Julianne Moore and Tilda Swinton give luxuriously self-aware performances as two old friends who are reunited in a doggedly mysterious drama
at the Venice film festival this summer, there were three kinds of surprised critic. Some were surprised to learn that this was Almodóvar’s first ever major European festival award; others that this should be the film to finally bag it … and then there were those who were politely surprised that it should have won anything at all.
But for me, this English-language shift only accentuates a film-making idiom, learned from Hitchcock and Sirk, which for Almodóvar is so natural and intensely felt. As ever, there is a lush, omnipresent orchestral score, seductively rich blocks of colour in the design , and – in a way utterly characteristic of Almodóvar – the story is layered and interspersed with flashbacks and incidental scenes which are semi-detached from the storytelling’s downstream flow.
Ingrid, played by Moore, is a bestselling author who learns that an old friend of hers is dying of cancer, someone she hasn’t contacted or thought about in years; this is war correspondent Martha, played by Swinton. They both dated the same man ; first Martha, then Ingrid. The two women are warmly, even joyfully reunited in Martha’s private hospital room; the shadow of death gives a richness to their rekindled friendship and emboldens Martha to ask a favour.
From the outset, Martha is honest with Ingrid: she wasn’t her first choice. She asked two or three other people but they said no; an indiscretion which is later to bring Ingrid close to legal jeopardy. But Ingrid, for her part, is not honest with Martha about something even more important, despite their closeness.
The Room Next Door is very Almodóvarian: a dreamlike curation of people and places which is not entirely realistic, a place warm enough to sunbathe outdoors and yet at other times cold enough for snow and invocations of the last lines in James Joyce’s story The Dead. As for the timely issue of assisted dying, the characters’ obvious wealth is a palliative not available to all, but the ideas are fiercely and absorbingly invoked. Saying goodbye is what we will all have to do someday.
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