Venice, Italy.- The Spanish filmmaker Pedro Almodovar premiered in Venice on Monday its first English-language feature film, The Room Next Door, a drama about the end of life starring Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore, and which is in competition for the Golden Lion, reported AFP.
After several years of doubts and failed attempts in Hollywood, Almodóvar, 74, decided to set his film in New York, the city that opened the doors to the United States for him when he was starting out in the 1980s.
In the film, Tilda Swinton is a war correspondent suffering from terminal cancer, while Julianne Moore plays a successful novelist and friend who agrees to accompany her in her final moments. Actor John Turturro completes the leading trio of this melancholic film. “I feel much closer to Julianne’s character: I can’t understand that something that is alive has to die. Death is everywhere, but it’s something I never fully understood,” confessed the author of Pain and Glory at a press conference.
“This is a pro-euthanasia film. That’s something I admire about Tilda’s character. She decides that getting rid of cancer can only be achieved by making the decision she makes: ‘If I get there sooner, cancer won’t beat me.’ And so she finds a way to achieve her goal with the help of her friend, but they have to behave like criminals.”
Spain legalised euthanasia in 2021 and is one of only 11 countries where any form of assisted death is legal. In the UK, assisted suicide is punishable by up to 14 years in prison, while euthanasia is considered manslaughter or murder. The maximum penalty is life imprisonment. “There should be the possibility of practising euthanasia all over the world. It should be regulated and a doctor should be allowed to help his patient,” the director said.
The jump to Hollywood
Almodóvar had already released in 2020, in English, The Human Voice, a medium-length film based on the homonymous work by Jean Cocteau with Tilda Swinton in the role of an abandoned woman. And three years later he repeated in the language, in an even shorter format, with Strange Form of Life, a gay western with Ethan Hawke and Pedro Pascal. Almodóvar has said that after this last medium-length film, and the success it had at its premiere in Cannes, he felt that the time had come to launch into a bigger adventure, although no less profound, where once again he reflects on death. “Personally, I was never afraid of death. I know it’s going to come, I feel it’s going to come. And I support my friends when they begin the transition,” said Swinton, who like Julianne Moore, declared herself “happy” to have been able to film under Almodóvar’s orders. “Very rarely do we see a film about friendship between two women, especially older women. And I don’t know if there’s any other filmmaker in the world who would do that except Pedro,” Moore added.
Total creative control
The author of Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! and The Law of Desire is known for his rigorous control of his artistic work. Everything, from the script to the set design or the costumes, has to be approved by him. That was the reason why his project with Cate Blanchett to adapt the novel “Manual for Cleaning Women” did not come to fruition two years ago. Now, The Room Next Door is based on another novel, written by Sigrid Nunez, entitled “What are you Going Through”. An icon of the Spanish movida, Almodóvar began with kitsch and daring comedies, such as Pepi, Luci, Bom and Other Girls of the Heap and What Have I Done to Deserve This. Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown was his international breakthrough in 1988: it won the award for best script at the Venice Film Festival and the Oscar for best foreign film. But the Spanish director’s more circumspect side gradually became apparent, with films such as Hable con Ella, La Mala Educación, about his childhood, and Dolor y Gloria, about his career as a filmmaker. After the premiere of La Habitaciones de al Lado in Venice, Almodóvar will receive a lifetime achievement award at the San Sebastian festival at the end of September.
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