12/20

Pedro Almodóvar’s first long feature film in English

Scenario

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The answer, unfortunately: it’s disappointing

Featured in The 7PM Project: September 8, 2024 Episode (2024). I wondered what Pedro Almodóvar would do differently in his first non-Spanish film, built around two of today’s most talented actors. There are many ways that "The Room Next Door" it lacks what makes Almodóvar’s work so distinctive – the spontaneity, the sense of improvisation, the comic timing, the sparkling ensemble workings – but the main fault of this film, as I see it, is that it is simply rewritten, which is rare in his previous work. The screenplay (which he is credited with writing) was adapted from a novel by Sigrid Nunez, which I haven’t read, but it sounds like huge samples of dialogue were lifted verbatim from it, with many clumsy and clumsy, slowing down and emptying the film, where Almodóvar’s work usually stands out lapidary dialogues and crazy forward movement that immerses you in the characters' a world with little exposition—as a viewer, you’re kind of just there, hanging on to your soul, figuring out relationships and social context as you go, grabbing what you can.

Little is left to our imagination

Even in movies that deal with dark themes (“Pain and Glory” or “Bad Education”), the action and its background unfold in compelling ways (even if they’re really crazy if you stop and think about them) that draw on our intuition and empathy and depend only marginally on extended expository narration. Here it’s the other way around: the characters talk and explain on and on, with a few awkward flashbacks to create context. Although there are some of the usual Almodovar hallmarks, particularly in the wonderful use of rich, subtly coordinated color and the tastefulness of many of the sets and costumes (here with lots of beautiful still lifes of flowers and fruit), these are reduced to props – they don’t serve to tell the story and overwhelm you the reality of his wildly artificial visual worlds as they do in most of his films. And the computer-generated backdrops of New York look completely artificial and thus lose their meaning.

But the wordiness of this script undermines Swinton in particular

Almodóvar’s films certainly have plots, often quite convoluted (which is part of the fun), but they don’t feel plot-driven even though they are. “The Room Next Door,” on the other hand, is all about its plot and is weaker for it. With talents like Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore (plus the esteemed John Turturro) in front of the camera and there are some great, often very touching, moments – how could there not be, especially considering the central premise of the plot and the way it reinforces and tenses the long-term , a close friendship in his final days? Her amazing power lies in her strong, enigmatic presence and her understatement.

In my unscientific test, she speaks as much dialogue here as she has in the last three or four of her films (that is, the ones I’ve seen) combined

Remember her stunning performances in another relatively recent film about a difficult relationship between two women, “Eternal Daughter”; (2022), in which she devastatingly plays both an aging mother and her middle-aged daughter.