In a way, death has always been present in Pedro Almodóvar’s cinema. I was in What did I do to deserve this?where Carmen Maura ended up with that macho husband with a gnawed ham bone. Of course in Matador, where the bulls, the slasher and a serial killer mixed together without rules in the filmmaker’s shaker. Or in Far heelswhere a crime was confessed on television in during prime time. But also when Almodóvar began to acquire international fame and refine his style until reaching the heights of his career with All about my mother, talk to her either Backall stories crossed by death.
Almodóvar always assured that he lived surrounded by death and the rites that surround it, as shown in the opening scene of Back where women cleaned the graves and watched over the dead in the houses. Although his relationship with such a painful subject is predefined by the atavistic customs of a people of La Mancha; His evolution as a person and as a filmmaker has also changed the way he talks about it. Almodóvar’s current moment as a director is different. A moment in which the exacerbated melodrama has remained somewhat parked, and in which the drier drama has entered the scene from the turning point that was Juliet.
This film seemed like a rehearsal for an austerity that he perfected to the almost dry emotion that runs through his new film, The next piecethe adaptation of the story What is your torment? by the writer Sigrid Nunez that she presented in Venice, where she moved the entire audience thanks to this beautiful and free look at death. It is also her first film in English, and so in this case, two devoted Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore were added to the list of great actresses who played with him, who perfectly captured the tone that two of these different roles required. from each other but so important that they mix.
They are two friends who meet again when Swinton, a cancer-stricken former war reporter; He communicates his illness to the second (Moore, a successful writer). The film focuses on their relationship. In the way Moore, especially, listens to Swinton, in a more grateful dramatic role. In one way or another The next piece It could be defined as a chamber piece in which two women talk, but for Almodóvar, nothing is ever that simple. Here, the camerawork is filled with occasional flashbacks – the first two are what fits the film’s puzzle the most poorly and what makes the film take a while to find its tone – and, above all, with captivating direction. Despite this austerity, it is impossible not to recognize the filmmaker in the colors, in the composition and in his spirit. Pure Almodóvar.
Many critics have said that the director’s latest films lack the visual audacity of before, although the truth is that his style has simply also adapted to the text he had in hand. He demonstrates this here by also transferring this austerity into the camera movements, but by showing mastery and exquisite taste in the framing. The shots of The next piece They play with the reframing within the painting itself, using the architectural elements of the house where these two women retreat. Each corner, each door or stairwell is used by Almodóvar to create different compositions that enrich the story.
There is also in its staging a nod to ghost cinema, something that will be consolidated in an epilogue that should not be revealed, but which has Vertigo. Almodóvar often films his actresses through glass, especially Swinton, blurring their silhouettes and increasing the spectral sensation that his film sometimes acquires.
The superb photography of Edu Grau and, above all, the excellent score by Alberto Iglesias, accompanying and cradling the director’s images. Their artistic relationship continues to offer moments of overwhelming aesthetic beauty. Together, they manage to excite without putting their finger in each other’s eye, as in the scene where the two friends see snow through the glass of a window in New York after a meeting with The Dubliners that will almost become a leitmotif dramatic. Every time you return to John Huston’s work, you can’t help but feel a pang in your heart.
There is in this film a desire to capture and capture the visual style of Hopper, one of the artists that the filmmaker has always honored and who on this occasion is almost literally challenged. And as always, to show the world everything he loves, like that impressive photograph by Cristina García Rodero where women dressed in mourning – death on stage again – parade down the street and watch, in a way, the conversation between Moore and Swinton.
A better world than the real one
There is another transversal characteristic of Almodóvar’s cinema, which is that with his cinematography he offers a better world than the real one. In the Spain that Almodóvar first depicted, Franco did not exist (as he often said, it was his revenge in his early works). An Almodovarian universe where women support each other and cover themselves with machismo. Where trans women were women without anyone doubting it. Where the graves of the civil war were opened that are still unopened in our country.
In The next piece He once again offers a better vision than the real one when he looks at death head on. Almodóvar is resolutely committed to a dignified death, far from what the Church and the reactionary right have sold. An amendment to all the Catholic stoicism present in society for generations. Death should not be dirty, cruel, slow and painful. This is what the character of Tilda Swinton thinks, whose desire to die before becoming a shadow of what she was is the dramatic engine of the film. Almodóvar grants her this wish that is not yet achievable in many countries. In Spain there are doctors who refuse to do it, and in the United States it is downright a crime, as the filmmaker rightly points out at one point in the film.
The image of Swinton putting on lipstick, dressing in yellow and looking at the camera at one point in the film is captivating, a statement of aesthetic and political intent. “This is how it should be,” her character and Almodóvar seem to be saying as he films this scene as he does. The next piece It is a naked film. The director’s entire body of films has given way to works stripped of parts and secondary plots until reaching this purification, where two women who speak are enough and more than enough to make a work that condenses the evolution of a filmmaker who continues to build imaginaries. with which to create a better world, where friendship is a lifeline against everything, even against the loneliness of death.
