Tilda Swinton recovers with poise and grace in the most exquisite hospital room ever designed in The Room Next Door, but for her Martha’s inoperable cervical cancer. Martha may seem like a character from a Pedro Almodóvar film, but surely such a gaping hole devoid of human feeling is idealistically draped in elegant autumn colored chapel wallpaper, flowers in vases everywhere, and a lime chair and Manhattan skyline visible from where, at one moment in time, it actually snows, pink. I was at a loss for words when Julianne Moore as Ingrid the author with an iconic background color of deep burgundy, pays an early first visit in the film. While engaging a view where they each embrace on practices of graceful and colorful depictions of them meeting, in the midst of all the colors involved, one couldn’t help but hold their gasp at the mix of color when looking at the scene there. Moore has a navy bag with a burgundy coat and a blue naugaite in her arm. Two characters meet, seemingly reversed in energy because the dying Martha wore vivid clothes whereas her muted friend wore a muted wardrobe.
Almodóvar’s world is equally informed in the first instance in Marthas worlds by the screenplay for “What are you going through?” written by Sigrid Nunez and “Pain and Glory” where Almodóvar introduces older Spanish filmmakers unable to work. Almodovar began writing in English, primarily for the scripts of the short films ‘The Human Voice’ and Strange Way of Life, and ‘The Room Next Door’ is his first full length English spoken movie. Though it is of lesser significance, it may serve as a sort of counterpoint to Pain and Glory, his 2019 drama about an elderly Spanish filmmaker: a creative, talented man whose sufferings from numerous chronic diseases have deprived him of his creative capacity and left him existentially empty. . In this new film, it is Marta who happens to be a former war correspondent but loses all her abilities to focus including reading, writing, or even listening to music after the chemotherapy treatment. Explanation for this is quite simple having undergone chemotherapy made it impossible to focus on tasks as crucial to Martha’s identity and hence to her as a human being and professional. This time, however, the explorations of how it feels to be in the body of failure are third person, Ingrid wrote a book on how she fears death, however upon reconnecting with Martha only to be asked to go on a getaway to the Catskills with a sick woman who wants to commit suicide.
The semi autobiographical closeness of Pain and Glory, this somehow detached reflection on death from the perspective of the dead who have something to say to the living appears to be a step backwards.
Regardless, it is hardly as appealing as an inspirational poster as that depiction may suggest, even if for Martha, the outright realization of what is actually happening is the least engaging aspect of a movie that still has its fair share of vivid oddities. It is as if Almodóvar simply is unable to contemplate the dimension of finitude that the plot of his film so pretentiously promotes. Just like in Pain and Glory, in Martha’s visions of a love affair with a Carmelite monk in Baghdad, which is in the past, and a colleague’s spouse who died in a defiant house fire, the course of history advances on the screen at a greater level of sensory overload than modernity can hope to attain. In an amusing side note, Ingrid has a workout at a gym just outside Woodstock and confides in the trainer about a friend fully deteriorating in front of her eyes and he very calmly tells her that he would’ve embraced her, but this is forbidden now thanks to lawyers.
She also meets Damian (John Turturro), who has been her and Martha’s love interest at different points in time, a fellow writer who is a climate change doomer, which figures in stark juxtaposition to the serenity Martha appears to have achieved about the time left in her life.
However, the major highlight of the film is the two women in this case, the two ladies in the hospital bed, the extreme comforts of their exquisite apartments, and finally, the strikingly designed current residence in the mountains where Ingrid campaigns essentially takes place until she feels like leaving.These two old friends engaged in the quixotic pursuit of well established intimacy expressed in an earlier period of their lives are sweet and beautiful not only because of the splendor of their final setting. Some sarcasm and some restiveness break the monotonicity of the suppositious calm in Swinton’s character, as at the same time Moore makes Martha expose her unease through her cheer over responses that come too premptively and out of turn. Ingrid goes to bed one night, with half faces belonging to herself and Martha on one pillow, effectively fusing into a single picture which is reminiscent to Picasso whilst capturing their proximity and divergence. One may argue that the most unique thing about The Room Next Door is how it doesn’t offer its conclusion the moment one expects it to and how it does offer few more twists prior to rolling the credit.
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