75, the Hollywood film of his life, towards which all his cinema has been tending for decades – takes us once again into his romantic universe, into games of mirrors, ambiguous reflections in the windows, which could just as easily be called memories or lies. Truffaut said that Hitchcock filmed “love scenes like murder scenes and murder scenes like love scenes”. Same for Almodóvar.
On several occasions, a subtle staging effect but obviously intended by its author, the spectators wonder if Martha is not leading Ingrid into a trap, manipulating her. Almodóvar touches both the most clichéd melodrama and the purest abstraction, at the highest level of cinema, at the “great form”, that which shows without showing what works on our unconscious: behind the story and the images that we see unfolds a whole world of fantasies, not necessarily pleasant, which cross the bridge and approach us, threatening. Masterful.
The Room Next Door by Pedro Almodóvar, with Tilda Swinton, Julianne Moore, John Turturro (Esp., É.-U., 2024, 1 h 47). In the hall on January 8th.
