Before last summer, Pedro Almodóvar had never won any of the top prizes at the major European film festivals: Cannes, Venice, Berlin. But a jury led by Isabelle Huppert gave his latest, The Room Next Door, the Golden Lion in Venice less than six months ago. Now, as always, he’s back in Baltimore the January after his movie came out everywhere else, but again, as always, people take Almodóvar for granted. I saw The Room Next Door at 9:45 on a Tuesday night when it was 11 degrees outside. I was alone in the theater. When I saw a double bill of Strange Way of Life and La Voz Humana, it was me and one other dude several rows up and to the right. But at the same time, theater 3 at the Charles was packed around this time in January 2022 for Parallel Mothers, a relatively successful movie at a time when most people hadn’t yet emerged from the comfort and complacency of a lockdown lifestyle.
Unlike most American movies, big or small, The Room Next Door addresses the present, however fleetingly: John Turturro’s character talks about the pandemic and how it’s changed his habits, how he doesn’t go to “the cinema” anymore, doesn’t go to concerts, doesn’t go out, but reads more… and he’s deadly earnest about a coming apocalypse caused by climate change. He’s even urged friends not to have children because of the environment. One hopes that Almodóvar is mocking a certain type of person with this character, but it’s hard to tell with an artist so cozy in the firmament of contemporary world cinema. He may not have ever won the Palme d’Or, but he almost always competes, and, ironically, he’s won an Oscar—check out this amazing clip of collaborators Penélope Cruz and Antonio Banderas presenting Almodóvar with the award for Best Foreign Language Film, Cruz belting out “PEDRO!!!”
Is The Room Next Door a lifetime achievement award? No, it deserved the Golden Lion: this is prime cut Almodóvar, not late-style but the work of a confident master. He doesn’t need or want to indulge in the sensationalism and borderline absurdity of his earlier work—even Broken Embraces, which I saw in high school, feels like a Roger Corman movie compared to this—but he hasn’t dulled at all, and even if he’s as worried about climate change as the Turturro character, his prefab institutional leftism doesn’t infect the work.
This isn’t a movie about how the audience needs to do a better job about [x, y, and z]—it’s about two women played by Julianne Moore and Tilda Swinton, the latter dying of terminal cancer and the former tasked with being present on the day of her suicide, in the room next door at the cabin they’ve rented. In the end, it turns out Swinton asked someone else first and she refused; Alessandro Nivola, in a single scene which earns him a place on the poster and in the opening credits, plays a fundamentalist religious cop who drills Moore, “I think you’re lying. I think you’re the type of person who would help a friend of theirs commit suicide.”
Almodóvar will be 76 in July. Where is his Spanish heir, the one who Sony Pictures Classics, Focus, Amazon, etc. will produce and distribute as the sole “foreign auteur” constantly on their slate? Outside of Spain, why isn’t Radu Jude getting seen outside of New York and Los Angeles? His films, according to Jonathan Rosenbaum, “it’s like Godard, almost, these films are coming so fast,” and yet we can’t see them in most of the United States. Almodóvar is the only auteur not working in English to have all of his films distributed outside the coasts in my lifetime. That’s not a sign of an unhealthy world cinema, just lack of imagination, curiosity, and risk—never mind, they love risk, their movies bomb all the time.
I saw The Room Next Door in a big stadium seated theater near midnight on a freezing cold night in Baltimore. Only three years younger than the late David Lynch, Almodóvar is more prolific, but just as the sadness of Lynch’s death is the finality of no more Lynch works, Almodóvar’s on the horizon, and his last several films have dealt with that. They’ve all been great. Don’t take him for granted.
—Follow Nicky Otis Smith on Twitter and Instagram: @nickyotissmith