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.  

Imitation of Life (1959)

 

Douglas Sirk with Lana Turner

Sirk and Turner with producer Ross Hunter

IMITATION OF LIFE         A                                                                                                         USA  (125 mi)  1959  d: Douglas Sirk

It’s a sin to be ashamed of what you are.  And it is even worse to pretend, to lie.  Sarah Jane has to learn that the Lord must have had his reasons for making some of us white and some of us black.        —Annie Johnson (Juanita Moore)

The price of ruthless ambition, where self-centeredness becomes the American Dream, returning to themes from Magnificent Obsession (1954), accentuating the materialistic mindset of the 50’s, highlighting the tragedy of false ideals, but seen through a prism of racial exclusion, with America turning a blind eye to racism during the 50’s, and just about every other decade, with tragic consequences.  A plush and glamorized remake of John Stahl’s 1934 film Imitation of Life bears only a passing resemblance to its source, the best-selling 1933 novel by Fannie Hurst, which was originally serialized in 1932 in the magazine Pictorial Review under the title Sugar House.  Sirk’s film achieved far greater commercial success, becoming one of Universal Studio’s highest grossing films in history, though some of that might have been attributable to a very public, behind-the-scenes scandal involving actress Lana Turner’s 14-year old daughter Cheryl Crane, who fatally stabbed Turner’s boyfriend Johnny Stompanato, part of Mickey Cohen’s infamous gang, who had been threatening and physically abusing Turner, with the court ruling justifiable homicide.  The film proved to be a comeback vehicle for Turner, the 40’s femme fatale focal point in Tay Garnett’s classic film noir The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946), and a Hollywood glamor queen whose personal and professional life were in crisis.  This also proved to be Sirk’s final American film, recalling years later, “I had outgrown this kind of picture-making which…was typical of Hollywood in the fifties and of American society, too, which tolerated only the play that pleases, not the thing that disturbs the mind,” where his critical reputation rests heavily on four 1950’s melodramas, All That Heaven Allows (1955), Written On the Wind (1956), The Tarnished Angels (1957), my own personal favorite, and this film, known for taking pedestrian sentimentality to a subversive extreme.  The role of the film’s under-acknowledged producer, Ross Hunter, becomes significant in Sirk’s films, especially the part he played in casting actors who were passing for straight, most notably, Rock Hudson, so the theme that you can’t escape what you are is paramount.  In this film the casting is equally important, however its status as a woman’s picture, featuring the dual lives of two single working mothers, one white and one black, makes it ripe for both a racial critique and a feminist investigation.  Its unique story structure is a rarity, even within the context of the woman’s film, as it explicitly develops a parallel between its two female protagonists, becoming not only a discourse on race, with whites remaining completely oblivious, but the complications of working mothers.  By juxtaposing Lora Meredith (Lana Turner), a resolute white actress who finds her salvation in the theater, with Annie Johnson (Juanita Moore), her black maid, humble and self-effacing, never raising her voice (nonetheless she’s just as determined as her white counterpart), whose job literally is domesticity, sharing a home and parenting one another’s children, and by interweaving the two women’s relationships with their daughters, whose dissatisfaction follows in their mother’s footsteps, it veers into an over-stylized hysteria of artifice and melodramatic exaggeration, where men are merely a backdrop for these women, as the film offers an opportunity to observe an unusual and revealing intersection of the issues of race, class, and gender, while also offering a scathing critique of the rich and spoiled.  Turner has the showier and more glamorous role, where her own life draws parallels, discovered in Hollywood at the age of 15, having multiple lovers including Artie Shaw and Tyrone Power, who she considered the love of her life, married eight times with seven different men, where her career constantly took her away from her daughter, who was raised by a series of nannies, growing ever more resentful of her mother’s success, but it’s Moore toiling in the shadows who brings the heartfelt authenticity the picture needs, simultaneously wrenching and restrained, “How do you explain to your child she was born to be hurt?”  Nominated for an Academy Award in a Best Supporting role, she had few career offers afterwards, as significant roles were simply not written for black women. Turner grew rich from the film, reportedly given the most luxurious trailer in Universal’s history, Imitation of Life Official Trailer #1 - Lana Turner Movie (1959) HD YouTube (2:20), having forfeited much of her salary for the part, but more than made up for it as she received a percentage of the profits, turning out to be her biggest payday.  

The film recounts a decade in the life of Lora Meredith, beginning in the late 40’s when she’s a young widow struggling raise her child, Susie, holding a variety of odd jobs, but a short stint as a model leads to a break as an actress, then jumping ahead a decade later after she has achieved fame as a Broadway star.  Her success is made possible by her association with Annie Johnson, a black single mother she encounters early in the film on a crowded Coney Island beach, with Annie moving into her apartment as a nanny and housekeeper with her daughter Sarah Jane, who is about the same age as Susie, immediately becoming best of friends.  Lora also becomes attached to a young amateur photographer she meets on that same Coney Island beach, Steve Archer (John Gavin), who immediately takes a liking to the two kids, who he randomly photographed that day, where the picture eventually leads to an advertising job.  The thrust of the drama is that Steve wants her to marry and settle down, which was the prevailing view in the postwar 50’s, but a life of domesticity doesn’t take into account her own personal ambitions, which becomes the central drama of the film, cutting it short with Steve, as success often takes her away from her daughter and her home.  During their years together, both women endure parental conflicts, as Susie (Sandra Dee, pert, pretty, and blond, the highest paid teenage model in New York and one of the most sought after young actresses in Hollywood) feels Annie is more of a mother than her own, who is always absent, while Sarah Jane (Susan Kohner, daughter of Lupita Tovar, a Mexican-born actress who had a career in Hollywood, and Paul Kohner, a Jewish film producer from Bohemia who was best friends with director William Wyler), the undutiful daughter, attempts to pass for white, even as a young girl in school, where her anger and ultimate rejection of her mother speaks to her generation’s rejection of domestic work, which causes Annie no end of grief, eventually dying of heartbreak.  Susie eventually falls in love with Steve, who steadfastly remains a loyal friend.  Though Lora initially rejects Steve in favor of her career, where her hard work eventually pays off, purchasing a lovely home, decorated in a plush décor, reflecting the pinnacle of her success, yet her emotional world feels vacant and empty.  By the end of the drama, she wonders if she’s been living an “imitation of life.”  That title says it all, as it suggests a shadow world, a morbidly depressed underside to all that middle class success, a subject addressed in Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique in 1963 and her new feminist activist group, the National Organization for Women, a prelude to the women’s movement of the 60’s, where radical feminism would emerge by the end of the decade, raising questions about what a woman really wants, striving for something more than husband, children, and home, suggesting women had been sacrificing their own opportunities in order to fit the model of a stay-at-home mom in the suburbs, where economic stability had not brought happiness, often feeling adrift and alone, as if vanquished in a desert of monotony where the daily routine becomes a grind.  The role of women in American society is awash with contradictions, cautioned in the 40’s about the hazards of working women, while urged today to pursue professional careers.  Yet this film adds additional layers of subtlety that figure prominently, the psychic price rebels pay for being different, parental suffocation, the comfort of religious faith (the compensation for such low wages and lower status), and society’s repressions, where it’s no accident that gays, whose closeted denial mirrors the mentality of Sarah Jane, and black women, who perhaps finally recognized themselves onscreen, have always been drawn to this picture.  At the time it was made, the film was a Hollywood milestone debunking the myths of a safe, white middle-class America in their pursuit of stability and happiness.  Underneath is an undeniable rage.  The scene of Troy Donahue, discovering Sarah Jane’s mother is black, is particularly vicious, brutally beating her and leaving her in the gutter, accompanied by the chaotic sounds of jazz music, sending the message that Sarah Jane was born to be hurt, destined to a lifetime of racism and prejudice, no matter how many times she tries to reinvent herself.  More than half a century later, that’s still hard to watch.  More importantly, is being different any easier now?       

This film takes place during the dawn of the civil rights movement, as the nation’s schools were recently integrated from a 1954 Supreme Court decision, the 1955 arrest of Rosa Parks and the subsequent bus boycott led to the integration of buses in Alabama, while in 1957 the U.S. Congress passed the first Civil Rights legislation since Reconstruction in 1875, forming a Civil Rights section of the Justice Department, empowering prosecutors to target interference with the right to vote.  Sirk significantly altered the context of the novel, where a maid’s pancake recipe leads to her employer’s success in the restaurant business, yet the two women’s relationship is largely the same, where racial and class differences are minimized.  Lora’s ambitions are largely determined by her deceased husband, who was a theatrical director, so she was simply following in his footsteps, yet the singleminded purpose she brings to her career is stunning, the equal of any man, especially the way she dresses down her would-be agent, Allen Loomis (Robert Alda),  who openly acknowledges, “Me, I’m a man of very few principles and they’re all open to revision,” whose sexual advances she cuts short, not willing to cross that line, yet she’s extremely fortunate to find a young playwright, David Edwards (Dan O’Herlihy) in search of an actress, as they are able to build something together.  She breaks from him as well, in need of dramatic roles instead of sticking to comedies, where her career is an astounding success.  But that’s never the central focus of the film, with Sirk more interested in the consequences of her success, as trouble continues brewing at home, with Susie resenting her mother’s narcissistic ambition and instead turns to Steve for friendly advice and companionship, becoming infatuated with the idea of love.  But the real focus is on Sarah Jane, continually passing for white, getting mixed up with a relationship that goes terribly wrong, before finding herself dancing as a chorus girl in tawdry night clubs under an assumed name, where she refuses to recognize her own mother, pretending she’s just some stranger, as she doesn’t want to lose a job that is available only to whites.  In her rejection, however, she finds herself just as lost as all the other women, having turned her back on her mother’s influence and affection.  Sarah Jane’s anger still resonates today, seemingly a misfit among blacks, disillusioned with the artificial paradise of white America, having no world she can call her own, as Kohner’s angry defiance also led to a Best Supporting Actress nomination.  Audiences may have been drawn to the glitz and glamor of Lana Turner, as the studio paid more on her garish wardrobe ($23,645) than they did on Juanita Moore’s salary ($5,550), dressed in prominently featured jewelry that was worth over a million dollars, but ended up being emotionally gutted by the performances of both Moore and Susan Kohner, who end up stealing the picture, perhaps the ultimate irony, as bigger stars Turner and Dee are not at all sympathetic.  For Turner, all her life is tied up with this elusive black woman, but knows next to nothing about her, so when she dies, Turner is left completely clueless and empty.  Passionate, cynical, and laced with irony, these lurid melodramatic overtones accentuate what this film is about, exposing the mediocrity and sheer indifference of the American Dream, as two heroines who are both disillusioned workers and failed parents question the choices they’ve made.  Ironically, in the end it’s Steve who makes the compromises, initially championing artistic integrity before selling out as an advertising executive selecting photographs to sell beer, where he’s forced to sacrifice his own ambitions as a successful photographer.  By the time each realizes the price they’ve paid for success, and the void that exists in their own lives, getting back together again feels like the right thing to do, as they’ve never stopped thinking about one another, much to the horror of Susie whose romantic inclinations have been stymied by her own mother.   

According to Sirk, “You can’t escape what you are…. I tried to make it into a picture of social consciousness — not only of a white social consciousness, but of a Negro one, too.  Both white and black are leading imitated lives… There is a wonderful expression: seeing through a glass darkly.  Everything, even life, is inevitably removed from you.  You can’t reach, or touch, the real.  You just see reflections.  If you try to grasp happiness itself your fingers only meet glass.  It’s hopeless.”  It’s that underlying element of hopelessness that is the key to understanding this picture, as no one really believes the happy ending, which is a mirage.  A tearjerker with a message, there’s even a theme song that opens the film sung by Earl Grant, perhaps best known for his instrumental version of the song Ebb Tide, "Imitation of Life" (Douglas Sirk, 1959) -- The Opening Credits YouTube (2:06), while the rousing finale is an unforgettable depiction of that perfectly scripted, grand-opera gospel road to glory, with all that pomp she never received during her lifetime, as four white horses pull a black carriage loaded with a mountain of white roses, where it’s hard not to choke up in tears, especially when Sarah Jane shows up, featuring none other than the incomparable Mahalia Jackson singing Trouble of the World, Imitation of Life (1959 Douglas Sirk) YouTube (5:42).  When the film was released, contemporary critics found Sirk’s films to be artificial and melodramatic, overreliant on manipulating the audience emotions, having little to do with the concerns of the real world.  In the 70’s and 80’s however, critics and scholars have a near universal praise for Sirk’s films, directly counteracting the dismissals of the earlier critics, where his critical reputation has almost completely reversed. His first well-known American film was Sleep, My Love (1948), but nearly all his films depict families in which a house, car, and affluence are present, while sexual and emotional fulfillment are nowhere to be found.  Russell Metty’s cinematography often frames the characters through doorways, against windows, or in front of mirrors, keeping the camera at a distance, continually emphasizing both the spaciousness and confinement of the décor, accentuating the lavishly artificial and visually stylized aspects of the melodrama, where characters lose sight of and become disconnected from their lives.  The word expressionist is frequently used to describe Sirk’s technique, an indication not only of the style of his work in the United States, but also his background in films within the framework of German expressionism in the 1920’s and early 1930’s, where his excesses are viewed as a form of Brechtian distancing.  If there is “distance” in Sirk’s style, it’s something he shares with fellow émigrés Billy Wilder, Otto Preminger, Max Ophüls, Fritz Lang, and Robert Siodmak, having fled the horrors of the Nazis, observing the naïveté of American society with a bemused concern, with Sirk making a series of films about middle-class America, with its losses and disillusionments.  This film moves from initially showing what it means to be a woman living in a male-dominated society, while in the second half it addresses the perspective of how women of color are affected by racism.  Along those lines, German director Rainer Werner Fassbinder offered his own critical analysis, “It is not because white is a prettier color than black that Sarah Jane wants to pass for white, but because life is better when you’re white.  Lana Turner doesn’t want to be an actress because she enjoys it, but because if you’re successful you get a better deal in this world.  And Annie doesn’t want a spectacular funeral because she’d get anything out of it, she’s dead by then, but because she wants to give herself value in the eyes of the world retrospectively, which she was denied during her lifetime.  None of the protagonists come to see that everything, thoughts, desires, dreams arise directly from social reality or are manipulated by it.”