23 October 2024

Pedro Almodóvar’s conflict of interests

The Room Next Door resolves the Spanish director’s struggle between black comedy and bookish melodrama.

Illustration by Ryan Mcamis

In various ways, Pedro Almodóvar’s terrific new film represents a culmination or point of arrival. The Room Next Door, winner of the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival, marks the director’s first time working in English and telling a story set entirely outside Spain. It is also a clear admission – from a film-maker strongly associated with costume, production design and bodies – of an essential bookishness: his belief, expressed in his recently published collection of stories The Last Dream, that his vocation is “literary”, and it’s merely a quirk of fate that the bulk of his written output has been 22 screenplays, which he also directed. The film concerns two writers, Ingrid, a war reporter suffering from cancer (Tilda Swinton), and Martha (Julianne Moore), a novelist with whom Ingrid spends her final weeks. Though Almodóvar does away with many of the reference points in the source material, Sigrid Nunez’s novel What Are You Going Through, he introduces plenty of his own. The Room Next Door opens at a Manhattan bookshop, where Martha is doing a signing, and ends with a quotation from “The Dead” – and it isn’t the only bookshop, or mention of James Joyce.

Almodóvar was born in La Mancha in 1949, and emerged as a writer, performer and film-maker in the transgressive culture that flourished in Madrid following the demise of Franco. During the 1980s, he made a run of films, starting with Pepi, Luci, Bom and Other Girls Like Mom, and ending with Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!, all of them pungent and confrontational, and characterised by jerky plotting and a deadpan (or blasé) approach to a range of aberrant behaviour: glue-sniffing, kidnapping, poisoning. Then he felt he’d hit a rut. In interviews, he described his tenth film, Kika (1993), as “a way of saying goodbye to certain themes” and “an ending to a chapter”. (It ends with the main character telling a driver that she needs “pointing in the right direction”.) Almodóvar didn’t know what the next cycle would be but speculated he wouldn’t “change in a very radical way”. His work would continue to contain “very free women” (always a greater concern for him than gay men), “colour”, and “sex” – but he foresaw a new “attitude”.

Crucial to this self-conscious mellowing was a shift in tone and genre, from noir-ish thriller and black comedy to a genre that had been evident in his work now and again: melodrama. And though Almodóvar’s films already had a devoted following – Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (1988) received an Oscar nomination – this mid-career mutation was widely taken as a forward step. Responding to Law of Desire (1987), the Observer film critic Philip French insisted that the director would inherit the “joint crowns” of Luis Buñuel and Billy Wilder “over my dead body”, adding, with no trace of irony, that the film would annoy “the conventionally minded”. But he welcomed the influence of the social and domestic melodramas or “women’s pictures” that Douglas Sirk made in the 1950s (All that Heaven Allows, Imitation of Life) on the emotional temper and expressive décor of Live Flesh (1997) and especially its follow-up, All About My Mother (1999), which remains for many his most beloved film.

A related but far less noted component to Almodóvar’s refreshed formula was an embrace of literature, as subject matter and source material. In 1990, he had acquired the rights to Ruth Rendell’s thriller Live Flesh and was collaborating on a script with the playwright Christopher Hampton, fresh from his success adapting another novel about sex and power, Dangerous Liaisons. Speaking to the Literary Review in 1994 for a feature on directors’ dream projects, Almodóvar said he wanted to make a film of John Kennedy Toole’s “funny, pathetic and intelligent” novel A Confederacy of Dunces. (Both these novels were written in English; a part of the plan that never came to fruition was a desire to “leave Spain”.)

Talking about Kika, Almodóvar noted that the actor Peter Coyote, who plays an American novelist Nicholas Pierce, has “the face of a writer”. He said that he would “never” cast Antonio Banderas, who had appeared in five of his early films, in that kind of role. It would be excessive to say that the Banderas type, a lost, impulsive, often deranged young man, was replaced by a quieter or more sedentary writer type – and not only as Pierce turns out to be a characteristic early-Almodóvar psychopath. But Almodóvar’s next film, The Flower of My Secret (1995), concerned a romantic novelist, Leo, who is fed up with the work she produces under the nom de plume Amanda Gris. Since then, he has portrayed two young male short-story writers with an interest in Truman Capote (All About My Mother, Bad Education) and a travel writer (Talk to Her, 2002). He has now made four literary adaptations, while Volver (2006) borrowed the story of Leo’s non-Gris novel.

There has been a greater emphasis – allied to his increased engagement with the devices of melodrama and his growing interest in more reflective, less impulsive modes of behaviour – on the written and spoken word: keyboards, typewriters, letters, notes, manuscripts, speeches, confessions, song lyrics, voiceover and inter-titles. His films have retained a taste for the macabre, the lust for red, but it would be hard to imagine a character in one of his 1980s films ending, as Talk to Her does, with characters promising to “talk one day”. Back then a heart-to-heart was a less likely prospect than a double suicide or a spot of sado-masochism.

Almodóvar’s adaptations have all been loose, and the departures are revealing of his sunnier post-Kika mood. Ruth Rendell admired the film of Live Flesh, engrossing and slickly executed, but admitted she was mystified as to “why he bothered to buy the rights”. Only the outline remains: a young man, Víctor, goes to prison for shooting a police officer, David, who is left paralysed. But in her version, the gun belongs to Víctor, a serial rapist who has broken into a woman’s house. The novel begins as Law of Desire ends, with a young man (Banderas in the film) holding a woman hostage at gunpoint. In the version Almodóvar made, David marries Elena, the woman he had been trying to save during the siege – the equivalent figure in the source material plays no further role – while Víctor, is a victim, an unlucky bystander in a love triangle that involves David’s partner Sancho and Sancho’s wife Clara, figures without counterpart in the novel. (Philip French claimed that there was “more than simple coincidence at work here”, but there isn’t.) The addition of these characters gives the film hints of romantic tragedy but the essential vision is affirmative. Having begun with Víctor’s birth in Franco’s Madrid, the story ends with him addressing a message of social hope to his child.

In his next adaptation, 2011’s The Skin I Live In, Almodóvar took a different tack, making the plastic surgeon in Thierry Jonquet’s novel Tarantula (Banderas, still crazy after all these years) even more inventively sadistic. That film is not just an anomaly in Almodóvar’s body of work – “the only time,” as he put it, “I have tackled a truly terrifying thriller” – but at odds with the direction he had been moving.

Alice Munro’s trio of linked stories, “Chance”, “Soon” and “Silence”, were a closer fit. In Julieta (2016), Almodóvar increases the stories’ emphasis on the central character’s fractured relationship with her daughter, bringing things closer to the thematic terrain of All About My Mother. Many of the film’s most characteristic elements come from Munro. Yet despite his affinity for the material, Almodóvar still works to makes things more schematic and upbeat – more palatable. Julieta is allowed to identify her husband’s body, whereas Munro’s Juliet is told she cannot because an animal had “got at” him, and the decision is made to cremate him on the beach (“there was a realization, rather late, that consumption of fat, of heart and kidneys and liver, might produce explosive or sizzling noises”). When Munro’s Juliet concludes that her daughter was a “cold fish”, her friend rejects this account as “a parody of resolution” and the section ends. Almodóvar, by contrast, introduces a late revelation explaining the falling out and offers strong hope of reconciliation.

There’s a risk of blandness, even tameness, an engulfing sense of calm. At one point, Julieta’s boyfriend compares himself to a character from Patricia Highsmith. If only! Almodóvar recently described Julieta as the beginning of a period of “a greater sobriety”. Such a development – surely the “radical” break he had earlier rejected – was partly borne out by his subsequent films, Pain and Glory (2019) and Parallel Mothers (2021). But that process has been paused, and perhaps even reversed, in The Room Next Door.

At first, the film displays a number of his established bad habits, compounded by the switch of milieu. The first encounters between Ingrid and Martha unleash a torrent of backstory, via dialogue (“Then I went to work as a war correspondent”) and voiceover-flashback. The literary chatter is strained. Almodóvar’s concern with the Bloomsbury Group goes at least as far back as Talk to Her, where a character is reading The Hours, Michael Cunningham’s novel about the composition and legacy of Mrs Dalloway. But he seemingly didn’t realise that Julianne Moore – who appeared in the film of that book – was mispronouncing “Lytton Strachey”, while a native English speaker would be unlikely to ask Tilda Swinton, who played Ottoline Morrell in Jarman’s Wittgenstein, to exclaim: “What a group!”

You wouldn’t confuse The Room Next Door for Pepi, Luci, Bom, or even Moore’s previous film May December, the double portrait which she made with her regular collaborator – in some ways Almodóvar’s American counterpart and fellow Sirkian – Todd Haynes. A plotline involving Ingrid’s estranged daughter is more consoling than in Nunez’s book. An ex-boyfriend (John Turturro) displays a sweeter nature. But once the story moves upstate to a country house where the characters hang out and lie around and watch films as Ingrid plans to euthanise herself, The Room Next Door turns into something spiky, unnerving, and at times joyously silly. There’s even evidence of the eccentric male supporting role that was such a striking feature of the early work.

Almodóvar hasn’t offered such a balance of his impulses since at least Bad Education (a film that contained a genuine Mr Ripley type). But there’s a suppleness to the tone and rhythm, a humour that is neither outrageous nor merely wry, that has no obvious precedent. At one point, Ingrid and Martha watch the 1987 film version of Joyce’s “The Dead”. It seems an obvious choice. They have discussed and even quoted the story. The DVD is to hand. But there are other justifications for its presence. It is a rare example, cited by Almodóvar in The Last Dream, of the harmonious relationship between film and great literature – and an even rarer example of a director, John Huston, more than 40 years into his career, not only retaining signs of vision and vitality and engaging with traditional “late” subject matter but sounding some new notes as well.

[See also: Fight Club in the manosphere]