About friendship and death

The wonderful Pedro Almodovar, who has been delighting us with his for decades films! I became aware of the Spanish filmmaker in the 1990s, in the wake of the collapse of Yugoslavia, when his films, partly due to circumstances (Hollywood blockbusters disappeared from our repertoire around that time, due to sanctions) came to the fore and became unavoidable and inevitable. Posters were hung, music from movies was listened to, Almodovar's older directorials were sought out on VHS tapes of dubious quality. A fantastic series of films High heels (1991) Kika (1993) The flower of my secret (1995) Raw meat (1997) and All about my mother (1998), marked the last decade of the XNUMXth century and planted Almodovar once and for all in the hearts of all film lovers. That love is so strong that even today, a quarter of a century later, it does not abate, and in Serbia, Almodovar is still a name that is spoken with the greatest respect and admiration.

photo: promo

Of course, Almodovar also recorded before the nineties, so thanks to VHS and a retrospective at one of the editions of FEST, we had the opportunity to familiarize ourselves with his "early works", fierce "punk" ” films from the eighties that showed us another, more unrestrained and rebellious side of this author (we should highlight Labyrinth of passion, Dark habits, The Law of Lust, and especially "transitional" directing Women on the verge of a nervous breakdown i Tie me up.!, which represent a direct link with the next phase). Almodovar continued to film and in the past quarter of a century, he completed his filmography with ten more feature-length titles, among which stand out Talk to her. (2001) Bad upbringing (2004) The skin I live in (2011) and a late masterpiece, an extraordinary semi-autobiographical drama Pain and glory (2019) starring Antonio Banderas. In that sequence, there were some weak films, which is inevitable after all, but the Spaniard always maintained the level and class, and knew how to capture the attention of viewers and remain at the top of European (and world) cinema.

Film Adjacent room represents a new phase in the career of the seventy-five-year-old author: it is his first feature film in the English language and the first film with a (mostly) non-Spanish cast. Almodovar has been flirting with the idea of ​​making a film in English for a long time, but he kept putting it off, even though he came very close a few times. He worked on the project for years Cleaning lady's manual, based on Lucia Berlin's collection of stories of the same name, in which Cate Blanchett was supposed to play the main role, but that story backfired, just as he once abandoned the planned adaptation of the novel Piskarolo He asks Dexter. Nevertheless, the desire to direct a film in English did not leave Almodovar and he gradually prepared for that step. The next room preceded by two half-hour films that Almodóvar recorded in English - Human voice (2020) with Tilda Swinton and Strange way of life (2023) with Ethan Hawke and Pedro Pascal – and which set the stage for what's to come.

Adjacent room is the story of the writer Ingrid Parker (played by Julianne Moore), who after many years meets her (once) close friend Martha Hunt (Tilda Swinton), a fearless war reporter, now a woman at the end of her life, in a deadly battle with cervical cancer. Marta, faced with her own mortality and determined to end the agony, asks Ingrid to be by her side during her last days. The women leave New York and seclude themselves in a luxury rental house near Woodstock, and after Marta explains to Ingrid that she plans to commit suicide during their "vacation" together.

Of course, this is a very melodramatic setup and Almodóvar develops and explores it with expected pleasure. Based on the book by Sigrid Nunez What are you going through? (which, as I have been informed, will soon receive an edition in Serbian), Adjacent room is primarily a story about friendship and death, in which some important questions are raised about mortality and the right to choose. Now, while in theory this seemed like an excellent choice of subject for Almodovar, in practice it did not turn out to be quite so, at least not from the point of view of the signatories of these lines.

Adjacent room it won the Golden Lion at this year's Venice Film Festival, it was praised by many critics and is on the lists of the best films shown in 2024, although, when we add up and subtract everything, this is certainly not one of the best directions in Almodovar's filmography. I'm not saying that this is a bad movie, far from it, but something just didn't quite come together and it doesn't have the strength and convincingness of the Spanish favorite's best directorials. Almodovar follows a more or less familiar route, because he is Adjacent room, at least to a certain extent, a reworking of the famous ones High heels, and in that comparison the newer film loses a lot.

Dramaturgically speaking, the film is quite disjointed, with a lot of not too skilfully integrated gauntlets (such as the one in which the character played by John Torturo explains that we are on the threshold of the Apocalypse), so it seems that the script needed a little more work, harmonizing certain elements and " iron out” dialogues that, in this form, sound surprisingly artificial. The usually flawless Tilda Swinton gets a bit bogged down here and has a hard time dealing with all the lines she's being bombarded with, another major nagging problem The next room. In addition, when they were already hired and became part of the film, Alessandro Nivola and Juan Diego Boto should have been given at least a little more space, because the roles assigned to them certainly lack roundness. I know this is not a movie where these two are the main stars, but these actors definitely deserve juicier roles.

Adjacent room premiered in Serbia at the opening of the 30th Original Film Festival, and now it has arrived in the regular repertoire of our cinemas. Is the new Almodovar worth watching on the big screen? Absolutely. It is great that we have the opportunity to welcome the new films of this veteran on the big screen, that his films continue to be of interest and represent an "event". During the year 2024, we had the opportunity to watch a whole series of new films of old favorites that did not live up to expectations, including this Sorrentino (Parthenope), Coppola (megalopolis), Cronenberg (Cover). It should be appreciated and respected, with the hope that the next direction will bring a hit in the center of the target.