He won the Golden Lion for his career in 2019, but the award for best film at the Venice Film Festival had still eluded him. Until now. Pedro Almodóvar has conquered the Mostra with The Room Next Door, his first feature film in English, which has won the Golden Lion for best film in this highly competitive edition full of stars – Angelina Jolie, Brad Pitt and George Clooney have all paraded through here – and established directors such as Luca Guadagnino and Pablo Larraín. “I never dreamed of the Golden Lion, but once you have it you become addicted to the award. From now on I couldn’t live without it,” joked a radiant Almodóvar at the press conference afterwards.
It has been more than half a century since a Spanish director won the top prize at the Mostra. Only Luis Buñuel had done so in 1967 with Belle de jour. So for the man from La Mancha, who has dared to film in another language at the age of 74, the triumph will have a very special flavour. With it, he puts the finishing touch to his long love affair with the city of canals. He arrived in 1983, when he participated in the Mezzogiorno Mezzanotte section with Entre tinieblas, and 38 years later, in 2021, his Madres separadoras was chosen to open the festival.
Omen
At its premiere at the Mostra, ‘The Room Next Door’ provoked a 17-minute standing ovation, the longest applause of the festival
When he went up on stage to collect the coveted Golden Lion from the hands of the president of the international jury, the Frenchwoman Isabelle Huppert, Almodóvar quickly switched to his mother tongue. “This film is my first in English but the spirit is Spanish,” he said, dedicating the award to his family – starting with his brother Agustín – but above all, to the protagonists, the immense Julianne Moore and Tilda Swinton, for their “talent, confidence and generosity. “As a director, one of the privileges is to be the first witness when a miracle happens in front of the camera. And both Tilda and Julianne have brought about a miracle on many days of this shoot. This is for you,” he told them.
There were signs that this milestone might finally be possible. At the premiere, the film received the longest standing ovation of this festival, no less than 17 minutes. It was also the favourite of the critics who rate the films at the festival every day, who gave it a high score for a melodrama that reflects on the acceptance of death and defends the right to die with dignity through the reunion of two friends in a very complicated situation. It tells the story of Ingrid (Moore), a successful writer who has just published a book about death. Swinton plays Martha, a former war correspondent for The New York Times who suffers from terminal cancer and asks her to keep her company in the next room while she decides to spend her last days in a beautiful house in the woods. In the jury, Huppert pointed out in a press conference, there was no unanimous consensus, but they were “fairly in agreement” that it should be the winner.
Reading from a prepared speech, Almodóvar wanted to take advantage of the stage to make a strong defence of the legalisation of euthanasia. “The film also speaks of the character’s decision to end his life when it only offers him pain without solution. Saying goodbye to this world in a clean and dignified manner is a fundamental right of every human being,” stressed the filmmaker, who asked that this issue be addressed from a human perspective and not from a political perspective, and that practising believers “respect it and not intervene in individual decisions.” “Human beings must be worthy of living and of dying when life is unbearable,” he stressed.
The Room Next Door beat out the monumental The Brutalist, which earned Brady Corbet the Silver Lion for Best Director, in what is only his third feature film. Starring Adrien Brody as a brilliant Hungarian architect seeking a new life in America after escaping the Holocaust, the film is great in every sense. Literally, for its four-hour duration, but also for the depth of its epic look at the trauma suffered by survivors of the Nazi horror and the crisis of creativity experienced by many of them.
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Her compelling exploration of female desire in Babygirl earned the Volpi Cup for best actress for Australian star Nicole Kidman, who missed the awards due to the sudden death of her mother, to whom she dedicated the award. Kidman, in her most erotic role, thus becomes a strong contender in the race for the Oscar. On the other hand, the best male performance went to the French Vincent Lindon, who plays a father who debates what to do with his neo-Nazi son in Jouer avec le feu, a film that shows the helplessness of a family in the face of the advance of the extreme right. Also well-liked, with the special jury prize, were the Georgian April, the second film by Dea Kulumbegashvili, which denounces the difficulty of access to abortion; and Maura Delpero with Vermiglio, the Italian surprise of the festival, an intimate look at the wounds of war in a family isolated in the mountains, which won the grand jury prize.
Pedro Almodóvar at the Venice Film Festival awards ceremony
Yara Nardi / Reuters
The 81st edition of the world’s oldest film festival has thus come to a close, marked by the abundance of stars who have trod the red carpet, but also by the distance they have imposed from the press, which has protested against the few interviews given by the most famous faces of international cinema. Brad Pitt and George Clooney danced in tune, the always risky Lady Gaga – the star signing for the long-awaited sequel to Joker with Joaquin Phoenix – made an impact, and Jenna Ortega and Monica Bellucci, the new faces of the particular underworld of Tim Burton’s Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, dazzled. The Venice Film Festival, already consolidated as a launching pad for many of the films that aspire to the Oscars, has many films for the coming months. “The cinema is in great shape,” said Huppert.
Tilda Swinton, Pedro Almodovar and Julianne Moore on the day of the presentation of ‘The Room Next Door’ at the Venice Film Festival
ETTORE FERRARI / ZUMA PRESS / CONTACTOPHOTO / Europa Press Read also
