In various ways, Pedro Almodóvar’s terrific new film represents a culmination or point of arrival. The Room Next Door, winner of the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival, marks the director’s first time working in English and telling a story set entirely outside Spain. It is also a clear admission – from a film-maker strongly associated with costume, production design and bodies – of an essential bookishness: his belief, expressed in his recently published collection of stories The Last Dream, that his vocation is “literary”, and it’s merely a quirk of fate that the bulk of his written output has been 22 screenplays, which he also directed. The film concerns two writers, Ingrid, a war reporter suffering from cancer (Tilda Swinton), and Martha (Julianne Moore), a novelist with whom Ingrid spends her final weeks. Though Almodóvar does away with many of the reference points in the source material, Sigrid Nunez’s novel What Are You Going Through, he introduces plenty of his own. The Room Next Door opens at a Manhattan bookshop, where Martha is doing a signing, and ends with a quotation from “The Dead” – and it isn’t the only bookshop, or mention of James Joyce.
Almodóvar was born in La Mancha in 1949, and emerged as a writer, performer and film-maker in the transgressive culture that flourished in Madrid following the demise of Franco. During the 1980s, he made a run of films, starting with Pepi, Luci, Bom and Other Girls Like Mom, and ending with Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!, all of them pungent and confrontational, and characterised by jerky plotting and a deadpan (or blasé) approach to a range of aberrant behaviour: glue-sniffing, kidnapping, poisoning. Then he felt he’d hit a rut. In interviews, he described his tenth film, Kika (1993), as “a way of saying goodbye to certain themes” and “an ending to a chapter”. (It ends with the main character telling a driver that she needs “pointing in the right direction”.) Almodóvar didn’t know what the next cycle would be but speculated he wouldn’t “change in a very radical way”. His work would continue to contain “very free women” (always a greater concern for him than gay men), “colour”, and “sex” – but he foresaw a new “attitude”.
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