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| Tilda Swinton with Julianne Moore at The Room Next Door New York Film Festival press conference: “I’ve always believed that there are three things that will always get you through: Art, friendship, and nature.” Photo: Anne Katrin Titze |
Pedro Almodóvar ’s first feature in English, The Room Next Door (adapted from Sigrid Nunez’s What Are You Going Through and Golden Lion winner at the Venice International Film Festival), starring Julianne Moore and Tilda Swinton with John Turturro, Alex Høgh Andersen, and Alessandro Nivola, was the Centerpiece Gala selection highlight of the 62nd New York Film Festival and will have its UK premiere at the London Film Festival this week. Film at Lincoln Center has announced that Pedro is the recipient of the 50th Chaplin Award. The Gala ceremony will take place on April 28, 2025.
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| Tilda Swinton on Pedro Almodóvar: “Everybody in Pedro’s films dressed not only for each other but for Pedro!” Photo: Anne Katrin Titze |
At a book signing, author Ingrid (Moore) learns from an acquaintance that her old friend Martha (Swinton), a war correspondent, is seriously ill in the hospital. Soon the two of them bond as if the time that passed since they last saw each other didn’t exist. Their exquisite faces fill the screen (cinematography by Eduard Grau) and the, as always in Almodóvar’s films, vibrant garments (costume design by Bina Daigeler) and eye-catching sets (by Inbal Weinberg with art direction by Gabriel Liste) paint a mood that feels more launch than coda.
Flowers and lots of fruit take up residence in various scenes, a reminder of the delights in the already plucked. The clothing - fabulous sweaters, an elegant trench coat here and a perfect woven leather tote there, a pungent green plaid jacket and a key lime-yellow suit - that the women wear for each other, speaks of their growing complicity.
The Room Next Door is packed not only with spectacular shots of nature and the city, humans und human-made things, it weaves in the power of other works of art organically and meticulously. The friends’ most consequential meeting happens in the lobby of Alice Tully Hall at Lincoln Center, where the New York Film Festival takes place, and the movie had its U.S. premiere (Almodóvar joked at the press conference how disappointed he would have been had it not been selected). The two are there to see Roberto Rossellini’s Journey To Italy and Martha suggests a voyage for them to Upstate New York.
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| Ingrid (Julianne Moore) with Martha (Tilda Swinton) in The Room Next Door |
Damien (Turturro), a former lover of both women, who meets Ingrid for a lunch of fruit (once more!), becomes the mouthpiece for all that is wrong with our world. He in a diatribe regurgitates it with gusto - from the rise of the far-right to the end of the planet, he says he completely lost faith. But Ingrid knows that “there are lots of ways to live inside tragedy.” He compliments her as being one of the rare people who “know how to suffer without making others feel guilty about it.”
Alessandro Nivola, playing a policeman in a poignant and intense scene of interrogation, is fantastic as an agent of disenchantment who shifts the perspectives between an outside law-and-order world and an inside were lies and truth stir differently. It is not the first time that an Almodóvar film tricked me into believing I saw a ghost, which ultimately turns out to be very much flesh and blood.
Pedro Almodóvar knows how to utilise the charms of a fairy tale to speak about the most urgent concerns in a way that is still comforting. His films and this one in particular embrace the possibility of change. You may be terribly afraid of death or feel incapable to endure loneliness, he shows, but there is a glorious sunset over the skyline, a movie that takes your breath away because it guessed your secret thoughts, a lipstick the colour of the ripest berry, and a friend you didn’t know you had.
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| Tilda Swinton on Ingrid and Martha: ”It’s almost like they are a mirror for each other, but they give each other form.” Photo: Anne Katrin Titze |
Anne-Katrin Titze: One of the ways the complicity between the two women shows itself without words is that they dress for each other. I never noticed it like that in a film before. I would like you to talk about the costume design and if you were dressing for each other!
Tilda Swinton: Everybody in Pedro’s films dressed not only for each other but for Pedro! That’s what colour is for. But I think you’re absolutely right. I think that’s a beautiful point. There’s something about the way they give each other shape [Julianne Moore is nodding and smiling in agreement]. It’s almost like they are a mirror for each other, but they give each other form. And as Pedro’s mentioned, they do affect each other. They do evolve in the nature of their complicity.
Ingrid changes. She starts this story terrified of death when she’s asked to do something that’s really really challenging for her. And she finds it and she even is aware that she finds it. She tells John’s [Turturro] character, I’m learning from her. She can feel it moving. And I think that Martha also, who has said that she doesn’t want to be alone, she’s alone in the end. She finds the courage. And just she’s filled up with the love and the witness of this old old friend.
And there’s something about this ancient friendship that I want to mention because we all, even young people, have old friends. And there’s something about having an old friendship that then is interrupted by a couple of decades. Finding someone again and knowing that you can go straight to the important stuff. Because all of the sort of, you know, what did you do last week and what about that affair that only lasted for a month - you don’t need to even bother about that. You can go really to what’s important and what hasn’t changed about you.
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| Pedro Almodóvar (holding up a copy of Sigrid Nunez's What Are You Going Through) with Tilda Swinton, Julianne Moore and John Turturro |
And there’s something about this relationship between these two old friends who haven’t seen each other for so long that I think is very particular but at the same time it’s particular on screen. I mean it’s very rare that we particularly see a relationship like this between two women on screen. But we do have these relationships and we also really rely on them. I mean, the question of reliance - there are three things. This is one of the things that I loved about the screenplay. You asked me what my response was to the screenplay when I first read it.
I’ve always believed that there are three things that will always get you through: art, friendship and nature. And that’s actually the text of this film. What Martha looks for when she’s really up against it are those three things. The democracy of nature, that’s what’s so beautiful about that extract from Joyce, from [John] Huston [a clip from the ending of The Dead]. You know, the snow is falling on all of us. And it will go on falling on all of us whatever we do. I think that feeling of, yeah, being there for each other and yes, I’m going to wear that bright green jersey because I think you’ll dig it!
The Room Next Door will have its UK première at the London Film Festival on Saturday, October 19.
The Room Next Door opens in the UK on Friday, October 25 and in the US on Friday, December 20.
