Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore facing the end of life, great art by Almodovar

Critique
Drama by Pedro Almodóvar, with Tilda Swinton, Julianne Moore, John Turturro, Alessandro Nivola (Spain/United States, 1h47). In theaters January 8 ★★★★☆

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After “Talk with her”, go with her. Death has always worked on Almodóvar. As it approaches, he no longer makes it a (melo)drama but an ending whose terms everyone, as long as they have the possibility, should be able to choose the terms of. Successful novelist, Ingrid (Julianne Moore) reconnects with an ex-friend and fellow journalist, New Yorker Martha (Tilda Swinton), suffering from stage 3 ovarian cancer. Their newfound complicity, Martha declines and asks Ingrid to accompany her on vacation to a villa in the countryside, where she plans to kill herself…

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Adapted from the novel “What is your torment?” » by Sigrid Nunez, “The Room Next Door” avoids clichés about the “fight against illness” and other warmongering metaphors to which Martha’s job as a war reporter lent itself. We hear, on the other hand, sentences struck by a common sense which is no longer so common on the mind that pain dissipates, sex as a bulwark against the fear of death and our times in bad shape. They come out of the characters’ mouths but we have the impression that Almodóvar is whispering them in our ear. His cinema as a lover of romantic twists and turns, since “Julieta”, gets to the point. He aims for purity.

With this first film in English, shot in the United States, the Madrid master continues his exploration of sororal empathy and places himself under the auspices of two American painters. The first half evokes Andrew Wyeth when the key episodes in Martha’s life (which she tells to Ingrid) are illustrated. So many melodramatic avenues that the story will not take, Martha’s desire to take control of her death – therefore of her life and of the film – taking the second half towards a form of melancholic stasis in the style of Edward Hopper. And if “The Room Next Door”, Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival, carried by two exceptional actresses, flirts with Hitchcock and quotes “People from Dublin”, it is to transform a police interrogation into a plea by the absurd in favor of euthanasia and to make snow fall in summer in order to connect the living and the dead. Great art.