Tropic Sprockets / The Room Next Door
By Ian Brockway
Famed auteur Pedro Almodóvar directs his first feature film in English “The Room Next Door” based on a novel by Sigrid Nunez. The film is both dispassionate and heartfelt. In some ways it is a departure from the director, who is fond of highlighting eccentric characters in bizarre situations. However, for what it lacks in high energy voltage, it gains in intimacy and pensive reflection with a singularity and focus that is almost Zen.
Author Ingrid (Julianne Moore) learns that her former best friend Martha (Tilda Swinton), a war correspondent, has terminal cancer. Ingrid is saddened and concerned, but she is shocked when Martha insists that she wishes to end treatment and by extension, end her life.
Central to the film is the actor Swinton, and her (for the most part) dispassionate directness. Her role never wavers in its highlight of empathy and care. Ingrid also never loses her verve in friendship and Moore shows exacting precision in an understated outing. John Turturro co-stars as the boyfriend that the pair have both lived with at one time. In his youth, he was a bohemian libertine, now he is an environmental zealot, critical of the left and right.
For those thinking there is no unusualness in this Almodovar film, think again. Swinton is a pale avian astronaut, a silver blonde satellite, embarking on her far away journey, enclosed in a geometric spaceship of a sprawling country house.
The usual trademarks of the director are here too: Martha’s triangular face becomes its own origami puzzle merging within the triangular, right-angled apartment, blending in with the walls and doorways, fading into the crystal-clear windows. Martha transforms into a space aged Orientalist flower, a white paper bird reposing along a bright yellow lounge chair, florid in the colors of a new death.
While some might say this is the most accessible Almodovar has ever been, stripped of his Bunuelian bravado, this is also his most naturalistic film. Yet still, underneath the rhythms of the Hitchcockian score, there is a fair amount of apprehension to experience within the knife-like shadows that accompany a red maroon door.
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