The Venice Film Festival on Saturday awarded its Golden Lion to Spaniard Pedro Almodovar, giving him, at the age of 74, one of the most prestigious prizes of his immense career for his first American film.
In “The Room Next Door”, the former enfant terrible of Movida stages the British actress Tilda Swinton and her American colleague Julianne Moore, in a story of assisted suicide.
Almodovar, author of masterpieces such as “All About My Mother”, “Bad Education” and “Pain and Glory”, awarded at the Oscars, had never been consecrated by the supreme prize at a festival.
It was finally the jury chaired by Isabelle Huppert, another great face of European auteur cinema, who awarded this distinction to the Spaniard, a filmmaker of women and feelings par excellence.
“It’s my first film in English but the spirit is Spanish,” he said when receiving his award.
A film with a twilight tone, “The Room Next Door” tells the story of Ingrid (Julianne Moore), a novelist anxious about the end of her life, and Martha (Tilda Swinton), her childhood friend, a former war reporter accustomed to defying death, living alone in her beautiful New York apartment and who, suffering from cancer, decides to end her life.
A colourful character, still appearing in Venice dressed in a salmon pink suit, Almodovar nonetheless harbors a certain darkness, more marked in recent years. His award-winning film “is about a woman who is dying in a world that is probably also dying,” he explained.
- FRANCE 24
