Previous Almodóvar’s collaborator Tilda Swinton plays Martha, a war correspondent dying of cervical cancer who, after extenuating treatments, decides to terminate her life by her means and wants Ingrid, played by Julianne Moore, a writer and a friend from the past with whom she lost contact for years, to be her companion in her decisive moment and to be in the room on the next door in the luxurious house Martha rents to live her last days in a small town.

Swinton’s voice pitch, expressions, gestures, and acting convey a woman who has lived for decades under stress in family and work life and is coming to terms with her final chapter. Swinton owns an ethereal presence and, in some moments, resembles a personification of death, which is a fact of life and not a stereotyped battle of “good versus evil,” as Martha exposes in brilliant dialogue that debunks condescending notions about those enduring life-ending diseases and conditions.

Like Swinton, Moore is a world-class talent who expresses the responsibility required from her act. The performance is infused with melancholy that seeps through her attempts to act “normal” in an unusual situation. Moore modulates her voice as someone in a dark corner but trying to avoid others’ knowledge.
It is a picture of emotional depth as Almodóvar is dealing with ageing. Nevertheless, ‘The Room Next Door’ has light and tender moments, which are the right choice to avoid the traps of doom and gloom and generate false pity towards the ordeal faced by both characters.

This lightness is also seen in some moments when the physical humour with innuendo comes, as when the friends talk about their shared lover Damian (John Turturro), in the scene in which Ingrid is signing books for many women readers, many lesbians, and when the writer goes to the gym to alleviate the tension from the house and the exercise choreography with the trainer Jonah (Alvise Rigo) has a veneer of sexual tension. During the session, Ingrid breaks down and talks about her ordeal with a stranger, showing how physical proximity creates bonds.

Bridging heavy subjects to a broader audience

‘The Room Next Door’ is also part of the zeitgeist as it touches on climate change and human rights violations mainly through the speech of the activist Damian, who has a valid discourse. However, Turturro embodies a sense of self-righteousness, which is counterbalanced by the light air brought by Ingrid or the looming sense of personal closeness felt by Martha.

Another dark presence is in the film; the rise of the far right and its zealots emerges in the form of the unnamed policeman, played by Alessandro Nivola, a stark reminder of the political moment and how such forces can prey on personal decisions and body autonomy to preserve the status quo. A third prominent masculine presence is brought by actor Alex Høgh Andersen playing Martha’s young years boyfriend who has PTSD after serving in the Vietnam War.

These oppressive or absent emotions are furthered by the employing of architecture to represent the emptiness and solitude of modern life, which are counterbalanced by the use of colours. The latter is a characteristic of Almodóvar’s oeuvre, and his distinctive red appears in important moments, sometimes even dialoguing with Moore’s trademark red hair and bringing lightness to the euthanasia theme alongside the acting by the protagonists.

Being a film by the famed director, although Ingrid and Martha are not identified as gay, queerness permeates it as represented in some parallel stories. Ingrid is writing a book on the beautiful and unique yet tragic relationship between painter Dora Carrington and writer and gay man Lytton Strachey during the dawn of the 20th Century. Martha shared a similar tie with a war correspondent colleague who was in a romance with a Carmelite missionary, a member of the Catholic Church. Martha wrote the story of both men but decided not to publish it.

The movie is based on Ingrid Nunez’s book What Are You Going Through (2020), and it already touches on heavy subjects that mainstream Hollywood avoids, such as euthanasia, far-right ascension, and environmental rights. Almodóvar brought sister love between women and more by mentioning queer relationships from past figures or other characters while focusing on Martha and Ingrid’s friendship without overloading the narrative, which already has complex themes that might push regular audiences away.

In a way, ‘The Room Next Door,’ with its subtleness, might be able to open doors for future major studio dramas portraying layered lesbian relationships while also touching on heavy subjects like euthanasia, considering the state society finds itself in.

Also Read: Review: Memoria

The post Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore Shine in Almodóvar’s Emotional ‘The Room Next Door’ appeared first on Big Picture Film Club.

Since 1997, the pair have been an unstoppable force in Spanish cinema, a power second only to the genuine love they seem to share for each other. At the 72^nd Oscars, when Almodóvar won Best Foreign Language Feature for All About My Mother, Cruz, alongside fellow Almodóvar staple Antonio Banderas, had the honour of giving it to him, shouting his name out like an excited school child as she opened the envelope. “He’s my safety net,” she told the press at Venice two weeks ago. “He can ask me to do something that can really scare me, but I know he will be there.”

I have long believed that the partnership between Almodóvar and Cruz is one of the greatest in cinema history, likely for the very reasons Cruz mentioned. Cruz’s performances for Almodóvar are fearless; they are risky and brutal, vulnerable and tender. That working relationship that blends with the personal offers us, the audience, hours of cinematic genius. Yet when the idea of actors and directors working in pairs comes up, the two are rarely mentioned. Instead, we hear tell of DiCaprio and Scorsese, or De Niro and Scorsese. People talk of Hitchcock and Stewart, Burton and Depp, Spielberg and Hanks. As if the only way greatness can be achieved is if it’s reached by two men – usually straight and white. 

Those beacons of greatness, who often make heavily masculine and male-centric films, are why Cruz and Almodóvar are so often left out. “Great movies” are about violence, they are about men seeking revenge, they are about men on a mission, they are about men. Almodóvar’s movies, while occasionally violent, are often colourful melodramas, queer and camp, that exist on a different astral plane. They explore the lives of outsiders, of the working classes, of women and the world of sexuality. Yet when it comes to “greatness”, their films exist as victims of, as Emily Nussbaum once noted, “an unexamined hierarchy: the assumption that anything stylized (or formulaic, or pleasurable, or funny, or feminine, or explicit about sex rather than about violence, or made collaboratively) must be inferior.”

Almodóvar and Cruz are not alone in this rarely recognised space either. Catherine Keener has appeared in five of Nicole Holofcener’s six feature films, exploring the complexity of the female experience from their twenties into their forties. Sofia Coppola and Kirsten Dunst have done something similar, with Dunst appearing in four of Coppola’s films, each offering a nuanced look at the life of young women. Julianne Moore has appeared in three of Todd Haynes’ films, including a tremendous turn in the Douglas Sirk homage Far From Heaven. Michelle Williams has repeatedly blown audiences way in her films with Kelly Reichhardt, the next of which is currently in post-production. At the same time, Tilda Swinton exuded her now-trademark complexity in six of Derek Jarman’s films in the eighties and nineties before his death from an AIDS-related illness in 1994.

If this list seems overwhelmingly white, it’s because it is. While black men have found some repeated success in pairings like Ryan Coogler and Michael B. Jordan, or Spike Lee with Samuel L. Jackson and Denzel Washington, they rarely get included in that pantheon of greatness. Though, admittedly, if their films conform to that idea of violence and masculinity as central, they tend to do better. As for women of colour, Ava DuVernay has worked with David Oyelowo three times, while Teyonah Parris appeared in Nia DaCosta’s recent Candyman reboot and is due to appear in The Marvels—the upcoming sequel to 2018’s Captain Marvel—directed by DaCosta. 

The point of all this listing? For nearly a century, the film industry has continually pushed an unquestioned narrative onto its audience that male art is great art. Everything else is left out of those discussions. That which deals with the male experience is what cinema is all about, and whatever else filmmakers cover it does not hold that same value. Take, for example, the outcry each time it’s rightfully suggested that a number of women directors have been snubbed for Best Director any given year. “MaYBE iT’s AbOuT wHo iS bEtTer aT tHe jOb?” people scream on Twitter, battening down on the unquestioned assumption that all the men who are nominated are, ipso facto, better than the women who aren’t. 

In her response to Lady Bird leaving the 2018 Oscars empty-handed, Hunter Harris wrote for Vulture that “Greta Gerwig made a movie about what generations of male auteurs saw only as background noise.” Specifically, she made a film about mothers and daughters. The characters who, in the movies of men, are often side-lined. They wait for their husbands to come home, they chastise them for making bad decisions, they complain, they put their feet up on the car dashboard for the camera to zoom in on, or, like Anna Paquin in Scorsese’s The Irishman, they have a single line (that amounts to seven words) in a movie that is basically the length of a mini-series. 

This is not to say that straight male directors are incapable of understanding experiences outside their own; some do often, and do it well. Most, however, rarely do. Spielberg has overwhelmingly cast men as his leads. Scorsese’s movies often feature one woman at most amongst a sea of male violence, while Tarantino, for all his “feminist” hype, creates two-dimensional women that are reduced down to their bodies. It suggests, perhaps, a lack of empathy or interest in experiences outside their own which itself is cultivated by the very narrative their work upholds.  

The straight male directors of today are not leading the charge in their male-led ideals but instead continuing a legacy that dates back decades. In Recollections of My Non-Existence, Rebecca Solnit writes that the constant centring of the straight white male experience is a longstanding problem, with broader effects than we may think. There is a problem “with those who spend too little time being anyone else; it stunts the imagination in which empathy takes root, that empathy that is a capacity to shape-shift and roam out of sole self.” For women, people of colour, disabled folk, and queers, we spent our childhoods being someone else. We had to. Imagination was the centrepiece of our childhood, finding ways wherever we could. It is where we learned to empathise

Perhaps, as a queer person whose strongest friendships have often been with women, I see something of myself in the work of Almodóvar and Cruz, knowing how specific and open that bond can be. Perhaps, whilst also being a social-political vendetta I’m writing about, it is also a personal one. I find it frustrating each time I read a list of “Best Actor and Director Pairings” and they’re not on it. I find it disheartening that work that questions the idea of the patriarchy is subjugated to the work that upholds it. 

Also Read: How Film Changed Me: On The Hollywood Trickle-Down

Your contribution to Big Picture Film Club will allow us to continue to produce content. No matter the amount your contributions are greatly appreciated.

The post How Film Changed Me: On Underappreciated Actor and Director Pairings appeared first on Big Picture Film Club.