Triumph of the Will: Almodovar’s Muy Excelente English Debut
Successful author Ingrid (Moore) has just learned an old friend, Martha (Swinton) is undergoing treatment at a nearby hospital in Manhattan. In their youth, they had worked for the same magazine, but Ingrid carved out a career as novelist specializing in autofiction while Martha became a prominent war correspondent. Ingrid is received warmly by Martha, who reveals she remains estranged from her daughter despite a prognosis which has concluded chemotherapy did not work, though she has hope for a new experimental treatment she’s about to undergo. Ingrid makes herself available to Martha, their relationship rekindled. But when the new treatment no longer works, Martha reveals she has procured a euthanasia pill and requests Ingrid accompany her for a month in the countryside to be on hand, in the room next door, to assist in this transition. Ingrid initially balks at the request, but soon relents.
Almodóvar’s storytelling has always been bolstered by a vibrant, alluring production and costume design, visual elements also adding their own symbolic weight. If at first The Room Next Door may not initially feel like an Almodóvar film, his crew quickly coalesces on his wavelength, perhaps aided most significantly by production designer Inbal Weinberg, who whips up one of his most sumptuous color coded schemes ever, reminiscent in many ways of Talk to Her (2002). Moore and Swinton find themselves enrobed in color coded excess, swirls of red, green, and blue fluctuating between them of varying shades. The interiors of their apartments also reflect this coding, with Martha more prominent as green and Ingrid as red, which eventually switches for Ingrid after the film’s inevitable ‘event.’
As an author of ‘autofiction’ who embellishes narratives based on real life figures, including herself, the first thing we learn about Ingrid is her overwhelming fear of death. And, of course, those obsessed with the end oftentimes find their journey to it eclipsed. She’s just published a novel, On Sudden Death, which seems to have been written too soon based on the experience she’s about to have. As entertaining as it is to see Moore stationed in swank NYC bookstore Rizzoli, it’s a bit of a clunky start in the dialogue exchanges required to feed us exposition and pertinent subtexts via flashbacks which metaphorically underline the narrative.
We learn, in quick succession, of Martha’s estranged relationship with her only daughter Michelle, the product of a fleeting affair from her youth with a Vietnam veteran named Fred who met a tragic, haunting end—one in which Michelle literally writes herself into as a tortured ghost. As Ingrid unveils her new project, outlining the strange, tragic relationship between painter Dora Carrington and (gay) writer Lytton Strachey, members of the Bloomsbury Group from the early 20th century, Martha shares a similar experience of an embellishment between a colleague while in Iraq and his romance with a Carmelite missionary—-a story she wrote for herself but did not publish. This is represented in a flashback wherein the reunited men feel lifted from the same page as the queer cowboys in Almodovar’s 2023 short, Strange Way of Life.
These moments align both women as existing on a similar plane but on opposite lines of division between reality and fiction, both of them tiptoeing into the other’s realm, and also transforming. Other cultural focal points they gravitate towards include a screening of Roberto Rossellini’s Journey to Italy (1954), starring his then wife Ingrid Bergman, whose relationship was defined by tabloid scandal. Later, they discuss the desire to read Erotic Vagrancy, a 2023 publication which goes into great detail about the highly publicized relationship between Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton—all personas who found themselves tethered to and redefined by their larger than life (and larger than death, it seems) relationships.
The clunkiness returns in the third act, with Alessandro Nivola playing a religious fanatic cop, and a shared lover from their past, John Turturro, a writer who preaches cynicism about the environmental crisis proclaiming the irresponsibility of bringing children into a doomed world. Ultimately, these are angles confirming a collective obsession with death. So much so, we all seem to be overlooking life. Almodóvar also adds an element not in the novel, whose characters all are unnamed. Swinton pops up again, (a la Joanna Hogg’s The Eternal Daughter, 2022) as her own daughter, Michelle, a ghost who’s returned, mothered by proxy courtesy of Ingrid.
However, just as their color coding begins to blend, so does the relationship of their visualized intimacy, including one of DP Eduard Grau’s finest shots in the film which aligns the left side of both women’s faces, like they’ve blended into a cubist woman by Picasso. Speaking of artists, Almodóvar includes Realist painter Edward Hopper’s People in the Sun, hanging prominently in the death rental. They deduce it must not be an original but a well done copy. But such lines become increasingly difficult to deduce.
Swinton initially overpowers the film as a fiercely intelligent woman contending with her inevitable end, persuading Moore’s Ingrid, who seems to comply partially out of guilt as well as morbid artistic interest, to be the person in the room next door. Martha’s cheerful helpfulness feels artificial, saying everything one assumes they’re supposed to in the context of the situation. She puts aside her own needs in unpacking her new apartment, and keeps her continued correspondence with the lover they shared (who Martha still pines for) a secret. It’s as if Ingrid is unable to be her own person until she begins to absorb portions of Martha (including, it seems, half of her assets). Ingrid is, in essence, like the ferryman who transported the souls of the deceased across the River Styx in Greek mythology—-it seems as if we undervalue the inherent comforts of Charon.
Like the novel, Almodóvar’s adaptation is rife with inspirations and subtexts. Not only is their lavish rental outside of Woodstock a brutalist wonder, the owners have a stock of films any cinephile would enjoy. After watching Buster Keaton in Seven Chances (1925) and Max Ophuls’ Letter from an Unknown Woman (1948), their final film screening is John Huston’s adaptation of James Joyce’s The Dead (1987), which Martha quotes before we catch a clip of the film. Almodóvar adds his own spin on it in the final haunting frames as the snow drifts down on two women, intersecting and morphing as characters and actors, mothers and daughters. While The Room Next Door utilizes Joyce as the orator of its elegy, let us also return to Woolf’s sentiments as well, another figure in the Carrington/Strachey milieu. “Truth had run through my fingers. Every drop had escaped.” The revolving door between truth and fiction stops with death.
Reviewed on September 2nd at the 2024 Venice Film Festival (81st edition) – In Competition. 110 Mins
★★★½/☆☆☆☆☆