Can you start an American career at 75? Spanish cinema icon Pedro Almodóvar crosses the Atlantic to The Room Next Doorhis first feature film in English, a twilight story about assisted suicide.
Paradoxically, it was with his first film “made in the USA” with cold and polite atmospheres that Pedro Almodóvar, the leading director of Spanish cinema, painter of the liberation of morals, desire and women, achieved recognition, winning the Lion gold in Venice last September.
The Room Next Door follows Ingrid (Julianne Moore), a novelist anxious about the end of life, and Martha (Tilda Swinton), her childhood friend, a former war reporter accustomed to defying death, who lives alone in her beautiful New York apartment. In a few flashbacks, the film rewinds Martha’s life: her daughter whom she never raised because of her work and to whom she never spoke about her biological father, her companions to whom she never is never attached. A strong, free, but lonely woman.
When the two friends meet again, Martha is terminally ill with cancer. Refusing uncertain and grueling treatment, she decides to end her life by taking a drug purchased illegally on the internet. She asks Ingrid to accompany her in her last moments, by moving in with her in a sumptuous rental house in the countryside, in “the room next door”.
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 him 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 both their companion.
It’s my first film in English, but the spirit is Spanish
Almodóvarian as hell on paper, the film is nevertheless far from the sound and fury of the kitsch and provocative comedies of the beginnings of the enfant terrible of Spanish cinema, but also from the peaks of emotion of All about my mother (1999) or talk to her (2002). “It’s my first film in English, but the spirit is Spanish,” declared the director when receiving his prize in Venice, a few days before his 75e birthday.
He moves away from his more recent autobiographical vein (pain and glory2019) to move frankly towards melodrama, without revolutionizing the way of filming a subject, euthanasia, regularly treated in cinema.
He attempts some political-social escapes, drawing a parallel between the end of life and the climate catastrophe. The director nevertheless emphasizes that he wanted to “avoid making a lugubrious film” and instead brought in “light and (the) vitality”.
Almodóvar, whose works are increasingly tormented by physical decline and the fear of death, returned to the subject in Italy: “The film is about a woman who is dying in a world which is also probably dying.”
“I was born in the La Mancha region, where there is a deep culture around death (…) I feel very close to the character of Julianne (Moore), I cannot admit that something which is alive must die. Death is everywhere, but it’s something I’ve never understood (…) Every day I spend is one less day I have left.”
Filming in the United States, in English, was a project cherished for a very long time by the Spaniard, author of The law of desire (1987) or Adam! (1989) and great voice of European cinema.
After a few failed attempts in Hollywood, Almodóvar chose to set his film on the east coast, in New York State, the city that opened the doors to the United States when he started out in the 1980s.
Almodóvar released his first medium-length film in English in 2020, The Human Voiceinspired by Jean Cocteau, with, already, Tilda Swinton. Three years later, he did it again in an even shorter format with Strange Way of Lifea gay western starring Ethan Hawke and Pedro Pascal.
