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.  

Never Look Away (Werk ohne Autor)

Director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck

NEVER LOOK AWAY (Werk ohne Autor)             B                    

Germany  Italy  (188 mi)  2018  d: Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck

From the director of The Lives of Others (Das Leben der Anderen) (2006), the director’s first feature film which won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film and became the most successful German-language film in history, yet it was denied a competition spot at the Berlin Film Festival and was loved everywhere else except in Germany, which took offense to the autocratic portrayal of the East German Stasi secret police that spied on its own citizens with ruthless efficiency, yet suddenly displayed a change of heart.  This is another film that curiously explores the sweeping historical ramifications of the Nazi era in German history, creating an epic, three-hour film where art intersects with life, etched with the melodramatic sweep of a Spielberg film, though displaying a bit more cleverness, actually utilizing the biographical story of German artist Gerhard Richter without attributing his name, though he is thanked in the end credits.  Even the paintings are done by Andreas Schön, Richter’s former assistant, offering a touch of authenticity.  It’s a strange way to tell someone’s story, without acknowledging that person as the inspirational source of the story, and though the film is fictional, it has real-life historical roots.  The director met with the artist prior to writing the film and conducted a series of interviews with him, so it may have initially had his blessing, but Richter, who is an extraordinarily private individual, has all but disowned the film, refusing to allow his name or any of his paintings to be used and would not even allow himself to view the film, so whatever initial interest he might have expressed quickly soured, unhappily describing it “an abuse.”  Still, despite his reservations, Donnersmarck has filmed what amounts to a shockingly accurate recreation of Richter’s family life and personal experiences, where his life comes to personify what most Germans experienced in the three decades from the transition from the Nazi era of the late 1930’s to the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961.  The film attempts to turn the profound trauma of a nation into a renewed source of energy and inspiration, with art serving as a guiding light, an emblem of resilience, and a sign of better things to come, discovering a new “anonymous” art fusing historical reality with a blurred memory, creating artworks with no author, which explains the German title of the film.  The American title makes less sense, but extends an early developing theme, repeating a line spoken by one of the characters, feeling more like a sound bite. 

The captivating musical score by Max Richter effectively contributes to a larger-than-life creation of stellar emotional moments, while the luminous cinematography by Caleb Deschanel is especially noteworthy, nominated for an Academy Award for the fifth time, but the first in fourteen years.  There’s an opening 45-minute prelude that is easily the best thing in the film, both in terms of originality and intensity, as nothing that comes afterwards is remotely comparable, turning into a romanticized melodrama along the lines of DR. ZHIVAGO (1965), but with characters that are not as fully developed, so one needs to pay particular attention to the opening segments, where like Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960), a lead character is killed off relatively early in the film, with reverberations echoing throughout the rest of the film that continue to have a profound effect on literally everything that happens.  That’s a stunning way to open a film, which starts out innocently enough with a young girl spending the day with her nephew, as a teenaged Elisabeth (Saskia Rosendahl) is bringing her young 6-year old nephew Kurt (already a budding artist) on a museum tour in Dresden in the late 30’s, but already the Nazi’s are staging an exhibition only to condemn and ridicule the works on display, with a mocking tour guide describing the modern, abstract art of Paul Klee, Max Ernst, Wassily Kandinsky and others as “degenerate art,” depicted as worthless junk that belongs in a junk pile, that could be created by children while being sold for astonishing sums, suggesting these were the driving forces of moral corruption and an evil plot against the noble German heritage, where one room entirely featuring abstract paintings was labelled “the insanity room.”  These artists were driven out of the country, seeking refuge elsewhere, yet the exhibitions were extremely popular, drawing larger than usual crowds, some out of sheer curiosity, viewing it as a scandal, but also taking advantage of seeing this kind of art before it was destroyed by the Third Reich.  What’s most intriguing, the film seems to suggest, is that art will outlive all political regimes.  Yet it’s clear Elisabeth is not easily fooled by this damning rhetoric, wanting to expose Kurt to as wide a range of art as possible, reminding him that “everything that is true is beautiful,” condemning censorship of all forms, urging him to “never look away.”  There’s a chilling scene with Elisabeth among the other all-female Hitler youth, given the opportunity to hand flowers directly into the hands of the Führer as he pays them a visit, where she is viewed like a rock star afterwards as the other girls look on in awe.     

But there’s also a meeting in October 1939 of Gestapo medical physicians discussing the implementation of a new plan of Nazi eugenics, weeding out the sick and afflicted from the strong, urging doctors to send anyone showing signs of mental or physical disabilities to special asylums where they would be put to death (described as “mercy killings”) in order to enhance the genetic purity of the Aryan race, filling out questionnaires that were sent out to mental institutions, hospitals and other institutions caring for the chronically ill, where more than 400,000 people were sterilized against their will, while up to 300,000 were killed under a nationwide euthanasia program, taking up “needless” space for more well-deserving soldiers wounded in action.  These killing centers served as the training grounds for the SS officers eventually assigned to extermination camps.  Among the more unflinching depictions is Elisabeth being removed from the family home against her will by German authorities following a diagnosis of schizophrenia, as Elisabeth was prone to swooning episodes of elevated intensity, not dangerous or particularly harmful, but different, like removing all her clothing and playing a Bach refrain on the piano, Bach "Schafe können sicher weiden" from BWV 208 - YouTube (4:58), a piece of amazing beauty and eloquence that literally defines her character, where the Gestapo head of the Dresden women’s clinic, Sebastian Koch as Professor Carl Seeband, initially has her sterilized before assigning her to the euthanasia program, set to the weirdly unworldly music of Klaus Nomi - The Cold Song 1982 - YouTube (4:07) as we eerily witness the guards march a group of naked girls into the showers, lock the doors, and turn on the gas.  Despite our familiarity with history, this is still the most dramatically shocking scene of the film, even as it feels overly exploitive, with little finesse shown by the director to the ultimate savagery of the event, as the ugly historical truths have already been imprinted.  It is the senselessness of her loss that haunts viewers the most, as we simply don’t forget the barbarous nature of this State-imposed mass slaughter, never really losing a connection to Elizabeth’s memory, as she was the most cherished member of the family to young Kurt (Tom Schilling), who grows up to become the lead figure in the film.  Displaying more artistic talent than any of his fellow students, Kurt becomes the prized pupil of the artistic director of the Dresden art academy (Hans-Uwe Bauer), where the East Germans remained under the political domination of the Russian communist movement, where the only valuable art was social realism, meant to inspire the working class.  Under the banner of communism, all other art was deemed self-centered and bourgeois, compatible with other consumer products on display, of no real social value.  Curious how political viewpoints tarnish the value of art, where the political ideal must supersede any artistic model, devaluing not only art but the worth of the individual, who is viewed as weak and worthless all alone, as working in a collective defines the greater good.  While that may be the ideal, little of artistic value was produced under this suffocating system, instead showing signs of defections to the West, which was the East German justification for building the Berlin Wall. 

What follows is the obligatory romance, with Kurt meeting a fellow student also named Elisabeth, but known as Ellie, Paula Beer from Frantz (2016) and Transit  (2018), who is studying fashion design, immediately falling in love, though he has no idea that her father, former SS officer Professor Seeband, ordered the murder of his aunt.  While this creates some intrigue, what’s immediately apparent is how underwritten Ellie’s part is, as she’s simply window dressing, never really a full-fledged character, always viewed as a ghostly mirror image of the initial Elisabeth role.  In fact it’s her father with a more prominent role, rebounding from his initial fall from grace, stripped of his authority after the war, yet still managing to land on his feet, where he remains a shining example of postwar success, winning prestigious accolades from the medical community, pledging his fidelity to communism, and despite his former history with the SS, he maintains his elite social status in the community, eventually returning to his former position.  As Kurt is a mere painter, he looks down upon him as an inferior suitor for his daughter, attempting to undermine their relationship, even devising a well-constructed lie about Ellie’s fragile health in order to abort their expectant child, intentionally damaging the future prospects of his daughter to ever conceive a child, still playing the eugenics card.  Ellie soon learns of his despicable acts, literally despising her father’s smug arrogance and domineering control, while Kurt reaches a dead-end in his artistic aspirations in the East as well, both defecting to the West when it was as easy as simply taking a transit to the other side, literally weeks before the construction of the wall, traveling light so no one would suspect,  bringing with them only a few possessions, which includes a photo album of Kurt’s family, which would prove significant, eventually using it as source material for his budding career.  Curiously, the first movie they see in the West is Psycho (1960).  While he was a wunderkind in the East, Kurt has no status whatsoever in the West, expressing little interest in traditional methods, choosing the Düsseldorf Academy of Fine Arts due to its heightened reputation for a free-spirited approach to avant garde art.  The film is literally an introductory course to painting and the various methods of radical artistic expression in the 60’s, including wildly pretentious looking examples of performance art that were all the rage, with one of the leading proponents being Joseph Beuys, a member of the Nazi youth who became a Luftwaffe pilot, offering a brilliant monologue where he describes being shot down in the Crimea, nursed back to health by Tartar tribesmen that he was sent to bomb, reinventing himself as an artist, played in the film by an eccentric professor who never takes off his hat (Oliver Masucci), and while he’s not identified as Beuys, that’s who the character is modeled after.  The professor takes a particular interest in Kurt, suggesting “you have seen more than any of us,” himself moved by tragedy and personal loss, granting him admittance on a hunch, offering him a studio and privileged status, yet the open-ended chance to create whatever he wants leaves him a bit awed at the prospects, just staring at a blank canvas for days on end until suddenly he feels inspired to begin a series of photo paintings, which include a picture of himself as a young boy with Elisabeth, or staunch passport photos of an overly rigid Professor Seeband, then blurring them in white paint, where they resemble fading memories, or optical illusions.  Amazingly, the paintings suggest a unique connection when he integrates Seeband’s portrait into the picture of Elisabeth, a dazzlingly effective dissolve technique, which is the start of a new career of instant success.  Interviewed by the press after a gallery exhibition, he makes claims about anonymous art pursuing “the truth,” yet the irony is that he’s no closer to it, but viewers given the backdrop to the story may be devastated by the redemptive implications where art truly does intersect with reality in strange and mysterious ways.