The Room Next Door is not Pedro Almodóvar’s best film, but offers an elegant and sensitive meditation on the theme of farewell.
Ken Loach won a Palme d’Or pour I, Daniel Blake et The Wind That Shakes the Barley. Roman Polanski won the Oscar for The Pianistand Martin Scorsese had to wait The Departed to receive his Academy Award. It is not uncommon for great directors to be rewarded for works that are not among their best films. This also applies to Pedro Almodóvar. At 75, the Madrid maestro of movida received last year the Golden Lion of Venice -his first big festival triumph- for The Room Next Door. Although this film beats to the rhythm of a generous heart and is impeccably directed, it seems less powerful than masterpieces as All about my mother, Talk to her or Return.
Ce first feature film in English is a reflection on friendship and death. Martha (Tilda Swinton), a terminally ill ex-war correspondent, seeks help from longtime friend and writer Ingrid (Julianne Moore). Martha asks Ingrid to be present in “the next room” when she ends her life with a pill purchased on the Dark Web. What follows is a superior soap opera on the theme of farewell and memories hanging between once close people.
Visually, it’s pure Almodóvar: intense colors, luxurious decors -this modernist villa!- and a tension that builds over almost dreamlike sequences. Yet, The Room Next Door -where echoes of Silence by Ingmar Bergman- seems to be a more restrained work. Subversive humor and the dramatic intensity that often gives depth to Almodóvar’s films remain in the background – unless this flashback where Tilda Swinton meets a homosexual Carmelite during the war in Iraq is a joke.
It is a serene atmospherealmost zen, which reigns here, perhaps a little too calm compared to the tension aroused by the theme. The subjects – euthanasia, the passage of time – are treated with (too much?) caution, and the film sometimes struggles to find the right rhythm, as if frozen in its artificiality. Some dialogue even seems to have been cut from a personal development manual for lonely middle-class women in full menopause.
That doesn’t mean there are a lot of good sides. The cinematography is exquisite, Alberto Iglesias’ tormented score elegantly interweaves with the story, and the duo of Swinton and Moore exude a subtle alchemy -even if Swinton demonstrates in the most tear-jerking scenes that she has not missed a career as a great soap actress. It all culminates in a film who does not shout but whisperswhich subtly moves at times and illustrates Almodóvar’s expertise at all times.
