10/12
Ingrid and Martha were close friends in their youth, when they worked together at the same magazine. After years apart, they meet again in an extreme but strangely sweet situation. IMDb editor Arno Kazarian offers quick reviews of the 12 films he screened at the 2024 New York Film Festival, including Anora and the dangerous, strangely erotic Misericordia. Pedro Almodóvar’s first long-form feature in English. Presented on The 7PM Project: Episode from September 8, 2024 (2024). I was curious what Pedro Almodóvar would do differently in his first non-Spanish-language film, built around two of the most talented actors working today. The answer, unfortunately: is disappointing. There are many ways in which The Room Next Door lacks the elements that make Almodóvar’s work so distinctive – the spontaneity, the sense of improvisation, the comic timing, the effervescent ensemble work – but the film’s main flaw, as I see it, is that it is simply over the top, something that 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 chunks of dialogue were lifted word for word, and much of it is heavy and artificial, slowing and emptying the film, whereas Almodóvar’s work is usually characterized by terse dialogue and frantic forward movement, drawing the viewer into the world of the characters with little exposition – as a viewer you are simply there, hanging on for dear life and trying to understand the relationships and social context as you go, grasping for what you can. Even in films that deal with dark themes (think Pain and Glory or Bad Education ), the action and its backdrops unfold in a compelling way (even if they are actually crazy, if you think about it) that draws on our intuition and empathy and relies only lightly on extended expository narrative. Here, it’s the other way around: characters talk and explain endlessly, with a few awkward flashbacks to set the context. Little is left to our imagination. So while some of Almodóvar’s usual hallmarks are there, particularly in the exquisite use of saturated, cleverly coordinated colors and the good taste of many of the sets and costumes (here with many beautiful still lifes of flowers and fruit), they are reduced to props – they serve no purpose in telling the story and do not overwhelm the viewer by forcing them to accept the reality of his wildly artificial visual worlds in the way that most of his films do. And the computer-generated New York backdrops feel completely artificial and thus rendered nonsensical. Almodovar’s films certainly have plots, often quite convoluted ones (which is part of the fun), but they don’t feel plot-driven even when they are. “The Room Next Door,” on the other hand, is all about plot and is weaker for it. With talents like Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore (and the estimable John Turturro) behind the camera, there are bound to be, and are, great, often very moving moments – how could there not be, especially given the central premise of the plot and the way it both strengthens and strains a long, close friendship in its final days? But the verbosity of this script undermines Swinton in particular. Her incredible strength lies in her powerful, enigmatic presence and understatement. In my unscientific test, she says as much dialogue here as in at least three or four of her recent films (that I’ve seen) combined. Consider her stunning performance in another fairly recent film about the strained relationship between two women, “The Eternal Daughter” (2022), in which she plays, devastatingly, both an aging mother and her middle-aged daughter.