The Venice film by Almodovar prioritizes friendship above death

Pedro Almodovar, a Spanishman, finds it difficult to comprehend death.

The 74-year-old director, whose work has become increasingly melancholic in recent years, honors the close connection between two women in his most recent picture, “The Room Next Door,” which comes out as one of them is about to pass away.

Almodovar remarked, “I cannot understand with my mind that something that is alive has to die,” prior to the movie’s global premiere at the Venice Film Festival, where it is one of 21 films vying for the Golden Lion award.

“In that sense I am really, really like a child, very immature, because death is everywhere — we have wars, just to see on the news, it’s everywhere,” he told a press conference.

In the filmmaker’s debut feature-length English-language film, Julianne Moore plays Tilda Swinton’s friend, a successful novelist who consents to remain by her side as she ends her own life. Swinton plays a war journalist with terminal cancer.

He declared, “This is a pro-euthanasia movie.” Almodovar claimed that despite the weighty subject matter, his emphasis on intimate relationships acted as a counterbalance to the antagonistic rhetoric that permeates modern society.

“In the end, it’s the reaction to hate speech that we hear on a daily basis. “Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown” director commented, “This movie is exactly the opposite of that speech.”

In addition, he referred to as “profoundly stupid” a proposal put out by far-right Spanish MPs to use Navy ships to stop migrant arrivals, adding, “I want to send a message… to all those unaccompanied children who are fighting to reach our borders.”

Furthermore, he criticized “denialist discourse” regarding climate change, saying, “What I suggest is the reverse. In the movie, a woman is dying in a world that is most likely also ending.” “We are in danger, the planet is in danger,” he said.

Almodovar has been adopting a more somber tone in his films for almost ten years now, veering away from the outrageous, outrageous black comedy of his early career and toward movies that explore the fear of dying or aging.

Antonio Banderas played a sick director in the 2019 film “Pain and Glory,” which the director has admitted was based on himself.

However, the director and actors “talked a lot about life, we didn’t really talk about death at all,” according to Swinton, who plays the dying Martha.
“Someone who decides absolutely to take her life and her living and her dying into her own hands and make it how she wants it to be, as far as she can,” she told media, describing the movie as a celebration of self-determination.

“It’s about a triumph, this film.”

Female companionship

The close bond between the two heroes was one of Moore’s favorite aspects of the movie.

“We very, very rarely see a story about female friendship, especially female friends who are older,” Moore added.

“The fact that he chose to portray this relationship, to elevate it, to show it as the love story it is I think is truly extraordinary.”

The film “The Room Next Door” is not Almodovar’s first venture into the English language. 2020 saw the Venice debut of his first film, a short called “The Human Voice,” in which Swinton played an abandoned lover.

The director debuted another short film, “Strange Way of Life,” a gay Western starring Pedro Pascal and Ethan Hawke, at Cannes last year.

For a full-length film, working in English presented few challenges, according to Almodovar, who admitted that at first he had been cautious.

“I was thrilled because I had anticipated having more issues,” he remarked, acknowledging his two actresses.

“Basically they understood exactly the tone that I wanted to tell the story,” he said, calling it “austere, emotional, but not melodramatic at all”.

Almodovar frequently attends Venice, and in 2019 he was awarded a Golden Lion for professional achievement.

His final appearance on the Lido occurred in 2021, the year Penelope Cruz won the best actress prize for his film “Parallel Mothers,” which tells the story of two women who give birth on the same day.