TIFF '24: The Art of Dying in One's Own Terms
Tuesday, September 17, 2024 at 9:00PM 
THE ROOM NEXT DOOR won the Golden Lion on the same day it first screened at TIFF.
Whether programmed with that intention or bonded by coincidence, one can often find films in conversation at festivals. Echoed themes and varied approaches to the same idea occur, often across sections, tying works together that were never meant to be considered in those terms. Some might disagree, but I find it to be a valuable experience, oft conducive to deeper thought, comparison and contrast. At this year's TIFF, for example, mortality was on many an artist's mind, from Godard, knowingly at the end of his rope, to the apocalyptic visions of Oppenheimer, Ostrikov, and Thibault Emin. From Cannes, there came meditations from Cronenberg and Schrader, films laden with grief, loss, and the need to take control. In documentary land, there are the recollections of an erstwhile death row inmate in The Freedom of Fierro.
Still, the most apparent conversation partners were two Spanish filmmakers, Pedro Almodóvar and Carlos Marques-Marcet, telling two euthanasia stories in The Room Next Door and They Will Be Dust…
THE ROOM NEXT DOOR, Pedro Almodóvar
Every late-in-life Almodóvar flick is, in essence, about its creator. In truth, a good portion of the director's filmography could be described within the realm of personal introspections cum autofiction. Pain & Glory is the most obvious example, but these matters need not be so self-evident. A woman behind the camera dealing with Spanish politics is as much a reflection of Almodóvar's emotional and ideological self as the perils of his Banderas-faced alter-ego. The same could be said about the director protagonist in Law of Desire, the many sons who regard their mothers with indescribable love, the artists and performers, the surgeon as auteur, the queer fabulists, storytellers, and so many others.
If nothing else, all these Almodóvar-like figures share a home. It's the director's own, as was all but confirmed in Pain & Glory, where Antxón Gómez explicitly based his designs on the filmmaker's abode. Suddenly, the similar sets across decades don't just seem like an aesthetic continuum. They are that, but they also represent an intimate closeness between Almodóvar and the fictions he places within his personal space. There's a great intimacy in sharing a home with one's imaginarium of characters. The décor, more than ornamental, becomes a source of confessional possibility, an imbuement of self-identification that tells us much about the auteur at hand.
In The Room Next Door, the Almodóvarian home is duplicated, almost tripled, reframing Sigrid Nunez's original novel as a Socratic dialogue of sorts, between the aging filmmaker and himself. Fittingly, it's the story of two creative people, writers who haven't seen each other for years but now reencounter at the end of one of their journeys. War journalist Martha is dying, her cancer terminal and unresponsive to treatment. Ingrid has just released a novel about accepting her unshakable terror for the very concept of death. They make quite the pair, a study in literary contrasts, especially stark when the moribund asks for a favor.
Martha wants to die on her own terms, spared of needless suffering, but she doesn't want to be alone when it happens. Ingrid won't have to be present, merely sleeping in the room next door, a strange and strangely comforting idea from the other woman's time in war zones. Their agreement is tentative but forged with conviction, leading to a film that's mostly made of one-on-one dialogues, sometimes disorienting in their bluntness, quiet contemplation, and the occasional sojourn down Martha's memory. Also, it's in English, a first for the Spanish director who, until now, had only dabbled in Anglophony in short-form exercises.
Linguistic variation will certainly throw many fans for a loop, especially those who don't speak Castellano or aren't too familiar with Spanish cadences. Almodóvar has always directed his actors toward a presentational register that flirts with the stilted and the arch. Stylization varies in degrees, but it's always there. Indeed, Broken Embraces has a whole plot point about the rhythmic, quasi-musical precision of Almodóvar's dialogues. Yet, The Room Next Door is sure to receive many an accusation of awkwardness from those unprepared for the familiar language in the defamiliarized context of the Spaniard's melodramas.
The cast makes no concessions to more mainstream American realism, though their director is playing with the national transplant of his cinema in other ways. Visual references abound to American art, from painters like Edward Hopper and Andrew Wyeth to the cinema of John Huston and Buster Keaton. The Room Next Door is Almodóvar's version of Wim Wenders' outsider view of the USA, Wong Kar Wai's Blueberry Nights, and many other such examples. Yet, the center is always death. It's Julianne Moore's frozen terror in unknowing rehearsals of loss. It's Tilda Swinton, looking cadaverous yet radiant, asserting one's ownership over their end.
Rather than sentimental or inflamed by passion, The Room Next Door feels played in a minor key, searching for lucidity in a world where it's hard to come by, morose but beautiful to the end, a death rattle in the form of pink snowfall.
THEY WILL BE DUST, Carlos Marques-Marcet
Red curtains like ruby velvet fill the screen with the promise of some grand performance. However, as they open to the sound of opera, the promised grandeur is nowhere to be found. Even their opening lacks the finesse of theatrical pageantry, shaken loose by a screaming woman lost in the hell of her pain. Into the domestic stage, the camera unspools a portrait of quotidian pandemonium in a long, uninterrupted take. It swirls and sways, witnessing the desperate fit of the infirm as well as the consternation her actions cause on the family that worries on the sidelines. Paramedics come in and seem to take control of her, leaving by ambulance, their patient in a stupor, perchance a trance.
Left behind in the fading echo of her screams, the husband appears similarly dazed. Only his eyes shine with shock, a hint of brokenness. He is Flavio, a theater director, and she is Claudia, an actress and dancer losing sight of herself due to a brain tumor. Not that the audience is given that right away. The lack of context for what's presented in the opening salvo makes for an odd feeling. Everything we see can be accepted as observed reality, even somewhat mundane despite the histrionics. Still, leaving the audience unmoored beckons a dream-like logic where strange happenings follow an internal logic mysterious to the viewer. It both makes sense and doesn't—a smart way to connect the viewer to Flavio's constricting grief and Claudia's wild subjectivity.
Director Carlos Marques-Marcet will take the latter unreality to extremes once husband and wife settle on the same page, with Ángela Molina and Alfredo Castro painting a beguiling picture of aged love that's both the film's anchor and one of the most romantic unions in recent cinema. It starts on the bus home from another doctor's visit. An old hand holds to the handlebar, a younger covers it, wrinkled flesh enclosed in the warmth of soft, supple skin still in the spring of its life. The light changes, and the people around Claudia get caught in a convulsing dance. They Will De Dust slips into one fluid dream. It's majestic, a ballet of mirrors and ululations, revealing that the audience is before a rather erratic musical.
Like his characters, Marques-Marcet rejects the vulgarity of the mundane, and looks for what exists beyond the boundaries of reason. Indeed, the sporadic interludes of song and dance pair well with the idea of artists facing the tragedy of the end by pulling the sinister sublime down to their world of make-belief and expressive extravagance. It turns what could come off as a whimsical affectation into an insightful revelation. It further bends less outré scenes toward an innate sense of spectacle. For example, when discussing the particularities of their mortal decisions, the couple is framed in the proscenium of a mirror, their talk sounding like the rehearsal for a future play.
Ultimately, these devices are all about giving agency to the dying, a voice amplified by cinema and its endless possibilities. Claudia's boundless spirit takes us on a bus ballet and a tacky duet while on a stroll, a morbid Busby Berkeley homage where she dances with skeleton chorus girls and promises that "pain won't have the power to spoil my garden." But she also pleads for her children to "remember me this way." In this relative logic, the film's transformations are themselves a manifestation of Claudia's insistent self-resolve. She and Flavio will keep their life stories as romantic comedy and deny an end that would retroactively make what came before the prelude to tragedy. They Will Be Dust is often devastating but similarly refuses to be seen as just that. It's much more than just that.
The film's multi-dimensionality doesn't manifest solely in the flourish of musical impossibility. Sometimes, it's the surge of anger and spiky words, the jagged accusation of a daughter who thinks her mother is always acting and the older woman's instinctual, instantly regretted, rebuke. In other occasions, the Swiss systematization of assisted death can produce a strange delight, gallows humor for a form of service than can feel absurd. And finally, after moving through a thousand tonal swerves, They Will Be Dust culminates in a tour de force. The sequence is framed by white sheets and flowers, soothing serene as Castro and Molina prove they're two of the best actors working today.
It's positively breathtaking, up to the end credits, set over flame while a jolly voice sings that everything comes to an end, nothing lasts. And why should that be sad?
Reader Comments (2)
This kind of just confirms to me, that The Room Next Door's destiny in the long term will be to be discussed as one of Almodóvar's best and most poignant film, almost a cinematic testament in advance. Because almost every mixed review or mild praise I've read focus on what Claudio points out, the way the cast talks, feeling "unrealistic" to them. Almodovar characters have talked and acted in an Almodovarian way, the same that Tarantino's or Carpenter's to name another two landmark filmmakers. It's just the novelty of actually not needing subtitles to understand what's said that becomes puzzling and a shock. But with a cast with Swinton, Moore (and Turturro!) it was unexpected to hear criticism about the way the movie is written and acted. It's Almodovar's trademark in directing!
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