By Kyle Buchanan
At Monday night’s Venice after-party for “The Room Next Door,” Pedro Almodóvar beamed at his leading ladies as they beamed back.
I’m not just speaking of the affection shared among Julianne Moore, Tilda Swinton and their director, though it was tangible. I’m talking about the actual beams of light that bounced off the women’s sequined gowns and back at their besotted director as we huddled in a room to discuss the Spanish director’s first feature film in English, a long-held goal that allowed him to cast two big Hollywood stars.
“They are not actors now, they are like monuments,” Almodóvar said. Certainly, that’s how Moore and Swinton are presented on the poster for the film, which arranges their famous faces in profile as if they were massive mountain ranges.
“Big peaks,” joked Moore.
“Big sparkly peaks,” Swinton added, nodding to their dresses. “We can only wear sequins for the rest of our lives.”
Adapted from the novel “What Are You Going Through” by Sigrid Nunez, “The Room Next Door” casts Moore as Ingrid, a successful author who hears that her former colleague Martha (Swinton) is in the hospital with inoperable cervical cancer. They reunite, swap catch-up stories and once again become fast friends, but Martha has a weighty request to make.
With her experimental treatments failing and another taxing round of chemotherapy to come, Martha has booked a vacation house in upstate New York and bought a drug off the dark web. Might Ingrid be willing to accompany her on the trip, knowing that at some point, her friend will kill herself in the room next door?
Though Almodóvar is fairly fluent in English, he had long been wary of shooting a feature film in the language. (Even as we spoke, he kept a translator close by for moments when his second language failed him.) Two recent shorts made in English — the gay Western “Strange Way of Life” and the extended Swinton monologue “The Human Voice” — persuaded Almodóvar to finally write his first feature-length screenplay in the language.
But Almodóvar’s films have aesthetic pleasures that go beyond words, and “The Room Next Door” offers so much to look at — whether it’s a lavender sweater, an olive couch or a precisely chosen shade of burgundy lipstick — that is as satisfying as any line of dialogue. A sequence in which the two women ransack Martha’s apartment reveals pulled drawers filled with the most beguiling knickknacks, and the upstate vacation house where much of the movie takes place is an architectural stunner. (Like Martha, I’d die to live there, too.)
Moore said that sometimes during the shoot, Almodóvar’s mise-en-scene was so strong that she got goose bumps.
“I had an experience where I looked at my green turtleneck and Tilda’s purple jacket and I was like, ‘Oh, my God, we’ve walked into one of his movies,’” she said.
All that beauty isn’t frivolous, either: Almodóvar observes that in the face of something grim, the pursuit of pleasure can be a defiant act or even an assertion of life itself. The contrast is drawn most clearly when Ingrid reunites with an old lover (John Turturro) who delivers lectures on climate change and soon lectures Ingrid, too. “You’re living with a dying woman in a world also in its death throes,” he tells her.
“You cannot go around telling people there’s no hope,” she replies. “There are a lot of ways to live inside a tragedy.”
Ultimately, that’s the lesson of “The Room Next Door,” which Sony Pictures Classics will release in select theaters in December. At the film’s news conference in Venice, Almodóvar spoke about the myriad world issues that worry him but noted, “Optimism is the best way to resist.”
And though this film and his recent drama “Pain and Glory” demonstrate that the 74-year-old is grappling with his own mortality, he has no intention of slowing down anytime soon. He is planning to shoot a new feature next year, and at the after-party, he began pitching Swinton on a movie he’d had in mind for her years ago, a riff on “Cat People” in which she’d play a mermaid.
The more he told her about the project, the more enthralled both actresses became. “Let’s do it!” Swinton said. “We have witnesses now. Why not?” She was beaming, and it wasn’t just the sequins.
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