the ghostly photograph of the dignity that triumphed in Venice

This rare quality today (when almost all platform films seem to take place in the same places and see the world with the same colors) is what assimilates the Man of La Mancha to the great aesthetes of classicism, or to those there, like those cited above. , which gave way to modernity. Its creatures are defined as much by what they say and do as by the environments they inhabit, by how and where they move.

In his first feature film of Hollywood origin (actually New York), that is to say the challenge of his filmography that he has postponed for decades, this maxim (“space is emotion”) is fundamental. The emotion that can be provoked by the way the light paints an empty deck chair in golden tones or the reflection of a body in a stained glass window perhaps comes from the sensitivity of a filmmaker for whom objects (and the way he films them) can be as expressive as the characters.

In the specific case of The next roomthe scope of this “shaping” of the drama (which includes the exterior architecture and interior design: paintings in the bedrooms, a library in the living room, the color of the sofas and coffee cups or a landing on the staircase ) perhaps acquires a more obvious significance than usual in his filmography. The reason is simple: the two women who play it face death with dignity and the determination to love each other surrounded by beauty.

Bright and devastating

The next room It is a film as beautiful to see (and in this we must also pay tribute to the director of photography Eduard Grau, who succeeded José Luis Alcaine) and to feel, as luminous as it is devastating. Before their images, Staying on the narrative surface (for all that matters) is like removing all of cinema’s expressive potential. It is one of those films which remind us, as Jean Epstein said, that in cinema “there have never been stories, there are only situations”. In other words, the way these stories are told.

In any case, we must not harm a scenario that we will not detail here but which, as usual with Almodóvar, breathes in several dimensions. The main thing, as has been the practice since talk to him, operates in ghost territory (as he did Back And Juliet And pain and glory And Parallel mothers), invoking presences through absences.

In this case, that of a character who is a living dying person, and who, by a stroke of genius, achieved the spectral splitting of Tilda Swinton in the last act (in an operation similar to that in which she played in The eternal girl by Joanna Hogg), is charged with a poetic sense which fits into the end of the adaptation of Dubliners (The Dead) by John Hustona film that works like leitmotif reference of The next room.

The Man from La Mancha has never had any problems explaining his quotations to the cinema which nourishes him, and which in this case also enriches the very drama that his creatures experience (as in Broken hugs what happened with Rossellini), notably in a sequence of nocturnal cinephilia, where once again the objects – beautifully photographed DVDs from the shelf to the player – lend themselves to being filmed as if they had a soul that is unique to them.

One could say that the research underlying Almodóvar’s latest film is precisely to capture what Bob Dylan said was impossible to photograph: dignity. And for this, it is enough to give a humanist density and a political sense to characters confronted with a dignified death that most of the images go through and live in closed places (a hospital and a house in the countryside), embodied by two actresses completely magnetized by their creatures, their fears and their skepticismsperfectly synchronous in their dynamics of confinement and liberation, of light and darkness, of pain and pleasure.

The two old friends, Ingrid (Julianne Moore) and Martha (Tilda Swinton), writer and war journalist (not insignificant details), who meet again to accompany each other in the final transition of the second, illuminate the truths of life at through its relationship with mortality. A mortality that resonates in the agonizing world they inhabit (that we inhabit) and that the lover they both shared in their past lives, played by John Turturro, articulates lucidly in his cynical crusade for social and political awareness.

Despite some flashbacks of an explanatory nature which do not quite find their organic place in the dramatic framework of the film, or perhaps also because of it, in a certain way it’s as if The next room existed in the interstices, in the limbo obsessed with the end of things while clinging to the splendor of existence. To the redemptive harmony of friendship and the beauty of the world, while they still exist. Yet a few filmmakers, like Almodóvar, have the eyes to see it, the sensitivity to recreate it and the talent to film it. Our luck.