In 'The Room Next Door', Almodóvar puts himself on trial
In his new film, the Spanish director examines what is left for a great artist to say after having already created his greatest works, presenting a smart, funny, and love-filled cinematic experience. Despite his infuriating political stances, the film remains an excellent work of art.
Few directors have managed to build a cinematic world that can be recognized in seconds. For over four decades, Pedro Almodóvar has turned vibrant colors, passion, sexuality, heartbreak, and black humor into a language uniquely his own. He has written some of the greatest roles in European cinema for women, moved seamlessly between melodrama and wild comedy, and transformed stories that could have seemed absurd into living, pulsating human emotion.
Almodóvar has turned the camera on himself before, most notably in 'Pain and Glory', but in 'The Room Next Door', released today in Israeli theaters, this gaze has become more sober and cruel. This time, the question is not just where his stories come from, but what is left for a great artist after he has already created his greatest works.
At the center of the film is Elsa (Tilda Swinton), a film director forced to compromise by directing commercials while dealing with her mother's death, a creative crisis, and bouts of anxiety. Simultaneously, we meet Raul (John Turturro), a successful older director also suffering from writer's block, while Monica (Julianne Moore), his longtime assistant and partner, asks to distance herself to help a close friend. Gradually, the stories intertwine into a labyrinth of reflections where the boundary between life and art is erased.
Art as Appropriation
The heart of the film is an attempt to understand how a creator takes ownership of another person's story just because he managed to turn it into cinema. Raul does not process reality in an orderly way; he steals from it, switches genders, and moves pain from one person to another to keep himself at the center. In this sense, 'The Room Next Door' is perhaps the film in which Almodóvar puts himself on trial most directly. Raul is talented but egocentric and sometimes downright cruel: their pain arouses his creative curiosity before it arouses his compassion.
The fact that Almodóvar chooses to write his alter ego through a woman complicates the discussion further. The film dares to ask if this love for his female characters was a form of appropriation, and if the man who wrote wonderful women for decades truly saw them, or if he sometimes used them to tell his own story again.
Tilda Swinton is excellent as Elsa, holding together the fragility and selfishness of a character on the verge of collapse. Julianne Moore gives Monica a presence that grows as the film progresses, eventually becoming the moral center of the film when she demands that Raul see her as a person in her own right, not just as raw material.
Politics and Art
Almodóvar has been a sharp critic of Israel for years, which is infuriating to many. However, the reaction to political criticism should not be a boycott of the work. If we demand that the world not boycott Israeli artists because of the positions of the Israeli government, we must apply the same principle to an artist who criticizes us. The freedom to create and watch must be preserved even when the artist annoys us.
'The Room Next Door' is not one of Almodóvar's greatest films, and it has moments of self-indulgence. But it is still an excellent, rich, and free film by a director who understands that his peak may be behind him and refuses to pretend otherwise. Instead of trying to recreate his youth, he turns this very fear into raw material. If this film proves anything, it is that even when Almodóvar fears he has run out of stories, he still possesses more love for cinema than most directors have at the start of their path.
