Pedro Almodóvar continues to write the pages of Spanish cinema. He is doing so now from the Venice Film Festival, where the director won a historic Golden Lion for “The Room Next Door”. It is the first time that a Spanish film has achieved this, but he is not the first filmmaker to do so. Luis Buñuel achieved it with Belle de jour, produced in France. It is the culmination of a career in which awards are the least important thing, even if they always do good. The icing on the cake of a revolutionary cinema that, now, from a more sober and austere perspective, continues to fascinate the entire world.
In fact, it is curious that Almodóvar did not have the jackpot of the two major international festivals. In Cannes, he came close on several occasions (Best Director for Todo sobre mi madre, and Best Screenplay and Actress Award for Volver). In Venice, he was awarded a Golden Lion, but an honorary one, and it was here that he began his international career thanks to the award for Best Screenplay for Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown. Today, they raise it again with their first film in English, an exciting and austere drama about a dignified death and female friendship.
Almodóvar convinced the critics and also demonstrated the importance of filmmakers in their political positioning. He did it at the film’s press conference, when he criticized the attitude of the extreme right towards migrant minors. He repeated it again when he picked up the Golden Lion. In tears, he dedicated it first to his family, and then to his two actresses, Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore.
To my family, my brother Agustin, Lola. This is my first film in English, I will thank you in Spanish. “As a director, one of the privileges is that we are the first witnesses when a miracle happens on screen, and Tilda and Julianne invoked a miracle several days during this shoot, and I will never have enough words of gratitude. “This award is for you,” he said.
But the applause came when he once again stressed the political stakes of The Room Next Door, a film about “a woman who dies in a dying world.” “The film is not only about the boundless solidarity of Julianne’s character, but also about Tilda’s character’s decision to end her life when it only brings her pain. Saying goodbye to this world properly and with dignity is a human issue, not a political one, and it is from humanity that it must be approached. I know that this right goes against any religion that has God as the only source of life. I would ask practitioners to respect and not interfere in individual decisions in this regard. Human beings must be free to be born and to die when life is not enough,” he added.
The acting awards had many candidates, especially for the women’s award, where Nicole Kidman finally won the Volpi Cup for her risky work in Babygirl, the film by Halina Reijn that questions whether a sexual fantasy of domination can be feminist. The Australian actress – who was unable to attend the gala due to the death of her mother – gives her body and soul, and even dares to laugh at herself, and the jury recognized her among other works such as Jolie in Maria by Angelina, or that of Fernanda Torres, in the film I am still here by Walter Salles, about a mother in the Brazilian dictatorship. The film by the Brazilian director, one of the critics’ favorites, won the award for best screenplay for Murilo Hauser and Heitor Lorega.
In the best actor award, the surprise was greater since neither of the two favorites, Daniel Craig and Adrien Brody, won. This was the case of the Frenchman Vincent Lindon, one of the best European actors who once again demonstrates his talent in Playing With Fire, a film that warns against the rise of the extreme right. Lindon plays a left-wing working-class father who sees one of his sons start frequenting neonzai groups. During the award ceremony, she joked that for the first time, a French president, in reference to Huppert, had been fair to an actor from his country.
