Pedro Almodóvar, the eloquent Spanish director of The Room Next Door, had become internationally unmistakable for his love of the repulsive, grotesque and his almost poetic vision of kitsch and parody. Almodóvar’s unsanitised and objectionable characters, constantly crossing red lines with such brutality and truth, have nevertheless illustrated with incomparable originality the amalgamated nature of tradition and transgression, desire and control.
Almodóvar is not afraid to bring to the surface the most outrageous shadows of the human soul, which often culminate on the screen in explosive imageries of pain and desire. Almodóvar is undoubtedly, a cinema master of our times.
In The Room Next Door, Almodóvar’s first English long feature, Martha (Tilda Swinton) lying in a hospital bed, longs to die in a place untouched by memories of her life, away from any possibility of self-absorption and nostalgia by an overdose of opioids that suppresses suffering and eventually respiration, in a final act of freedom from dying desires, or euthanasia.
The Room Next Door
Martha’s ghostly figure bears the signs of impending death.
Terminal cancer slowly erases her, throws her between agitation and delirium, hope and depression, makes her progressively less awake and makes her doubt her self-coherence. Yet, she is determined to set herself free, but refuses to die alone and forgotten – a fate she witnessed countless times as a war reporter, in which she saw the obliteration of individual and collective memories.
In her perceived symmetry of trauma, she has no one to hold dear her memory and true story and carry it alive. No accomplice in her own demise. But, as with many of Almodóvar’s characters, she is led to her destiny by chance, relying on the solidarity of strangers and long-forgotten bonds.
An old friend left behind is Ingrid (Julianne Moore), a best-selling author of self-fiction stories on mortality, though remaining immature and terrified about the subject. In a fictionalised way, she also made death central in her life. After many years apart, these two parallel stories -on death and the fear of it– unexpectedly collide.
Martha asks her friend to witness her death in a dignified portrait of mortality, where friendship grows greater than love and blood ties are estranged, lost, indifferent or dead. It is a request to be in the room next door, nothing more, while life and desire fade faintly and faintly fade, “like the descent of her last end”.
It is a plea for total acceptance of our intrinsic closeness to tragedy, to which the only sensible response is simple humanity. In the face of inevitable tragedies, science, dogmas, morals, and laws were rendered more powerless than our human selves. Death and life instincts become indistinguishable in the room next door.
This is Almodóvar in his deepest essence, with newfound geniality.
Almodóvar: booed at home, but once praised abroad
Almodóvar in his own words says he has always been autobiographical and that he conceives “the impossibility of separating creation from one’s own life”. It is from his origins and memories in Calzada de Calatrava, a patriarchal, catholic small village in Castile-La Mancha, that Almodóvar inevitably crafted a violent caricature of the noir tones of the Spanish soul, so precise in stripping away the cultural realities, that his work made him often be booed at home, but praised abroad, where his depiction of human excesses was perceived solely as a matter of style.
But now Almodóvar distances himself from his origins and what in great measure created him as a director. He enters The Room Next Door, his first English language long feature, placing human tragedy in New York, inspired by the work of an American author What Are You Going Through (2020) by Sigrid Nunez.
It is comprehensible that Spain’s self-rejection rendered Almodóvar a series of notable snubs in the Oscar by not submitting Almodóvar’s greatest masterpieces for the Best International Feature category, such as Talk to Her (2002), where Spain chose Mondays in the Sun instead, Volver (2006), where Spain picked Salvador, and Parallel Mothers (2021), where Spain submitted The Good Boss.
Yet, the Academy overturned his absence and recognized Almodóvar’s films in other categories, particularly concerning acting and screenwriting. It would cost some severe critics not to do so. Remarkably, not this time around.
Snubbed by Hollywood
The Room Next Door was absent from the list of nominees across all categories for the 97th Academy Awards, despite garnering critical acclaim and securing several international awards.
What kind of consensus must prevail in Hollywood for it to ignore the undeniable existence of such an accomplished work of art and outstanding performances without fearing any criticism or reputational loss? Has Almodóvar dared himself to close by leaving Spain and choosing America as the centre stage of agonizing desires and humanity’s decay?
Almodóvar’s untamed “Law of Desire”, the oxymoron he uses to coin his own artwork, seemed to demand the allegory of a different society to find its place in the small and hermetic room next door.
It is a place at a time of claustrophobic emotions, with America standing, not by chance, as the allegory and epicentre of very contemporary human tragedies. Almodóvar’s death of humanity is staged in a society that exalts the efficiency of the impersonal, deeply afraid of its own fears, anxious to control and self-control, clinging devoutly to the regimentation of unpredictable human nature, and seeking refuge in suffocating safe zones, where almost no one is allowed in or out.
Maybe an unintended reflection for collective liberation.
Almodóvar is persistently unforgiving in drawing the audience as a protagonist of his story, and America gets a special part. Almodóvar puts us all in that room next door, as Martha’s unavoidable end blurs with our collective fate.
We are all in the room next door
Sitting in a luxury restaurant, aesthetically cold and detached from the many sorrows and realities, Damian (John Turturro), a common friend and once shared lover, can only show coarse empathy by reminding Ingrid of a much greater shared disaster. He draws Ingrid into an apocalyptical conversation, and through his words, “the room next door becomes our general position in the world” and to all its tragedies, as described by Tilda Swinton in an interview with Deadline Hollywood.
Damian foresees with convincing authority the collective end of a hopelessly terminally ill society, awaiting the cataclysm of the climate crisis, driven by hatred and ruled by the symbiotic destructiveness of neoliberalism and the far-right.
He had lost all hope.
In his self-perceived sobriety and scepticism, the only solution at sight is a lawyer for Ingrid’s trouble.
Damian seems to personify core elements of the American mass psyche that wish to reduce the complexities of the human condition and moral ambivalence to behavioural control and pragmatism. And when the illusions of a society’s omnipotent control shatter, it descends into a catatonic state of paralysis and numbness. But, “there are many ways to live inside of a tragedy,” reminds Ingrid, as she chooses not to dehumanise tragedy in all its dimensions.
In The Room Next Door, Almodóvar in part renounces the extravagance for which he is known. He speaks delicately, intimately of a tumult of emotions and through the magnificent acting of Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore, in highly restrained scenes, in almost silent dialogues, in a dense, disturbing depth, tragedy and humanity together unfold.
All that remains are the essences to contemplate. And perhaps, Almodóvar offers an ungentle reminder for us to witness our own humanity as the starting point within tragedy.
Featured image via the Canary
