ALMODÓVARIAN IS A UNIVERSAL LANGUAGE

The Room Next Door 😺 😺 😺 😺 4 Maryellens

Warner Bros.

Pedro Almodóvar loves a great story, especially when it’s shared between two women. But when Ingrid (Julianne Moore) shows up at the hospital bed of her old friend Martha (Tilda Swinton) in The Room Next Door, it takes a minute to orient ourselves. We’re so accustomed to hearing the director’s heart-to-hearts in Spanish—will the magic work in English?

It turns out Almodóvarian is a universal language.

Ingrid (Julianne Moore) is at Rizzoli in Manhattan, signing copies of her latest book—a personal meditation on her intense fear of death—when an acquaintance turns up and tells her that Martha, a mutual friend and celebrated war correspondent, is dying. Afraid of death or not, Ingrid shows up the next morning to support her friend, whom she hasn’t seen in many years. Why they drifted apart is vague: Was it jealousy about Damian, a man they both dated? Whatever the disagreement was, it’s long forgotten. They’re delighted to reunite, even under these morbid circumstances.

At the hospital, Martha unspools all the glorious backstory we could want from an Almodóvar film, and we quickly fall into his familiar mesmerizing rhythm. Propped up in a luxurious bed, she tells Ingrid about a doomed love affair she had as a girl, her difficult relationship with her grown daughter, and her dangerous work reporting from Bosnia and Iraq. After all of that, she says, dying of cancer is a letdown. “Survival is almost disappointing.”

So disappointing, in fact, she’d like Ingrid’s help in getting it over with. Consider this your trigger warning: The film centers on euthanasia. The “room next door” of the title may not be here on Earth.

The director has always featured powerful women in his films, and the success of The Room Next Door rests solidly on Swinton and Moore’s sturdy shoulders: Oscar-winning indie favorites, they bring long résumés in stimulating, emotional work to their first pairing, and Almodóvar puts their star power and familiarity to good use. Their reunion, awkward at first, then joyous, feels that much more real because we already know both women so well.

Types—especially female types—are the director’s expertise, and Swinton and Moore are right at home with Penelope Cruz, Cecilia Roth, Carmen Maura, Rossy de Palma and all the other larger-than-life chicas Almodóvar. Visually, the two women couldn’t provide a starker contrast. Moore is all autumnal hues and soft, gentle curves. She famously cries in most of her movies because she is completely comfortable with showing her vulnerability. Swinton, on the other hand, is all angles. Her icy blond hair and cutting cheekbones give her an ethereal presence. (At a New York Film Festival press talkback on Oct. 4, Almodóvar said she was “a being from some other dimension.” Swinton did not deny it.)

Side by side, they’re like Renoir and Braque paintings—cold and warm, sharp and tender, inviting and intimidating. But as we get closer and closer to these distinctly different friends, they begin somehow to merge. Almodóvar, who’s borrowed from directors as diverse as George Cukor and John Waters over his long career, here channels Ingmar Bergman, specifically Persona. The transference of style, attitude, perspective—and that most human of all feelings, empathy—this is what the Spanish auteur is always after. And he finds it beautifully.

Perched between here and the hereafter, much of The Room Next Door, which the director adapted from the Sigrid Nunez novel What Are You Going Through?, feels like it’s unfolding in a liminal space. A gorgeous liminal space. Working with collaborators old (composer Alberto Iglesias and costumer Bina Daigeler) and new (production designer Inbal Weinberg and cinematographer Eduard Grau), Almodóvar has made a movie that’s stunning in almost every frame.

His New York has the vivid, museum-quality shine of one of Hitchcock’s VistaVision films. The women never look anything less than runway-ready, pacing through spacious apartments with bold artwork and spectacular views. Manhattan’s skyline shimmers outside almost every window. When the friends decamp to the woods of New England, where Martha plans to take her leave, they land in the sort of fabulous modernist palace you’d expect to see in North by Northwest.

The cool, affluent polish of The Room Next Door plays to Almodóvar’s stylistic strength, but it also points to the film’s central weakness. Martha and Ingrid’s lives of easy luxury contradict the film’s stated political perspective. The dissonance appears when the man both women dated all those years ago turns up. Damian (John Turturro, giving an atypically subdued performance) is yet another writer, a famously pessimistic environmentalist who’s new book is cheerfully titled How Bad Can It Get? Over dinner with Ingrid, he answers her already weighty personal dilemma by raising an even more dire prospect: What does any of it matter in the face of catastrophic climate change?

At the NYFF talkback, Almodóvar acknowledged that one of Damian’s functions in the film is to make its broader politics explicit. But by harping on our failure to curb the destructive appetites of the 1%, the character unwittingly turns his critique on the wealthy gloss of the rest of the film. Someone in the audience at Lincoln Center even pointed out that a journalist like Martha could never afford her lifestyle, particularly in the US, where access to health care is grossly inequitable.

The director answered as only he could: “When you see Grace Kelly in Rear Window, you don’t ask her if she has enough money to have these Givenchy outfits,” he said, to laughter from the assembled reviewers and bloggers. “It’s a movie.” All that really matters to Almodóvar is that “the feelings are real.” And it’s hard to argue with that. There is more than enough real feeling in The Room Next Door to keep us engaged.

In truth, there have always been two Almodóvars: The fearless champion of women’s rights and queer culture, birthed after the fall of Franco; and the fabulous fantasist enamored of stylish sex fiends and melodramatic mothers. The Room Next Door, like most of his recent films, is tamer and more naturalistic than his early work. But the contradiction between his two impulses lives on.

At the talkback, Swinton praised the filmmaker for his politics, for always “encouraging us to not look away.” She could very well have been describing his polished aesthetic, too. We will continue to indulge Almodóvar’s inconsistencies—we just can’t look away.