In The Next Room, Pedro Almodovar wrestles with life, love and assisted suicide
The Spanish director said he built two main characters around the source material, with one being “very strong in the face of death and the other very afraid of the idea of death”, and revealed that he channeled his discomfort with death onto the latter. .
“When I saw there was a story to tell, I kept writing,” he said. “I didn’t go back to the book, because once you decide what story you want to tell, you have to obey what the story tells you.”
The Room Next Door begins with Ingrid (Moore), a best-selling author who has become interested in mortality, paying a hospital visit to her old friend Martha (Swinton), a veteran war correspondent undergoing treatment for cancer. . The former colleagues, who live in Manhattan and are single, soon rekindle their friendship as they get to know each other over the past few decades and gossip in the park about long-dead artists like Dora Carrington and Virginia Woolf, who happen to be dead. By suicide.
By the time Martha’s health takes a turn for the worse, they have settled back into each other’s lives, leading to the unusual proposal at the heart of the film: Martha asks Ingrid to accompany her to a house with large windows in the woods and she sleeps in the next room, waiting out the day. The one in which her friend takes a pill and doesn’t wake up.
Once Ingrid agrees, the film becomes a reversal of director Ingmar Bergman’s 1966 psychosexual masterpiece, “Persona,” about a toxic relationship that develops between an actor and the nurse she cares for in a seaside shack. Whereas the ailing actress in Bergman’s black-and-white thriller grows increasingly belligerent in response to her caretaker’s constant musings, the bond between Almodovar’s protagonists intensifies as Ingrid listens to Martha contemplate life and death. And during their final days together in the sunny house—moments full of terror for Bergman’s blondes—the writers find confidence in their roles as the dying woman and the friend whose memories will allow them to live on.
“I was familiar with Bergman, because he’s one of those guys [filmmakers] Which I really like. “But as a director, and also as a person, I am the opposite of Bergman,” Almodóvar said of the Swedish auteur who has been referenced throughout the Spanish director’s work, including in the 1991 melodrama “High Heels.”
“That cruelty that’s part of Bergman’s brilliance — the cruelty you see him express when he talks about himself — I admire that. But I wanted just the opposite,” he said. “I wanted a movie about death, about two friends, but not a dark movie.”
As Almodovar explained, his goal was to deal with themes such as assisted suicide and the afterlife in a film full of energy, color and light. However, he exploits some of the more unsettling visual elements, such as overlapping faces and ghostly outlines, which Bergman uses to depict the transformation between the protagonists of “Persona,” who engage in a love affair that is a bit more literal in addition to being psychological. tangled.
In Almodovar’s hands, these illusionary elements—along with the music of Alberto Iglesias, one of the director’s longtime collaborators—develop the palpable platonic romance that emerges between the women as they await their rendezvous with death.
“For me, the story is ultimately a love story. But I wanted a love story without the physical part, because I think the physical part is always a problem,” Almodovar said when asked about the romantic quality of Ingrid and Martha’s relationship and Nuñez’s reaction to the film. “I wanted a strong friendship.” And very deep, because that is better than physical love and less complicated. It’s the best you can give to someone else.”
However, he asserts that “there is a feeling of two women in love” in his latest film, citing the tender glances the characters exchange, as well as a lingering kiss on the cheek reminiscent of a pivotal scene in “Persona.” “
“In the end, they absolutely love each other,” he said of Ingrid and Martha.
For decades, Almodovar defined Spanish cinema with sexually explicit titles like “Tie Me Up!” 1989. “Time Me Down!”, a film that is said to have been rated NC-17. But in recent years, he’s moved away from showcasing physical intimacy to focus on expressions of love beyond touch — even between two people who desperately want each other, as in 2023’s “A Strange Way of Life.” He’s also turned his attention to less sexually charged taboos , where he addressed aging, death, grief and reincarnation in films such as “Julieta,” “Pain and Glory,” “Parallel Mothers,” and “The Room Next Door.”
The 75-year-old director, who also describes himself as an atheist, semi-jokingly attributed this new phase of his filmmaking career to having become more “austere” over time and, more importantly, to have become “like a child” when it comes to understanding… What is beyond that. “I have something about which I don’t understand death, and I can’t accept it,” he said.
But his films are neither bleak nor ignorant in their treatment of mortality, offering instead a humanistic view of the essential relationship between life and death. The Next Room, an imperfect, hopeful film, is perhaps his most sympathetic work to date, exploring not only the importance of being there for someone in the end, but also a person’s right to decide when to die, if they can. .
“When life can only offer you pain, I think we have a right to that. The film is about that,” Almodóvar said, calling Martha’s choice to end her life “a sign of vitality.”
He added: “As a human being, you have the right to live as freely as possible.” “You are the owner of your life, but you are also the owner of your death.”