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.  

2023 Top Ten List #9 May December

 

Director Todd Haynes

Haynes with actors Charles Melton and Julianne Moore

Haynes and cast on the red carpet at Cannes

MAY DECEMBER                   B+                                                                                              USA  (117 mi)  2023  d: Todd Haynes 

In Washington State, elementary school teacher Mary Kay Letourneau pleaded guilty to having sex with a sixth-grade student… Miss Letourneau has been branded a sex offender, or as the kids refer to her, ‘The greatest teacher of all time.’                                                                  —Norm Macdonald on Saturday Night Live’s “Weekend Update,” 1997, Sound Bites: the week's best TV quotes

Something of a before and after film, with Haynes taking an exclusive look at the aftereffects of a scandalous tabloid story happening decades earlier, inspired by the true story of Mary Kay Letourneau, a 34-year old teacher who pleaded guilty to having sex with a 12-year old 6th grade student, having two children together, actually getting married while she was serving a seven year prison sentence and living together as a family after her release.  Twenty years after the scandal gripped the nation, Julianne Moore, in her fifth appearance with this director, stars as Gracie Atherton-Yu, the tabloid fixture who is a registered sex offender living with her husband Joe (Charles Melton), now the same age as Gracie when the incident occurred, along with their three children, Honor (Piper Curda), who is away at college, and two twins, Charlie (Gabriel Chung) and Mary (Elizabeth Yu), who are about to graduate from high school.  Adding to the complexity of the story is Hollywood actress Elizabeth Berry (Natalie Portman), who comes to visit Gracie and her family to do research as she prepares to play her in an upcoming independent film that attempts to shed light without exploitation.  Set in Savannah, Georgia and their seaside home on nearby Tybee Island, it’s a picturesque locale with plenty of Spanish moss hanging from the trees, yet the unsettling family dynamic is explored through the lens of Elizabeth, a supposedly impartial outside observer whose presence only inflames the precarious inner tensions, opening up old wounds, with audiences seemingly eavesdropping into this carefully reconstructed yet scathingly recontextualized world, as Haynes examines our societal obsession with salacious narratives.  Written by Samy Burch from a story by Alex Mechanik, premiering in competition at Cannes, with European critics quickly deriding the film while American critics seemed to embrace it, Haynes deftly examines the cracks in the armor of what appears on the surface to be a stable relationship, elevating this into a full-blown melodrama that flirts with black comedy, social farce, psychological thriller, and romantic tragedy, where a key aspect is re-appropriating the ultra-dramatic Michel Legrand music from Joseph Losey’s forbidden romance drama THE GO-BETWEEN (1971) as a satirical leitmotif that hilariously intervenes, Michel Legrand - Theme From The Go-Between (1971) YouTube (2:32), taking this into exaggerated overdrive in an unorthodox story of moral irresponsibility, doomed love, and a slow, creeping sense of inescapable fate, yet the power of the performances feels impeccable, drawing us into this lurid world of carefully calculated exteriors and dangerously erratic interiors.  This film is not for everyone, with creepy undertones of human failings, as Gracie shows a psychopathic tendency, where rape in her mind becomes a Shakespearean romance of star-crossed lovers, veering between a dominating, Lady Macbeth personality and one who cowers in fear, like a scared little girl, where there are chilling interviews of various family members, friends, and others associated with the case offering conflicting opinions, as shockwaves give way to heartbreaking revelations.  Elizabeth’s teasing and blindly antagonizing behavior also becomes suspect, feeling closer to her role in Mike Nichols’ CLOSER (2004) than anything else she’s made, intentionally pushing the limits of respectability, like a stalker, until eventually she brazenly crosses that line in the most unsubtle ways.  There’s a jagged, jigsaw puzzle narrative that never directly approaches the subject, as much is learned through inferences or tangential characters who offer their views, where there are subtleties that should not be overlooked, but the power of the film is the collective dramatic weight that accrues, with Haynes delving into familiar Douglas Sirk territory, where the repressed emotional contradictions are essential to understanding what’s going on beneath the surface, a gray area that never really comes to light, so deeply submerged, only making brief ascensions for air. 

Certainly one unmentioned aspect is how they can afford to live in such an idyllic seaside home and raise a family, as neither parent generates any substantial income, with one a convicted felon, supporting herself by baking pies in the kitchen (an illusion of maternal morality, Mildred Pierce anyone?), but that is an extremely limited money source, while Joe, a former pet store clerk, now works as a radiology technician, so this is an inexplicable aspect of their life that remains a mystery (apparently the house was financed by selling exclusive wedding photos to the highest bidding tabloid).  Equally mystifying is how Haynes and cinematographer Christopher Blauvelt, a regular collaborator with Kelly Reichardt, actually film this environment, shooting on 35mm, as the sunny skies can be blinding before they typically turn cloudy, adding a darker aspect that envelops this peaceful sanctuary, where what passes for normalcy is a lingering societal contamination that is unusually deceptive.  While Elizabeth and Gracie are always cordial, they eye each other with suspicion, like circling feral cats, as both are narcissistic manipulators used to getting their way, yet there’s an ebb and flow to their relationship, frequently framed through mirror reflections, where their crude lack of awareness is nothing less than shocking, with rumblings of discontent coming from the children, who are like a Greek chorus of restless discord, not exactly welcoming Elizabeth with open arms, undercutting the supposed harmony in the family, as it becomes evident how trapped into a corner they all feel, where it’s hard not to anticipate an underlying sense of dread, with both parents consistently putting on airs of a happy home, yet it turns out to be much more suffocating.  Haynes makes the decision never to retreat into flashbacks, using photographs or newspaper headlines instead, or snippets from sensationalist made-for TV movies, but the full extent of what actually happened is never seen, only suggested, where at one point Gracie casually mentions, “Insecure people are dangerous.”  On a visit to a coffee shop with Gracie’s former husband Tom (D.W. Moffett), he was absolutely shocked by what transpired, thinking he knew his wife, but he asks Elizabeth the question on everyone’s mind, “What would make a 36-year old woman have an affair with a seventh grader?”  The dead silence resonating afterwards permeates throughout the entire film, like a puzzling enigma that will always linger just out of reach, inexplicable, incomprehensible, and unmistakingly criminal, yet still part of the human condition.  While there are plots and sub-plots to this picture, they are not as crucial as character and atmosphere, becoming a hypnotic film that takes a very nihilistic and sardonic point of view, with suggestions that reality may be a pathological repetition of previous behavior disorders.  Perhaps the biggest surprise is the character of Joe, who is deeply sympathetic, polite, and quietly introverted, where he seems to be the real family caretaker, providing the necessary equilibrium to keep them from falling off into the deep end, yet he’s strangely old-fashioned, with no real connections, and is mostly a homebody.  One of his passions is raising monarch butterflies, a species driven to the brink of extinction, yet he tenderly cares for them, transferring eggs into containers he maintains every day before releasing them back into the wild.  Gracie, on the other hand, has no patience for this practice, calling them “bugs,” asking that they be removed from the living room when guests come over.  It’s clear they’re not really on the same wavelength or as happy as they seem, with Gracie falling into tearful fits, growing emotionally hysterical at times, where her neurotic fragility requires the calming influence of Joe to settle her nerves, yet despite being twenty years younger, he may be the more grown-up of the two.  His sense of emotional restraint is the real surprise of this film, as he’s never been the focus of the story before, as all eyes were pointed at Gracie, yet late in the film he begins to question what happened to the childhood that was prematurely taken from him. 

A film that touches on tabloid stories and crime documentaries, like Ezra Edelman’s fascinating 2016 Top Ten List #4 O.J.: Made in America, or Truman Capote’s mesmerizing journalistic exposé In Cold Blood (1967), yet demystifies the sensationalism found in media, adding an extraordinary amount of personal intimacy that may never get at the truth but helps alter our preconceived notions, continually elevated by the amazing central performances that are simply never what we expect, with Haynes exploring the hidden yet profoundly sad nuances of ordinary life, even in such extraordinary circumstances.  The Bergman-like merging of Julianne Moore and Natalie Portman into something resembling Persona (1966), or Robert Altman’s 3 Women (1977), is not an accident, as this may be the driving force behind the film, using method acting as a medium, a means to an end, a place where fiction and reality meet, where Haynes reassembles the jagged pieces of their lives, carefully constructing a new identity in a world too confusing and cruel to call our own, as what we see almost never corresponds to the truth, yet we’re all captive to ideas about truth.   We never see the peculiar lengths actors are willing to go in preparations for a role, as we only see the finished product onscreen, but this film gets behind the scenes before shooting begins, taking viewers into strangely uncomfortable territory, as Elizabeth seems more concerned with her career, driven by her own personal ambition, and is clearly having a negative effect on the family, whose lives are already a study of emotional upheaval from all the tabloid headlines portraying them as the personification of evil, yet that doesn’t stop her from pressing ahead, creating even more family tension.  In an early scene, a package of “shit” arrives as evidence of the kind of hate mail they still receive after all these years, something they have to process as a normal part of their lives.  It’s an astounding detail that could just as easily translate to what’s currently being transmitted over social media, where the origins might have begun with this kind of public crucifixion.  One of the elements of this film that is especially successful is how well Haynes plants the seeds, setting up various incidents involving Elizabeth that will only become relevant later on near the end of the film, like talking to a classroom full of drama students, where her answers to their questions suddenly take on greater meaning.  The same could be said for various conversations she has with other characters throughout the film, yet this is how Haynes constructs such an unusual narrative, using the metaphor of caterpillars turning into butterflies, where some transitions in life may seem inexplicable, yet they happen.  Joe’s connection, in this regard, is the missing link to both women, as he’s the one most affected by what happened in the past, and while their children will forever be tainted and traumatized by this experience, he’s the one that is living with it from day to day, given a melancholy disposition, seemingly on an island all on his own with no safety net, manipulated as a “boy toy” at such an early age, where he can’t imagine his wife as the villain.  This gives him a childlike innocence and naïveté, a complete contrast to the predatory behavior and temperamental mood fluctuations of Gracie, who sees herself as a victim, still living in a self-serving state of denial for what she’s done, a toxic personality bordering on delusional, exhibiting no capacity to empathize.  Yet there she is standing before a mirror with Elizabeth, casually talking about her choice of make-up, actually applying it to the face of her counterpart, creating a moment of intimacy where the artifice actually sends chills in the air when we finally realize just how despicable these two women are, like the old school sensibility in Robert Aldrich’s trashy horror thriller WHATEVER HAPPENED TO BABY JANE? (1962).  The final sequence is a hair-raising reminder of how theatricality has a way of registering with audiences, demonstrating how performance intersects with real life, where you find yourself in the middle of these moments that simply register with you.  Haynes is such a gifted and intelligent director, where there are levels to this, and he continues to probe the void of the unknown, like a venture into outer space, yet he’s able to add such a humane context to the unknowable.