New York Film Festival: ‘The Room Next Door’ is about ‘celebrating life,’ but ‘we mustn’t look away’ from death in Syria, Beirut, Gaza
“It’s a good chance to reflect about mortality,” explained writer-director Pedro Almodóvar about his film “The Room Next Door,” which was the centerpiece selection at the 62nd New York Film Festival. “This is something that at least in my life is very present.” So when he read the proposition in Sigrid Nunez‘s novel “What Are You Going Through,” where a terminally ill woman asks her friend to assist in her suicide, the filmmaker was “very surprised.” Watch his discussion with actors Julianne Moore, Tilda Swinton, and John Turturro above.
“I thought that that was a very good sequence to develop between two actresses and two characters that they feel in a very different way in front of mortality,” Almodóvar added. Ultimately, Martha (Swinton) wants to end her life on her own terms, and Ingrid (Moore) is terrified at the prospect, but Swinton feels the meaning of the film is even more expansive than that. Martha wants Ingrid present in the room next door, but “we are in the room next door to each one of each other. We’re in the room next door to Syria, to Beirut. We’re in the room next door to Gaza, to Jerusalem, to China. And what Pedro has done for 23 films is encourage us not to look away — from everything, from death. It’s not just unlucky people who die … We mustn’t look away.”
It’s a message of “empathy,” Almodóvar said, “to feel very close to someone, which is not the usual thing in the world in general,” to “open our arms to someone that is sick and needs us.” But he also expands out to consider the state of the world. “The political message in the movie,” which is expressed at one point through Turturro’s character, is “talking about the situation that we live everywhere,” but Ingrid “was taught to live in this type of apocalypse just celebrating, day by day, by the hand of Tilda, life itself. This is a kind of optimism in the middle of a tragedy.” For Moore, “there’s nothing more profound than witnessing somebody else’s life … Only in communion with others, only in relationship, and only in reflection are we able to see ourselves.”
“The Room Next Door” is Almodóvar’s first English-language feature film, but working in Spanish he has a storied awards history. His “All About My Mother” (1999) won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film. Then he won an Oscar himself for Best Original Screenplay for “Talk to Her” (2002). His films have additionally earned Penelope Cruz Best Actress Oscar noms for “Volver” (2006) and “Parallel Mothers” (2021), plus a Best Actor nom for Antonio Banderas in “Pain and Glory.”
Moore and Swinton are Oscar winners themselves: Moore for Best Actress in “Still Alice” (2014) and Swinton for Best Supporting Actress in “Michael Clayton” (2007). Combining their three talents is an awards pundit’s dream, and as of this writing Swinton is among our top 10 contenders for Best Actress according to the combined predictions of thousands of Gold Derby users. The Sony Pictures Classics film is scheduled for release in the US on December 20, and it goes wide in January.