The Room Next Door / Pedro Almodóvar / 1 h 50.
Death is at the heart of Pedro Almodóvar’s new film, The Room Next Doorwhile she also caught up with her cinema in reality with the recent death of one of her favorite actresses, Marisa Paredes (Stiletto heels, The Flower of my secret, All about my mother…). Golden Lion at the last Venice Film Festival, The Room Next Door is his premiere movie filmed in the United States, with two stars, Julianne Moore (Ingrid) and Tilda Swinton (Martha).
These two childhood friends who had lost touch find themselves in special circumstances: the second has cancer. Almodóvar’s penultimate feature film, Pain and glory (2019), was also about reunions and a return to the past – which is not really a coincidence: the Movida filmmaker is now 75 years old…
One might believe that The Room Next Door is more dramatic. That’s not the right word, even though Martha’s cancer turns out to be incurable. No doubt because Martha, determined to end her life with the support of Ingrid, has concocted a brilliant staging of his suicide, in a splendid house.
Ambivalence
Also because the very image of the film, luminous, enhanced by an influx of colors always favored by the filmmaker, has nothing twilight. It was the big bet of the film. How can we avoid the morbid with such a theme? Without cheating. Without lying, for example, about the ordeal that it represents for Ingrid to accompany Martha towards her goal. Especially since the emotional burden is added to the criminal liability of failing to assist a person in danger.
The ambivalence of The Room Next Door also passes through the unsaid and via the presence of other works. This is an extract from Crazy brides (1925) that Martha and Ingrid watch, where Buster Keaton avoids tumbling rocks, burlesque and danger of death coexist. Or an evocation twice of the end of People of Dublinwhen the snow spreads “weakly on the whole universe as at the coming of the last hour on all the living and the dead”. It snows gracefully on Almodóvar’s cinema.
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