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.  

Fading Gigolo

FADING GIGOLO        B-         
USA  (90 mi)  2013  d:  John Turturro

While this is a John Turturro film, one that he writes and directs, it’s also one of the few appearances by Woody Allen in a film someone else directs, where one gets the distinct feeling that Woody Allen was the ghost writer behind the project, as so much behind his screen character feels tailor made for his early kind of Jewish guilt shtick humor, where there’s even a Hasidic neighborhood patrol watch hauling his ass in before the learned rabbi’s in a kind of mock trial, something one might imagine happens before gaining admittance to heaven, a Last Judgment where you have to answer to a panel of questioning rabbi’s.  While this is meant to be all in good fun, the sexual tone is problematic when it involves Woody Allen, now age 78, but with a history of child sex abuse allegations that have never gone away, but more importantly, in 1997 after a difficult separation from Mia Farrow, he married one of his own adopted foster children who is 35 years younger than he is, which reeks in the eyes of the public, making him guilty of some Kafkaesque morals charge, even if none actually exists, where at the very least, it still makes people feel uncomfortable.  It’s impossible not to think of these issues when thinking of Woody Allen, which are only exacerbated when his movies make fun of sex, as they have always done from the beginning of his career.  More than anything else, the premise of the movie sends out flares of bad taste warnings bordering on the ridiculous, as an aging Woody Allen as Murray Schwarz, a rare bookstore owner going out of business, decides he can earn some extra cash by pimping out his best friend Fioravante (John Turturro), a florist who works part-time in a flower store.   While Turturro is never anything less than a gentleman, maintaining a sense of decency and a bit of flair throughout, the same cannot be said for Allen, who’s something of a sleazy instigator here, continually getting into other people’s business.  Nonetheless, the film does have its charms, not the least of which is the wall-to-wall 50’s jazz soundtrack that mostly features the lush, sensuous tones of alto saxophonist Gene Ammons, a local Chicago jazz giant. 

Despite one’s initial reservations with the premise, where it’s hard to imagine Woody Allen at near 80 pimping out his friends, it’s a strange mixture of modern era fantasy and old world reality, where despite the sex comedy aspects, this is more of an old-fashioned love story.  From the outset, Murray has a proposition for his friend, claiming his dermatologist Dr. Parker, none other than Sharon Stone (Only in Hollywood can you still make a living off of one’s image as a sex symbol some twenty years earlier, complete with visual reference to 1992’s BASIC INSTINCT), suggested to him supposedly out of the blue that she was interested in an upscale menage-a-trois with her girlfriend, where Murray immediately thought of Fioravante as his Don Juan to fill the void.  While he had some initial reservations on his own, the incentive of $1000 in cash was too much to resist, making this not only a sex farce, but a capitalist fantasy as well in an era of economic deprivation, where Murray would get a cut acting as his opportunistic manager sending clients his way, a notion that also brings to mind Woody Allen’s own turn as manager extraordinaire in Broadway Danny Rose (1984).  Even the musical selection of Dean Martin’s version of “Sway” Dean Martin - Sway ^_^ - YouTube (2:43) has the mocking tone of a “Dino Latino” heartthrob.  Parker decides to sample the merchandise first, just to get a taste, and by all accounts it’s a great success, with the men seen divvying up the generous tip afterwards, where he also has the vivacious girlfriend Selima (Sofía Vergara) chomping at the bit.  While this is going on, we see Murray’s home life, a crazy reference to Mia Farrow’s horde of adopted children, as he’s living with a black wife, Tonya Pinkins as Othella, and three black sons, one of whom has lice in his afro hair.   This calls for the expertise of a neighborhood lice specialist, Vanessa Paradis as Avigail, a Hasidic widow with six kids of her own whose gentle prowess with hair belies her own personal need for a spiritual healer, where Murray suggests sometimes you have to go “beyond the rabbi,” of course, introducing her to his friend Fioravante, whose services to aid the distressed can be obtained for a small fee.

The mixing of the two ethnic cultures, black and Hasidic Jewish, especially through the innocence of Murray and Avigail’s kids, where there’s a pronounced lack of athletic coordination along with those twisted Payot curls, but watching them try to play baseball in the park is hilarious, as the orthodox Hasidic culture is such an unusual target for humor, made even more ridiculous by the nebbish Woody Allen acting as our guide through this cultural mishmash of opposite ethnic groups.  Adding to this element of mystery is the presence of Liev Schreiber as Dovi, a Hasidic Shomrim neighborhood watch guard, an interesting phenomenon that resembles the Guardian Angels in urban environments, as both are civilian watch groups in their neighborhoods as a supplement to the police force.  Dovi has had a thing for Avigail since childhood days, and now that she’s been a grieving widow for two years, he thinks it’s about time to make his move, awkwardly meeting her on the street and confessing his undying love.  Dovi grows suspicious when she continually avoids him, but she’s struck with Fioravante fever, where she plays such a gentle spirit that her fragility becomes the film’s guiding light.  It’s quite a contrast to the crassness of the goings-on between Stone and Vergara, but the unique tenderness of Paradis leaves her imprint on this picture, as she tries to remain true to her faith, yet she comes from an over-controlling, orthodox Hasidic community where women are expected to behave as if we are still in the Stone Age.  Perhaps the funniest scene in the film is when Murray goes out for a loaf of bread but is surrounded by the Hasidic mafia and kidnapped, thrown into the back of a van, where he is hauled before a sacred tribunal of ultra-conservative Hasidic rabbi’s that resembles Peter Lorre’s trial in M (1931), where this surreal gathering of the morality police question the authenticity of his Jewishness, which is something that has always plagued Allen, as it’s a constant point of reference in his own existential evolution throughout his entire career.  The movie is a comedy of errors, an exaggerated farce that expresses the particular constraints of faith and how it often interferes with one’s best interests, making it especially difficult developing relations with the opposite sex.  While this is unusual territory for a movie, Paradis is especially convincing as a woman whose emotional core remains unreachable, even to herself since the death of her husband, still feeling frozen in time, where the first signs of thaw are painfully difficult to navigate, offering rare insight in a movie that otherwise treats women as caricatures of Hollywood sex objects.