Spanish master director Pedro Almodovar’s English-language feature debut is visually rich but lacking in earthiness.
Death’s embrace looms in the new film from Pedro Almodovar, a showcase for stars Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore in what is the English-language feature debut of the Spanish master. It is an overwhelming subject, felt through the plot’s focus on euthanasia or the way it makes the characters sometimes deliver blunt pronouncements. What ensures is an artful but nonetheless untoward movie, a chamber piece cold to the touch even as the final flames burn.
I hungered for some earthiness, a flash of idiom. Working in English for his adaptation of Sigrid Nunez’s 2020 novelapplies a formality to Almodovar’s words. That mirrors his precise visual compositions, which are keyed to his signature reds and Swinton’s vertiginous face. The expressiveness Almodovar finds in a tracking shot of the two women reclining on sun lounges at the upstate holiday home Martha has rented is sublime, but a counterpoint would help.
Some of the dialogue feels stage in Pedro Almodovar’s The Room Next Door, which is his first English film.At one point Martha and Ingrid reminisce about a lover from their youth who went from seeing the former to the latter, and the lines somehow sound like a bureaucratic assessment. Swinton and Moore make the best of these linguistic strictures, and in other ways the pair flourish.
As much as Almodovar has a deep appreciation for golden era Hollywood melodrama, where a Bette Davis would gloriously succumb to an incurable ailment and leave the audience bereft,has a more twisty, ruminative momentum. Several times the story hints at different films it could become, be it describing the broken bond between Martha and her now-adult daughter, Michelle, or a Hitchcockian thriller where Martha is coolly testing Ingrid’s resolve.
It is fascinating to see a filmmaker whose work has resonated with joyousness and defiance since the 1980s grapple with existential fears, but it is not always fulfilling. John Turturro appears as the aforementioned lover, writer Damian Cunningham, who now offers Ingrid legal advice before railing against the looming climate apocalypse and his becalmed sex life.It’s worth noting all these characters are privileged intellectuals.
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