“It fell on the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, fell softly on the bog of Allen and further, to the west, fell softly on the rebellious and dark waves of the Shannon. It also fell in every corner of the isolated cemetery, on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It had gathered on the twisted crosses and tombstones, on the spearheads of the little gate, on the stripped brushwood. His soul was fading little by little as he heard the snow faintly spreading over the entire universe as at the coming of the last hour on all the living and the dead.
The snowfall at the end of the last of the stories that make up People of Dublin by James Joyce is one of the most beautiful things ever written, one of the sweetest, the most just and the saddest. One of the most human. The same goes for the final scene of People of Dublin, John Huston’s latest film, faithfully adapted from the book, and where these words resonate.
They resonate again in Pedro Almodóvar’s twenty-third feature film. And it suddenly seems obvious, which has nothing to do with a quote or a cultural reference. It is as if what was most precious, but quite underground, and which ran beneath the provocative appearances of the work of the filmmaker of Tout sur ma Mère and Parle avec elle, found the perfection of its expression.
Marta, a great war reporter, will die of cancer. At her request, she is accompanied until the end, the moment of which she will choose, by her lifelong friend, the successful writer Ingrid.
That, in order to tell the story of this journey of the two women with such keen and delicate precision, Almodóvar had to leave Spain suggests how his well-deserved position as the greatest active Spanish filmmaker, associated with certain themes and certain styles, had been able…
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