There is no trace of the daily struggles of the young Pedro Almodóvar, the one who pushed us to travel because perhaps tomorrow we would be gone. Parallel mothers, pain and glory And The human voice They came full of ghosts, contemplating from afar the traditional and sweaty street party.
Almodóvar’s cinema has now crossed the ocean as if it were passing through the other neighborhood: no longer without haste or sadness, nor without concrete direction. Like someone who crosses a gallery and feeds on those who preceded him. The next piece It is the least typical film “from La Mancha”, both the most universal and the most generous.
Adapts the malleable lines of New Yorker Sigrid Nunez into the novel What is your torment?: Julianne Moore plays Ingrid, an idle writer who agrees to live with her good friend Martha (Tilda Swinton) in a house in the middle of the forest for the weeks before she, terminally ill with cancer, is euthanized. But there’s no gravity in this kind of situation. Person by Bergman. Ingrid and Martha will sunbathe, listen to the birds chirping, stay up late watching movies and discussing everything…
Go to the cinema to get lost
The next piece He will also be distracted, advancing in pieces and with stories that unfold randomly or downright capriciously. Sometimes the friends change scenes in the montage between lines, from the kitchen to the studio for no reason or surprise, as if Almodóvar had tried to record them in two different places without being able or wanting to choose one. It is the greatest gift that cinema can give to Martha, who suffers from her lack of concentration.
The trinkets are also all the small roles that the director has reserved for his favorite actors, appearances in the snapshots of the past evoked by the patient: Victoria Luengo is the wife of the father of Michelle, Martha’s daughter; Juan Diego Botto and Raúl Arévalo play a couple of reporters in love in the middle of the war in Iraq; and Melina Matthews, the only one who chews English acceptably, plays the role of a lawyer. In short, a generous assortment of cookies to open up to the American industry.
Pedro “Nick Furia” Almodovar
The biscuit tin is of course filled with threads and thimbles, because in The next piece Everything fits together: from the bohemian biography of Dora Carrington to the impressionist paintings of the Far West, which already adorned the walls of strange lifestylewalking past a burning house that could be either American Gothic or Tarkovsky.
Also bibs in libraries, many posters and quotes, in particular this fragment of the The Dubliners of Joyce that Almodóvar puts in the mouths of his two actresses, recited, and which they will then reproduce on DVD (the best format for ghost films). And it is said: “the snow falls on all the living and on the dead.”
Even John Turturro, here as the two’s former lover, knows himself to be an actor-anecdote, a kind of activist through whom he can shoot tracts on the important issues of the day: climate change, eroticism as a lifeline, the rise of the far right and the crisis in the health care system.
It turns out impossible to dissociate The next piece from the left podium but very pleasant that Pedro Almodóvar currently occupies. In any case, since in the first bars a young girl asks Ingrid to dedicate her latest novel to “It won’t happen again”, the film equates the creation and diffusion of culture to a form of personal union, insisting on the inseparable link between art and politics. . , first of all, to save us from the fucked up times.
Ethics and aesthetics of a profession
The world is ending and so The next piece She walks unhurriedly, feeding on the kaleidoscope of pleasures that sustain her. The camera is removed from the action to explore the most beautiful views of the house that welcomes them, in a New England pine forest.
The plot invents twists and turns that reveal unexplored drawers, full of buttons, tissue paper, curious postcards, small bottles with aromas. The production design of Inbal Weinberg (Suspiria) works on beautiful miniatures, decorated by regulars Carlota Casado and Iker Elias. In times of criticism of the privilege of Sex in New YorkAlmodóvar’s metropolis is still crossed on foot, it is shamelessly read and leafy.
Tilda Swinton also enjoys it, while momentarily covering herself with a lookalike similar to that of The Eternal Girl by Joanna Hogg. Pinpoint, her Martha keeps her face impassive and her chin slightly raised, except when she opens her eyes slightly to acknowledge her guilt at having been reprimanded by her friend.
Then she will breathe again in small sips, like a sick person. As a kind of concave reflection, Moore creates an expressive and slightly too devoted Ingrid, with whom to equalize the volumes of her accomplice… These are not roles for beginners.
The camera itself is fascinated by the joyful testing of images of their conversations, sometimes in a curious and non-violent frontal perspective, and others in a completely lateral and flat perspective. The result is a discreet cerebralitywhich, by breaking the patterns, tempers the forms of the plan without denying the bursts of joy or emotion that transform the two friends from moment to moment into smiling young women. Ghostly moles Lolea, red likewise.
With so much light, death is not scary… Even if it remains at the heart of this intense and harmonious film, like the incredibly blond wigs and exquisite green prints of Yves Saint-Laurent. So we should not be shocked by an announced and repeated ending, as in a story where the moral is just that it’s over…
But there is something wrong. Maybe it is Alberto Iglesias’ music, suspended in the borders and tinged with mystery. Or maybe it will be something from the enormous Hopper painting, as luminous as it is desperate, that decorates the entrance. Maybe we will have to dig deeper into the hidden gaps of The next room.
