And here’s the reason why you can become addicted to the Venice Film Festival: It takes place on a narrow island in front of a lagoon. When you leave the cinema, your gaze wanders over the sea, which is also an empty blue screen, a promise, a form of possibility. With this view, it became even clearer what made this 81st edition of the festival so special: films that enable their characters to do the impossible. Images that support the heroes and heroines.
The Golden Lion, the festival’s main prize, goes to Pedro Almodóvar’s The Room Next Door, a film whose heroines allow us to redesign ourselves. This is not a given, given the subject matter. It is about a woman with terminal cancer who wants to take her own life with a lethal pill. Because Martha (Tilda Swinton) does not want to be alone at this moment, she asks her long-time friend Ingrid (Julianne Moore) to accompany her. The two of them go to a house in the woods, a few hours’ drive from New York, for a month. On the night Martha takes her own life, she will close her door so that her friend in the next room will know in the morning. There are the strong colors typical of Almodóvar (pink outfit on a green lounger), an elegant decor, but something is different – The Room Next Door seems like the essence of an Almodóvar film. The melodrama has left the drama behind, it becomes a meditation on life and death, the consolation of friendship. In his acceptance speech, Pedro Almodóvar expressed sympathy for Tilda Swinton’s heroine and admiration for Julianne Moore’s supportive friend character. And he called for laws that give people facing hopeless suffering the right to a self-determined death.
