Making a kind of companion to his Pain and Glory, Pedro Almodóvar returns to the themes of aging and illness with The Room Next Door. Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore play successful women who were once close friends and get reacquainted due to one of them being terminally ill and the other agreeing to accompany her on a vacation that is to culminate in her suicide. While Pain and Glory felt more genuine, possibly simply due to it being a more autobiographical story about a film director dealing with chronic pain, The Room Next Door in comparison is theatrical and calculated, as if the director is just indulging an impulse to make his own Persona. The former film was an original work written by Almodóvar, while the new one is an adaptation of a novel, a fact that tends to make it even less personal. The gorgeous color cinematography and striking production design are as satisfying as ever, and there are times when it seems like this is just enough to make the film worthwhile. Swinton and Moore, two of the greatest actresses in the world, are brittle and reserved, admirably avoiding easy tear-jerking moments. The film never milks the situation for obvious emotion, instead sticking close to the slow exploration of two very different and very difficult personalities. Almodóvar is one of my favorite living directors, and a new film from him is always an important occasion, so it troubled me that I was so distracted while watching The Room Next Door. I kept asking myself how I would feel about the film if I didn’t know that it was Almodóvar. The fact that it’s in English makes its dialogue feel pretty theatrical and obvious in contrast to the earthy and passionate quality of his Spanish-language films. Whether that effect is the result of my lack of fluency in Spanish or possibly to Almodóvar's lack of ease with English, I don’t know. Long story short, fair or not, I just hope that Almodóvar makes many more films and that they’re all in Spanish.
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