The Dead

 

Director John Huston

Huston on the set with his son Tony

author James Joyce, 1904

THE DEAD                A                                                                                                            Great Britain  Ireland  USA  (83 mi)  1987  d: John Huston

A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window.  It had begun to snow again.  He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight.  The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward.  Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland.  It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves.  It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried.  It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns.  His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.

—James Joyce The Dead, last short story from Dubliners, originally written in 1904, with this longer story added in 1907, not published until 1914, The Dead by James Joyce

John Huston began his career as a screenwriter, and one of the obvious strengths of his work is his attention to dialogue, relying heavily upon literary adaptations as a director, where the great majority of his 36 features, and certainly his best-known ones, were drawn from novels, short stories, or plays, with Huston awarded an honorary degree of Doctor of Literature from Trinity College Dublin.  In his storied career, one need only think of THE MALTESE FALCON (1941), a Dashiell Hammett novel, THE TREASURE OF THE SIERRA MADRE (1948), an adventure novel by B. Traven, KEY LARGO (1948), based on a Maxwell Anderson play, THE ASPHALT JUNGLE (1950), a W.R. Burnett novel, THE AFRICAN QUEEN (1951), a C.S. Forester novel, MOBY DICK (1956), a Herman Melville novel, The Misfits, (1961), written by playwright Arthur Miller, THE MAN WHO WOULD BE KING (1975), a Rudyard Kipling short story, and WISE BLOOD (1979), a Flannery O’Connor novel, among others, while this last and final film is an adaptation of what is perhaps James Joyce’s most perfect story from Dubliners, a collection of short stories focusing upon a series of characters connected only by the city in which they reside, written when Irish nationalism was at its peak, when a search for a national identity and purpose was paramount, made while he was sitting in a wheelchair while hooked up to an oxygen tank, on the verge of his own death (four months after shooting ended), suffering from terminal emphysema, bringing a vividly personalized atmosphere to the set.  Something of a love letter to Ireland and a merging of kindred artistic spirits, the youthful writer and the aging filmmaker, both coming to terms with their impending mortality, each wondering how they would be remembered and what they would leave behind, borrowing several biographical details from Joyce’s life, as both he and Gabriel Conroy reviewed books for the pro-British Dublin Daily Express, taught in college, became Europeanized, and were largely indifferent to the nationalistic aims of their native country.  Heavily impacted by Joyce ever since his mother smuggled him a copy from Paris during the 1920’s of the then-banned novel Ulysses, writing in his 1980 autobiography An Open Book, “It was probably the greatest experience that any book has ever given me,” actually influencing his decision to move to Ireland in 1952, thoroughly disgusted by the McCarthyist witch hunt spreading through Hollywood at the time, wanting to escape the “moral rot” ruining the lives of many of his friends in the movie industry, eventually becoming an Irish citizen.  Adapted by his son Tony Huston, with an opening dedication “For Maricela,” the director’s longtime nurse and companion Maricela Hernández, this mysteriously complex film also stars his daughter Angelica Huston, who he previously directed in PRIZZI’S HONOR (1985), winning her a Best Supporting Actress Academy Award, where the cast is all-Irish except Angelica Huston, but she grew up in Ireland, having moved there when she was just two years old, and doesn’t miss a beat, with most of the cast coming from Dublin’s Abbey Theatre company, yet what really stands out is the power of the performances.  Angelica Huston has never been so, well - - angelic, for lack of a better word, as she’s usually typecast as a much tougher person, darker and more imposingly complex, an actress whose strong onscreen physicality and elegance is hard to underestimate, yet here she plays Gretta Conroy, the wife of an academic, Gabriel Conroy (Donal McCann), modeled directly after Joyce’s wife, Nora Barnacle (also serving as Joyce’s role model for Molly Bloom in Ulysses), playing a more minor part than her husband, easily overlooked through most of the story.  While she’s outwardly kind and socially considerate, the picture of etiquette and social grace, the story turns on a dime near the end, where out of nowhere she becomes the central focus, almost by accident, as her actions suddenly influence the mood of the entire story, taking a decidedly melancholy trajectory, where all the banalities of ordinary existence and the much anticipated social pretensions, captured in all its drunken comedy and pathos, must be endured in order to appreciate the full emotional power of such a magnificently realized finale, like a beam of light streaming in opening our eyes to what the story is really driving at, suggesting a love for life can also express itself as a complicated love for the dead, becoming a labor of love so unlike Huston’s earlier films, beautifully blending in to the social setting of the turn-of-the-century era. 

Joyce had a complex relationship with Dublin, and Ireland, leaving the city for good after 1909, and after 1912 he never set foot in Ireland again, moving to Italy and then Paris where he was surrounded by like-minded contemporary writers like Marcel Proust, Ernest Hemingway, Samuel Beckett, Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, and W.B. Yeats, where his reasons were both deeply personal and part of broader societal trends, reflective of what he saw as the spiritual “deadness” of Dublin, while also decrying Irish society’s conservatism, censorship, religious hypocrisy, and zealous nationalism, though his spiritual and artistic engagement with the city continued until the end of his life, while according to Huston, “All I know about filmmaking is in this film.”  Written in 1907 when he was just 25 from an apartment in Trieste, Italy, more than a decade before Ulysses was published in 1922, the film is about memory, loss, and the lasting power of the dead over the living, and while it’s a faithful adaptation, there are additions not included in the original source material, reassigning numerous lines to different characters, while also introducing an entirely new character in Mr. Grace (Seán McClory), who eloquently recites an English translation of an 8th-century Middle Irish poem Donal Óg.  Taking place in Dublin in 1904, a Feast of the Epiphany dinner party, held every year 11 days after Christmas, is hosted by two spinster sisters, Kate and Julia Morkan (Helena Carroll and Cathleen Delany), and their unmarried niece, Mary Jane (Ingrid Craigie), all music teachers, as horse-drawn carriages arrive with formally-dressed guests on the snowy night, where we learn that for years the sisters have functioned as the official center of the city’s cultural world.  While Joyce’s writing provides access to Gabriel’s internal, stream-of-consciousness perspective, including his rapidly shifting observations, memories, and emotional responses, a vantage point that is practically impossible to replicate on the screen, instead Huston fluctuates between newly arriving guests, a joyous occasion seamlessly shifting the perspectives, expressing a range of disagreements among the guests, often confronted with uneasy realities, where it’s easy to get swept away by the accumulative power of the experience, yet it’s also hard not to admire his purely cinematic adaptation for its faithfulness to the time period through lighting, costumes, music, and such eloquent diction, where the acute eye for detail is impressive.  Shot by Fred Murphy, it looks utterly spectacular.  Gabriel is sarcastically teased by the fiery temperament of Molly Ivors (Maria McDermottroe), an Irish nationalist colleague who berates him for writing for The Daily Express, which she refers to as an “English rag,” suggesting he should be ashamed of himself for betraying his Irish identity, calling him a “West Briton,” “someone who looks to England for our salvation instead of depending on ourselves alone,” a reference to the political slogan of Sinn Féin, as she leaves the party early, stomping off to attend a Republican meeting.  Over the course of the festive dinner party, where guests discuss topics of musical and local interest, Mr. Browne (Dan O’Herlihy) arrives with flowers which he likens to the gifts of the Magi (which does not appear in the Joyce story), featuring plenty of music and dancing, with the men hovering around a table in the next room with the drinks, some overzealously, as guests find themselves haunted by spectral figures of an older, near-forgotten Dublin, what Huston’s friend Orson Welles characterized as a “myth of the past.”  Yet Joyce was a literary realist, depicting the sensory texture of thought and feeling, where that consciousness constitutes the essence of human life, yet the past may continually push and prod its way into the present, or may leap into our thoughts at any time, and while the characters may be prone to nostalgia, the story is not.  The festive dancing sequences mirror equally enthralling scenes in a Jane Austen novel, as they are everpresent, with audiences watching the action from behind the camera.  When the dancing subsides, Mary Grace plays a virtuosic showpiece on the piano while Aunt Julie performs a Bellini aria for the guests, though her singing voice has clearly diminished with age, as the camera peers through back rooms filled with memorabilia, a reminder of the ephemeral nature of life, while Mr. Grace reads an extraordinary recitation about a girl whose life is ruined by her passionate love for a man who promised her things he failed to deliver, only to abandon her, as if in the absence of God, Broken Vows [The Dead (John Huston, 1987)] YouTube (3:38).  While Gretta says nothing, the camera lingers on her placid countenance, thinking something only to herself, where it makes you wonder about the poem’s effect on her.     

You have taken the east from me; You have taken the west from me
You have taken what is before me and what is behind me;
You have taken the moon, you have taken the sun from me,
And my fear is great that you have taken God from me! 

Mirroring those internalized, personal reflections, the conversation turns to whatever happened to the many great operatic tenors that once flourished in Dublin, lamenting that so few are like them today, turning to the tableside expert in the matter, Bartell D’Arcy (Frank Patterson), a celebrated tenor with a sizeable reputation.  While the name Caruso is mentioned, Aunt Kate recalls someone from her youth by the name of Parkinson, a name no one else recalls, yet just thinking about him stirs something inside, her eyes glistening in tears, with the camera holding on her face in close-up.  This is the magic of memory, where the long-dead continue to live inside, haunting us in ways that nothing else can.  As the guests begin to leave, politely exchanging pleasantries, Gretta gets halfway down the stairs before she pauses, struck by what she hears, as the tenor D’Arcy is singing The Lass of Aughrim offscreen, an Irish variant of a Scottish ballad, a song that shifts back and forth between two former lovers lamenting the failings in their relationship, accentuating the imperfections and fragility of human love which lead to heartbreak and to untimely death, sending her into a prayer-like trance, framed by a stained-glass window, immaculately dressed like the Virgin Mary, with a white shawl around her neck and shoulders, representing purity in every sense of the word, The Lass of Aughrim - Frank Patterson YouTube (2:22).  A flood of memories wash over her as she listens intently, while her husband can only imagine what’s captured her attention, frozen in the moment, aware of the “grace and mystery in her attitude.”  Literally the turning point of the film, the music and storytelling of the evening awaken such intense memories, yet the couple says nothing on the carriage ride back to their hotel.  Only then, with Gabriel having hopes of getting amorous, does she finally break into tears, recalling a tragic childhood romance with a young man named Michael Furey in Galway, who used to sing that song to her, feeling responsible for his death at the age of 17, as he died under the window of her room.  “He was very delicate,” she says, revealing to her husband that Michael was very sick, but left his sick bed and stood outside her window in the cold and rain to say goodbye before she returned to Dublin, dying a week later, confessing “‘I think he died for me.”  The song opened up the floodgates of the pain that she had long repressed, serving as a catalyst which motivates her to remember something so clearly from her past, and while she clearly loves Gabriel and calls him “a very generous person,” she knows that he has never sacrificially given of himself in the way that Michael did for her, which only serves to reveal the lack of true intimacy and genuine love binding the Conroys, bringing about an emotional distance between them.  The cathartic final scene of the film leaves audiences to ponder the strange hold of the past over the present, as well as the impenetrable differences of those who are closest to us.  As Greta tearfully falls asleep in the hotel room, Gabriel is left looking out the window at the falling snow enveloped in darkness and utter solitude, struck by an all-embracing epiphany, realizing that he’s been deceiving himself for all these years, as he was neither Gretta’s first love nor her greatest love, helplessly discovering that he is less than who he thought he was.  His mind wanders to the future, imagining sitting around Aunt Julia’s deathbed, contemplating how he’ll be remembered, if at all, where his place in the world feels so impermanent.  “Better pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age.”  The final lines of voiceover dialogue spoken over orchestral refrains from The Lass of Aughrim encapsulate his severe desolation and loneliness, questioning his entire life again, reflecting on his existential existence and what it means to be alive before turning into shadows in one of the most profoundly stirring passages in all of literature, The Dead (1987) End Monologue YouTube (4:15), a fitting epitaph for Huston, where it’s hard not to be affected by the extreme intensity and literary potency of the language, mirroring Molly Bloom’s infamous stream-of-conscious soliloquy at the end of Ulysses.  A second camera operator, Scottish Michael Coulter, captures the mesmerizingly beautiful snowy landscapes, where the snow is a metaphor for the vast wasteland and hopelessness experienced by Joyce during the time period, looking out into the uncertainty of his country’s future, while Alex North’s elegiac Celtic harp music plays over both the opening and the end credits.

Watch The Dead Full Movie Online Free With English Subtitles  FShare TV (1:23:10)

The Room Next Door

 

Director Pedro Almodóvar

Almodóvar winning the Golden Lion at Venice

The director on the set

Almodóvar with his two actresses

THE ROOM NEXT DOOR               B+                                                                                      Spain  USA  France  (107 mi)  2024  ‘Scope  d: Pedro Almodóvar

A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window.  It had begun to snow again.  He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight.  The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward.  Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland.  It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves.  It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried.  It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns.  His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.

—James Joyce The Dead, last short story from Dubliners, 1914, The Dead by James Joyce

This is the kind of thing that people in their 20’s will probably find turgid and endlessly insufferable, but people over 50 will find much more insightful, as it deals with the latter stages of life instead of the early years, a common subject of interest as people mature.  Think of final films by Ingmar Bergman with SARABAND (2003), Andrei Tarkovsky’s The Sacrifice (Offret) (1986), or Béla Tarr’s The Turin Horse (2011), but also Leo McCarey’s MAKE WAY FOR TOMORROW (1937), Vittorio de Sica’s UMBERTO D (1952), Akira Kurosawa’s IKIRU (1952), Yasujirō Ozu’s Tokyo Story (Tokyo Monogatari) (1953), Cynthia Scott’s Strangers in Good Company (Le Fabuleux gang des sept) (1990), David Lynch’s THE STRAIGHT STORY (1999), Isabel Coixet’s My Life Without Me (2003), Sarah Polley’s Away from Her (2006), Michael Haneke’s Amour (Love) (2012), and Chantal Akerman’s No Home Movie (2015).  Death is an ominous subject for anyone to approach, at any age, yet when you’re young, it’s just not something you think about unless you have to, like near fatal accidents or illnesses, or having to attend funerals.  Pedro Almodóvar is not a director one would associate with aging or death, as his bad boy charisma and youthful energy are seemingly boundless, yet he was inspired by the 2020 novel What Are You Going Through by American writer Sigrid Nunez, and while it’s about a woman accompanying a terminally ill friend through her last months, offering many existential questions about impermanence and death, what stands out is the book’s conversation-heavy structure.  In this regard, the filmmaker was required to find two actresses who fit the mold, who could speak calmly and quietly through a stream of personal and mostly secluded conversations that capture our attention by exploring nothing less than the realities of living and dying in this world and how we feel about both.  We don’t often see these probing in-depth discussions on death and dying when it comes to adult friendships, revealing hidden truths we often shy away from, but Almodóvar directly faces several taboos of society such as the illegality of euthanasia or assisted suicide in forty out of fifty states in America, with only two states making it legal for non-residents, where his emotional connection to this forbidden terrain is undeniable, allowing the personal and political to intersect, expressed without a trace of sentimentality.  Spain legalized euthanasia in 2021 and is one of only 11 countries in which any form of assisted dying is legal.  In Great Britain, assisted suicide is punishable by up to 14 years’ imprisonment, while euthanasia is regarded as either manslaughter or murder, where the maximum penalty is life imprisonment.  Choosing two New York-based writers, Ingrid (Julianne Moore, who won a Best Actress Academy Award for Still Alice in 2015), a successful autofiction novelist, reconnects with a lifelong friend Martha (Tilda Swinton, who won a Best Supporting Actress Academy Award for MICHAEL CLAYTON in 2008), a hard-nosed war reporter, who is in the final stages of cervical cancer, THE ROOM NEXT DOOR | Official Clip YouTube (32 seconds).  Very few filmmakers, especially those who are male, have consistently captured the inner lives of women and the actresses playing them like Almodóvar, whose earlier film ALL ABOUT MY MOTHER (1999) was an affecting ode to the female spirit, dedicated “To Bette Davis, Gena Rowlands, Romy Schneider…To all actresses who have played actresses, to all women who act, to men who act and become women, to all people who want to become mothers.  To my mother.”  In keeping with the novel, Almodóvar chose to make his first English-language feature, having made two earlier shorts in English, one of them starring Tilda Swinton, now channeling his inner Douglas Sirk in the brightly colored costumes and set designs, where you literally feel like you’re walking back in time directly into a Douglas Sirk film, and since Julianne Moore was already in Todd Haynes’ FAR FROM HEAVEN (2002), an homage to Sirk films from the 50’s like All That Heaven Allows (1955), Written On the Wind (1956), and Imitation of Life (1959), that’s not entirely unexpected, yet everything that we’ve come to appreciate about Almodóvar is on display here, where a heightened sense of artifice has always been present in his work.

The leading light of contemporary Spanish cinema, Almodóvar’s characteristic splashes of vibrant color and bold melodramatic flourishes are everpresent at every turn, though this feels more tightly compressed due to the severity of the subject matter, adopting a more introspective and sober tone, as the weight of mortality is carried on both of their shoulders, told with a biting wit and a bold intellectual curiosity, along with an appreciation for an empathetic ear, adopting a very literary feel, while also including a screening of Roberto Rossellini’s Journey to Italy (1954).  Both actresses, by the way, have a history of working front and center for extraordinary queer filmmakers, Julianne Moore with Todd Haynes, and Tilda Swinton first with Derek Jarman and then with Luca Guadagnino and Apichatpong Weerasethakul, so their choice to grace the screen feels appropriate.  Winner of the Golden Lion (1st place) at the 2024 Venice Film Festival, with Almodóvar acknowledging in his acceptance speech, “As directors, we are privileged to be the first witness when a miracle occurs in front of the camera,” this is a film that examines mortality through the lens of human frailty, as we have two women who couldn’t be more different.  A caring and compassionate woman, Ingrid responds to a reader at a heavily populated book signing in Manhattan’s Rizzoli Bookstore, with the reader questioning whether writing the book changed her perceptions, “In the prologue, you say you wrote this book in order to better understand and accept death,” to which she responds that she’s still afraid of death, “It feels unnatural to me.  I can’t accept that something alive has to die.”  It’s only through these readers that Ingrid learns Martha is seriously ill in a nearby hospital, as the two haven’t spoken to each other in years, losing contact after Ingrid moved to Paris for a few years, though they worked together for Paper magazine in the 80’s, during the “party girl” phases of their lives, sharing, at different times, the same sexually volcanic boyfriend (John Turturro, who appears later with Ingrid, actually quoting a line from Almodóvar’s 1988 film WOMAN ON THE VERGE OF A NERVOUS BREAKDOWN), and may have even been lovers, but that didn’t last, yet they’ve remained lifelong friends.  The visit in the hospital is heartening, as she’s clearly welcomed, but Martha informs her, “I swing between euphoria and depression,” concluding “Survival feels almost disappointing.”  Something of a force of nature, fiercely independent and bluntly direct, hard and self-centered by nature, exhibiting no signs of self-pity, having a complicated and distant relationship with her only daughter Michelle (also played by Swinton), though with all the chemotherapy drugs filtering through her system, still lingering long afterwards, she doesn’t have the same mental sharpness, becoming more forgetful, losing focus, where the blend between reality and dreams is intermixed, causing extreme internal anguish, “I’ve been reduced to very little of myself.”  Yet our eye can’t help looking out the window at this enormous, picture-perfect New York City skyline, impeccably framed, exquisitely shot by Eduard Grau, where you wonder what it costs to be in a place like that, as it’s like no hospital room we have ever seen, where it’s idyllic in so many ways, with freshly cut flowers by the bedside, but then the crushing reality hits like a ton of bricks with the real reason why she’s there.  It’s just so Sirkian, a women’s drama with melodramatic hysteria reduced to minimalist theater, never depressing with all the eye-popping color, with occasional moments of unexpected humor.  Death is an unseen character in this suffocatingly embalmed chamber drama, as its ghostly presence is always hovering nearby, where both women have a fragile relationship with death that evolves over time, yet the core of their humanity is everpresent, a shining light continually elevating the material from the shadows.  The other aspect of the film is the intense, non-stop musical score by Alberto Iglesias, who has composed the music of every single Almodóvar feature since THE FLOWER OF MY SECRET (1995), where the sensuously provocative music is often the core of the films, most especially TALK TO HER (2002), with a remastered 12-CD edition of those compositions released in 2020, as the music literally plays throughout the entire film, except for a few moments near the end, so the entire composition is about as long as a Mahler symphony.           

Perhaps the most intriguing elements of the film are the artistic references, so while the film is essentially about dying, and doing so on your own terms, it’s also about the living, where these references are bridges from the past to the present and even into the future.  As the two of them head out of town into upstate New York around Woodstock (actually shot at Casa Szoke in the mountains just outside Madrid, Szoke House: The 'Silent' Hero of Almodóvar's Film), Martha has chosen a state-of-the-art residence to rent for a month, literally immersed in nature, deep in the woods in an idyllic, dream-like location where glass walls make the inside and outside merge, THE ROOM NEXT DOOR | Official Clip YouTube (34 seconds), with designs to end it all in a completely unorthodox manner, one that challenges the right of the living to take their own lives, especially under these terms, as all Martha has to expect is an excruciatingly slow and painful decline, so she constructs her own timeline, which may, in fact, be illegal.  Viewers are also aware that, starting at least with the powerfully autobiographical Pain and Glory (Dolor y Gloria) (2019), followed by the equally compelling Parallel Mothers (Madres paralelas) (2021), arguably his most political work that unearths ghosts of the past, Almodóvar himself has been wrestling with his own mortality.  Without getting into the specifics (“You can find almost anything on the dark web”), let’s just say that it’s a perplexing moral dilemma that continues to haunt the living, especially bypassing the authority of religion and law enforcement.  And while they bide their time, they renew their friendship through some of the most intimately revealing observations, none more prominent than Martha’s word-for-word remembrance of the final words in the James Joyce short story The Dead, a monument of literature that was also made into a stellar movie by John Huston in 1987, working from a wheelchair while hooked up to an oxygen tank (Huston didn’t live to see his final film, released several months after his death), directing his own daughter Angelica Huston, yet what’s so memorable about that film is the unforgettable ending, where the poetic power of the words mix so perfectly with the sublime imagery of quietly falling snow, The Dead (1987) End Monologue YouTube (4:18).  And they watch a DVD of the film one night, after spending the entire night viewing the hilarious Buster Keaton comedy SEVEN CHANCES (1925) and the melodramatic tale of doomed love in Max Ophüls’ LETTER FROM AN UNKNOWN WOMAN (1948), finally ending with the Huston film at sunrise just as a new day is about to begin, an apt metaphor.  The Nunez book is filled with plenty of references to other literary and artistic works, but Almodóvar chooses his own distinct set of references that are not in the book, and they are each rife with meaning and context, like a window into the souls of these complex women.  Ingrid tells Martha that she is planning a book on Dora Carrington (who is mentioned in the book, but Almodóvar invents a different conversation), a painter affiliated with the Bloomsbury Group that included novelist Virginia Woolf, openly bisexual and known for her many love affairs, who agreed to marry Ralph Partridge, not for love but to secure the 3-way relationship, as she was obsessed by the unrequited love from gay writer Lytton Strachey, becoming distraught by his death from cancer, dying by suicide two months later at age 38.  While there are visual references of Edward Hopper’s paintings, most notably People in the Sun | Smithsonian American Art Museum, by the end, the glamor element for Martha is right out of a magazine photoshoot, where there’s even a cinematic reference to the red lipstick sequence in Powell and Pressburger’s BLACK NARCISSUS (1947) (Sequence Analysis “Lipstick” in Black Narcissus), and, of course, there’s an inevitable shot that mirrors Bergman’s Persona (1966), where after death there’s a symbolic transference of identity that resembles a rebirth, with Ingrid inheriting Martha’s strength and fortitude, as she is literally transformed by the experience.  Almodóvar adds his own spin on it in the final memorable frames as once again the snow drifts down, with the filmmaker utilizing Joyce as the narrator of his own haunting elegy.