Here are the two films chosen this week by our cinema experts.
The room next door is the Spanish master’s first foreign language film, after two short films, no doubt just to get his feet wet. Almodovar has a long history of actresses and, here, Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore enter with majesty into the very select category of girls Almodovarian.
In New York, Martha (Tilda Swinton), a war correspondent, knows that her cancer has no possible remission. She obtains a lethal poison and asks her old friend, Ingrid (Julianne Moore), a successful writer, to accompany her to the death she has chosen. In a sublime house, in the countryside, warmed by the colors dear to the Spanish maestro, they make, not without hiccups or pain, this path that only their friendship can open.
What will surprise fans of the filmmaker is the almost austere tone of the film, far from the women on the verge of a nervous breakdown dear to the director. This was necessary to avoid the excess of melodrama linked to the subject, and Juliane Moore and Tilda Swinton excel in this game. They are luminous to say, with Almodovar, that there is nothing gloomy about choosing your own end of life. So of course, like François Truffaut, Almodovar thinks that cinema must be more beautiful than life and, here, his recognizable aesthetic is deliberately saturated. It feels good, and for anyone who grew up with his films, this familiarity with his cinema is comforting.
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A story of uprooting, distance and double culture. Yan Kerrand (played by an always silent, charismatic and mineral Roschdy Zem) is a French comic book author visiting Sokcho, a seaside town in South Korea, under the snow. He meets Soo-Ha, 23, who is juggling her boyfriend and her mother who sells fish. Two beings who are completely opposite but who will cross paths and become familiar with each other, the magic of cinema and its narration, with a real questioning of double culture since Soo-Ha speaks French, the country of her father who abandoned her. A heartbreak, a void that she tries to fill with the presence of this mysterious French visitor.
There is something undeniably tender and personal about Winter in Sokchoa bit of the story of the narrator and his actress themselves, and something universal in the message and this experience. The images are charming, as are the actors. Maybe a little problem with the rhythm: it’s sometimes too contemplative. However, a few sentences bordering on a personal development program should not prevent you from seeing and enjoying this film.
