In “The Room Next Door”, Pedro Almodóvar sublimates death

For his twenty-third feature film, Pedro Almodóvar is interested in death. Or rather at the end of life. By chance, Ingrid, a renowned writer, discovers that her old friend Martha has cancer. The two women lost touch after having worked together for a long time as journalists in the same magazine, where Martha was a war reporter. Ingrid goes to visit her former colleague at the hospital, and she tells her that the treatments are no longer working and that she is doomed.

Little by little, a long conversation begins between the two women. Martha tells Ingrid about her memories of reporting, the story of the birth of her only daughter, and even that of this former lover they shared. For Martha, this incurable illness is yet another war. As she covered the previous ones for her newspaper, she intends to keep control over this one until the end.

Visual beauty for vibrant advocacy

Everything is beautiful in this feature film, in theaters this Wednesday January 8, which earned the filmmaker of “Stilettos”, “All About My Mother” and “Volver” to receive the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival in September 2024. The actresses, first: Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore, haughty look, loose clothes and crimson lipstick. The settings, then: a bohemian New York apartment, an architect’s house planted in a thick forest, a sun-drenched terrace where lazy deckchairs rest. The staging, the dialogues, the lighting, the music, of course… and these flashy colors which pierce the image like a surge of life and desire.

Even illness is very chic. The ultra-modern and spacious hospital has the appearance of a palace, and the suffering always remains clean, dry, elegant. Death almost seems like a well-orchestrated ceremony. Some will criticize the 75-year-old Spanish filmmaker for this cold and sanitized beauty, this way of telling the end of life as if on glossy paper, omitting material contingencies, pain, bitterness or ugliness.

By idealizing and sublimating death, however, Almodóvar offers a vibrant plea for the right to die with dignity. He even slips in a little militant note at the end of his film with this detestable policeman character who, as a “man of faith”, sees euthanasia as a crime.

Two masterful actresses

The Spanish filmmaker’s first feature film in English, “The Room Next Door” is a new story of friendship between women – the male characters play very secondary, even anecdotal, roles -, carried by two masterful actresses.

If Julianne Moore is filming for the first time with Pedro Almodóvar, Tilda Swinton was already the filmmaker’s muse in a short film entitled “La Voix Humaine” in 2020. Here, the director does not bother to dig into his characters to go to the essentials. And sign a refined melodrama where aesthetics serve a purpose that is both metaphysical and political.