Pedro Almodóvar’s The Room Next Door is a tender, heartfelt drama about a driven former war correspondent who’s in search of the perfect final scene. She wants an ending that she can script and control, and a handpicked loving audience to applaud her when she goes.
As played by Tilda Swinton, the heroine doesn’t have it entirely her own way. But the film itself has fared rather better. It bowed out in a blaze of glory and scooped the crowning Golden Lion award in the dying seconds of this year’s Venice film festival.
One might assume that Almodóvar has a habit of hoovering up the big festival prizes. The 74-year-old director has been a mainstay of world cinema for the past four decades, feted and adored, almost an industry in himself.
Incredibly, though, The Room Next Door – his 23rd feature yet his English-language debut – marks the man’s first big festival triumph. He should probably have won the Cannes Palme d’Or for 1999’s All About My Mother, or 2006’s Volver. Most pundits thought he’d win in 2019 for his sublime, semi-autobiographical Pain and Glory, only to be pipped at the post by Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite. Almodovar, it seemed, was Cannes’ perennial also-ran. In Venice, at long last, he has his moment in the sun.
Cynics might file Almodóvar’s Golden Lion award as a lifetime achievement prize in all but name – and yes, there may be an ounce of truth to that. The 81st Venice film festival hasn’t been a vintage edition, but even within an especially spotty main competition, there were a number of other titles – The Brutalist, April, Babygirl – that excited the critics more than The Room Next Door. In the event, though, these more favoured contenders had to be content with the down-table prizes. Brady Corbet was named best director for his challenging American drama The Brutalist. Maura Delpero’s Alpine family saga Vermiglio took the grand jury prize, Dea Kulumbegashvili’s exacting abortion drama April won the special jury prize, while Nicole Kidman picked up the best actress prize for her full-throttle turn in Halina Reijn’s Babygirl. None of the pundits were exactly writing off Almodovar’s chances. But they’d been burned too many times in the past to install him as the favourite.
Based on the Sigrid Nunez novel What Are You Going Through, The Room Next Door is effectively a two-handed acting masterclass, featuring Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore as two old friends who find themselves thrown together at a posh rented house in upstate New York. Swinton’s war correspondent is dying of terminal cancer and plans to take a euthanasia pill she has obtained on the dark web. She wants Moore’s bestselling writer at her side (or at least close by) when she does. “I’ll sleep with my door open,” she explains. “And the day you find it close is the day it has happened.”
The Room Next Door is a tender, mordant human drama. The first third, it must be said, is a bit of a mess. There is too much decoration, too many unnecessary flashbacks. One can almost feel Almodovar adapting to his new American habitat, toiling to tailor his distinctive declamatory Spanish dialogue to the English language, finding his feet in an unfamiliar terrain. But, crucially, the film blossoms and deepens throughout the second half, when it is confident enough to remove all the scaffolding and simply focus on the two women as they prepare for the end.
The Room Next Door is a film about a death. But it is also an Almodovar film, which de-facto, unavoidably, makes it a film about life. It’s rich and colourful. It’s spiky and eccentric. Even when he’s staring death in the face, Almodóvar can’t resist making a joke, or sparking a quarrel, or admiring the colour of the sun loungers by the pool. And while his 23rd feature perhaps isn’t the best film that he’s made, it remains the work of a master and a picture in keeping with its creator’s gorgeous, scratchy spirit. Almodovar has been our golden lion for the past 40-years. But it’s nice to finally have it finally confirmed by the judges.