From Wim Wenders’s Hammett to Hirokazu Kore-eda’s The Truth, the English-language debut is a rock on which many directors have run aground. So it proves with Pedro Almodóvar’s The Room Next Door, a picture stuffed with good performances, pretty things and weighty dialogue that nonetheless fails to coalesce into the shape of an Almodóvar film.
The Room Next Door tells the story of a war correspondent, Martha (played by Tilda Swinton), who reconnects with her author friend Ingrid (Julianne Moore) after many decades. Martha is in the final stages of cervical cancer; following a failed round of experimental treatment, she enlists her old friend to keep her company when she ends her life.
The planning is meticulous, if off-key for native English speakers. Martha purchases a “suicide pill” on the “dark web” and the two Manhattanites journey to a fabulous guest house in upstate New York. As ever, sumptuous production design (by Inbal Weinberg) and structured rainbow knits (the costumes are by Bina Daigeler) take centre stage as Martha talks and Ingrid listens.
A few flashbacks offer moments of high camp: recollections of a gay Carmelite friar in war-torn Baghdad, Martha’s partner’s fatal dash into a house fire to save imaginary occupants, and a gym session with a hunky trainer in Woodstock. These signature moments offer respite from the morbidity yet sit oddly in an anglophone construction.
There are things to admire. The writer-director’s robust defence of euthanasia captures what it is to live intimately with death. It’s a polite business, articulated in clipped tones by Swinton’s matter-of-fact patient. There is no post-Bergman raging against the dying of the light.
But the film’s reflection on mortality lacks the power of Almodóvar’s autobiographical Pain and Glory. It’s a strange, baggy thing, emblematised by an exchange between Moore’s character and her doomsayer ex-boyfriend that could be mistaken for philosophical treatises.
One strongly suspects that Spaniard’s long-overdue win at Venice, where The Room Next Door picked up the Golden Lion, was more of a lifetime-achievement gong. Two vastly superior Almodóvar films, Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown and Parallel Mothers, previously premiered on the Lido. A lesser offering from the great director is better than none, but, within the pantheon, this is hovering close to the relegation zone.
The Room Next Door is in cinemas from Friday, October 25th
