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Faintly Falling
By Shonni Enelow

New York Film Festival 2024:
The Room Next Door
Pedro Almodóvar, Spain/U.S., Sony Pictures Classics

Gertrude Stein, describing the melodramas of her youth, explained that the pleasure she recalled from them came from the rhythm: “silence stillness and quick movement.” What she understood was that what’s most important to the genre is not so much emotionality as its oscillation in peaks and valleys, in rapid narration and slow, drawn-out views of its effects. Melodrama does not try to imitate the meandering, half-articulated conversational structure and quotidian experience of everyday life, like realism does; melodrama relies on stock characters and situations in order to quickly telegraph information so as to spend more time surfing the waves of affect. Melodrama’s narrative headline is not “what happened” but “how it affected me.”

So we learn, within the first few minutes of The Room Next Door, Pedro Almodóvar’s loose adaptation of Sigrid Nuñez’s 2020 novel What Are You Going Through, exactly the amount we need to know about these characters in order to appreciate the emotional acuteness of the situation and no more. Ingrid (Julianne Moore), a writer, is terrified of death; Martha (Tilda Swinton), a former war correspondent, is dying of cancer. They worked together at Paper magazine in the 1980s, a period evoked with nothing more than an airy line about its nightlife. Ingrid has moved back to New York after a period in Paris (where else?), finds her friend in the hospital, and they resume their friendship. Details of their pasts do not matter; nothing is filled in. The actors speak their exposition clearly and directly. They say what they have to say, and they mean it. When Martha, after an experimental treatment does not take, decides to end her life and asks Ingrid to accompany her to the site where she will do so, Swinton expresses no hesitations, no uncertainties, and no layered inner landscape of repression––she simply speaks the words.

In modernist melodrama––the kind Almodóvar makes––the stock characters and plot lines typically appear as ready-mades from mass culture, plucked from the history of Hollywood and its middlebrow entertainment machine, immediately invoking a type, a story, or a mood, which the filmmaker frames as such and then estranges. Part of the immediate estrangement in The Room Next Door is watching two subtle psychological actors act in a genre that is not psychological realism. In Almodóvar’s film, the Hollywood references pile up. Martha explains in a monologue of undisguised exposition (there is no way we believe this character has never told the other about this, because we are not supposed to: it’s there for us, the audience) the story of her daughter’s conception and the father’s death, and immediately we shift to a filmic fantasy world of the 1970s, with shag haircuts and morose Vietnam vets. In a flashback to Martha’s time as a war correspondent, the Iraq War is evoked with little more than tan-brown rubble and Swinton in a head-scarf––and a snippet from a gay love story that could be plucked, with only the gender shifted, out of Casablanca. (Swinton herself enunciates with the mid-Atlantic diction of a midcentury star.) We might also start to notice references to another medium dropping in––an image from the 1970s flashback near-reproduces Andrew Wyeth’s famous painting Christina’s World (1948). The U.S. of Almodóvar’s film, his first English-language feature, is this world of mass cultural artifacts. (In this, the filmmaker is truly the inheritor of his sometime-inspiration Tennessee Williams.)

What makes the pastiche uncannier is its layering with ultra-contemporary concerns (climate change, the rise of the far right, post-#MeToo rules about physical touch), which sometimes feel self-serious to a humorous degree. There are a few laugh lines––at the screening I saw, John Turturro as a public intellectual who gives a lecture called “How bad can it get?” got the most (although what’s actually funny is that I once attended a lecture with exactly that title, and it was good). But Almodóvar and his actors play it straight. Moore, clad in jewel tones, her auburn hair shining, plays Ingrid with a self-effacing femininity, verging on timidity, that contrasts with Swinton’s commanding and androgynous intensity. But everyone speaks in a calm cadence and tone of slightly heightened consciousness. If this deliberate speech feels theatrical, it’s not only because the actors give us so few micro-expressions, mirroring the film’s lack of subtext, but because the actors’ lines feel written. This is an unusual feature in contemporary film––so much so that saying the dialogue feels “written” sounds like an insult––but a regular aesthetic choice in contemporary theater as well as literature, where writers often call attention to their dialogue as written text, rather than create the illusion of spontaneous speech.

Between the writtenness of the text and the flat planes of the modernist upstate house Martha has chosen as the location to end her life, the film’s melodrama tips into abstraction. Once we arrive at the house, Almodóvar’s exuberant use of color, which recalls Sirk and Minnelli, turns explicitly painterly, as Martha and Ingrid compare the deck chairs outside to the Edward Hopper painting within. Seen in this light, the sketchy, schematic quality of the narrative becomes like the color-blocked loungers in the Hopper painting: so many colors to splash on a canvas, with the people in the foreground not necessarily the subjects. In the film’s denouement, Martha applies her makeup with the deliberate intensity of Norma Desmond, but geometric abstraction, rather than camp, is what struck me: the yellow of her hair and suit, the red of her lips, the blue of the chair. And it’s a modernist artwork, rather than a mass cultural reference, that turns out to be the key intertext: John Huston’s film of James Joyce’s The Dead, its final images (snow falling on everything) resignified in a world of climate change. Even the reveal of its final scene unfolds in a quiet, even chilly, mood of dancerly grace. No emotional breakthroughs or revelations follow Martha’s death; instead, we find a turn to art. In this odd but beguiling film, death haunts the aesthetic, and vice versa.