As a child, Pedro Almodóvar believed that films were made by actors, those classic cinema stars who opened his horizons by sowing his early passion for cinema. At 74 years old, the winner of the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival for The Room Next Door (The room next door), his first English-language feature, continues to claim the power of that emotion: that of great performances. Almodóvar pointed this out in his speech on Saturday upon receiving the festival’s top award — the first prize in that category for an extraordinary filmography — when referring to the “miracle” of seeing Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore acting in his film.
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In this process, Almodóvar reserves a privileged place for himself, his favorite place in the world, that of the first witness. The filming of The room next door It has been, according to the director himself, one of the smoothest of his career. “But a successful shoot doesn’t guarantee anything, I know that at this stage of my life,” he said when it was impossible to predict the fate of his film. What he did know then was that what he had experienced with the two actresses belongs to a mysterious order, a triptych made of trust, gestures and emotions.
In one of the most unforgettable moments of this film, his elegiac tribute to The dead, John Huston’s film based on James Joyce’s story, what we are seeing reaches another dimension. The snow that in Joyce’s words and Huston’s images covered all of Ireland, falling “on all the living and all the dead,” serves Almodóvar to recall, on the one hand, a story and a film that he loves; to illustrate a compassless climate that tints Manhattan in a Madrid pink and, above all, to show in a shocking way how fiction accompanies in her final days a woman who finds in that same snow, capable of going through the television screen, her own farewell. The room next door It’s a film that doesn’t let you cry, but the day that the sequence was shot in which Tilda Swinton, leaning on her old friend Julianne Moore, accepts her own ending through film, Almodóvar couldn’t contain his tears and had to leave so that no one would see him cry.
Actresses Julianne Moore (right) and Tilda Swinton, with director Pedro Almodóvar (center), during the filming of their new movie, on June 12, 2024.©Iglesias Mas THE DESIRE (EFE)
At that point in the shoot, between Moore, Swinton and Almodóvar, the “miracle” that the filmmaker referred to in his speech had already occurred, that intangible thing that he pursues in all his films. The room next doorfollowing the trail of dry and contained pain that began with Juliet (2016), his adaptation of Alice Munro, and despite being a melodrama, avoids sentimentality at all costs, as recalled by the president of the Venice jury, actress Isabelle Huppert, when explaining the complex distance that the director maintains with what he narrates.
Almodóvar loves cinema and has built his entire work around that passion. Spending time with him is enriching because of his generous erudition and his fertile imagination. His faith in cinema is contagious, and in his Olympus there will always be the great actresses who continue to move him. There, Bette Davis, Gena Rowlands and Marlene Dietrich roam. And, of course, Barbara Loden. Almodóvar has said on occasion how important it was for him to discover her in Splendor in the grass (1961, Elia Kazan), how she identified with the skin of the wayward Ginny, Warren Beatty’s crazy sister, the provincial girl suffocated by a sexist and retrograde society that questions her for living her way.
In the location of the forest house of The room next door There were countless DVDs brought by the director himself. In addition to The dead, There was a copy of Letter from an unknown womanby Max Ophüls, a box set with Fassbinder’s early films and WandaBarbara Loden’s only film, written, directed and performed by her before she died of cancer at the age of 48. A masterpiece that, long before it became popular, Almodóvar urgently recommended everyone to discover.
A world in agony
The room next door It is a film about mourning that rejects the black of mourning —which is only present in a photograph by Cristina García Rodero— to reclaim life, despite everything. Almodóvar says that it is a film about a woman who is dying in a dying world, but when the character of Damian (John Turturro), friend and ex-lover of the two main characters, comes to Ingrid (Julianne Moore) with his apocalyptic speech, she answers that living with someone who is dying is teaching her the opposite: that life deserves to be lived with joy.
But the real paradox of Almodóvar’s cinema is how, in contrast to his well-known excess – in words, in colours, in ornamentation – so characteristic of his work and his character, there is his Spartan gaze and background, and how, above form, acting ends up taking precedence. In one of the final sequences, one of the most prodigious of an exciting final stretch, Martha (Tilda Swinton) puts on makeup in front of a mirror. In a medium, fixed shot we see her take off her morphine patch and conceal the spots on her skin with concealer. From there we move on to another fixed shot, the reflection of her mouth in the mirror, Martha is putting on lipstick. And from there to another wide shot in which we see her sketching a perfect smile in a yellow suit. The sequence closes with a fourth shot: Martha turns on a tap and pours herself a glass of water. Nothing else is needed.
If in Pain and Glory, Almodóvar’s mother demanded from her son the details of her own shroud (the black mantilla, the habit and the rosary) in this continuation of their mourning. Almodóvar shrouds his new heroine with the dignity and elegance of someone who, in a world in ruins, decides to respond with her last party.
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