Words by JANE CROWTHER
Pedro Almodóvar’s first English-language feature length film boasts his expected vibrant reds, strong female performances and a discourse on life/death; but in transposing his signature style to a chilly New York there’s a fresh austerity and overt Sirkian sensibility also at play. The result is a vibrant and life-affirming treat as well as a battle cry against climate change.
Inspired by Sigrid Nunez’s novel What Are You Going Through, Almodóvar explores our relationship to death (both personally and environmentally) via two old journalist friends who once painted the town red as magazine writers and who reconnect when author Ingrid (Julianne Moore) learns war reporter Martha (Tilda Swinton) is terminably ill. Suffering from stage 3 cervical cancer, no-nonsense Martha has tired of her gruelling treatments and is now at peace with the idea that she ‘deserves a good death’. Ingrid, by comparison, has just written a novel exploring her terror of dying, so when Martha asks her to be in ‘the room next door’ of a gorgeous rental house when she commits euthanasia, she’s both honoured and horrified.
Within a soaring melodrama score and colour-pop production design, Moore and Swinton discuss the pleasures of life (books, writing, birdsong, movies), shared experiences (John Tuturro plays the eco-warrior lover both women have shared) and the depletion of self caused by the ravages of illness. As Martha reaches her end, she looks back to her past – to the war experiences that have shaped her and the conception of the daughter she’s estranged from, told in flashbacks with a luminous Esther McGregor playing young Martha.
There are moments of great visual beauty as expected from an Almodóvar film; pink snowflakes drifting over a Manhattan skyline, Moore and Swinton lying side by side on pistachio-green and cherry-red sun loungers, the lush tones of an autumn garden. And in the hands of such accomplished actors, the emotional magnificence also gleams; Swinton reciting poetry and the dialogue to John Huston’s The Dead as a tear slips from her eye, the way Moore reacts to a closed red door. Though Swinton playing her own daughter may jar for some, it works in a film that champions the idea of leaving the world with the next generation in mind, and reminds us all to be grateful for the small wonders of everyday life. After watching this the world may look all the more vivid on leaving the dark of the theatre…
Words by JANE CROWTHER
The Room Next Door releases in cinemas later this year
