Imitations of life: "The Room Next Door"

The transition is complete. After forty-plus years of working in his native tongue, Pedro Almodóvar is the latest arthouse luminary to become an English-language filmmaker, chasing his striking lockdown short The Human Voice with a full-length feature, The Room Next Door, which won the director his first major festival prize at Venice last month. You do wonder who's going to be left making movies in their own, non-English languages in ten years, and whether arthouse as a concept is doomed to extinction as our underfunded culture bends back towards the middle, but the new film, an adaptation of Sigrid Nunez's 2020 novel What Are You Going Through, initially suggests a promising continuity with the filmmaker's earlier works. It's there in the very Almodóvarian delight in stories and stories-within-stories, the effort to layer something up; the thematic interest in fate, motherhood, sex and death; and in the desirable living spaces, here sourced in central and upstate New York rather than the usual Madrid. The enduring commitment to shades of scarlet, meanwhile, is such that Almodóvar casts as his leads two of the contemporary cinema's most celebrated redheads in Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore. At first glance, Room seems to offer practically everything we've come to think of as Almodóvar, save only the subtitles. Is that, one wonders, why this is also the first of this director's films to feel so wordy, even windy in places? Some protective barrier seems to have been removed, leaving us to stare down a tsunami of thoughts, feelings and emotions - which is not to say that you won't still find yourself being swept away by it.

Some of the issue can be traced back to Nunez's original set-up: two writers trying to get everything out before their bodies give up on them, one (Swinton) a war reporter whose cancer has taken a turn for the terminal, the other (Moore) a novelist and art historian whose need to hear out her old friend's confessions extends to cohabitation in the latter's final days before playing a role of some kind in a proposed euthanasia plot. As the pair reconnect, bond and prepare to say a last goodbye, it gradually becomes apparent why Almodóvar cast two performers it has been a proven pleasure to see talk; it may be that this is the only chance Room has of working. Between them, Moore and Swinton lend the script a fighting chance, and in return - whether gabbing or listening - they find their faces caressed in the tenderest of close-ups. Swinton makes for one of the movies' few credible cancer patients, styling revealing a mole under her right eyebrow that somehow corresponds to the black spots accessorising her organs, the drawling or slurring of words speaking to heavy medication or a tiredness of jaw that could possibly be the actor's own. Moore has the more reactive role, but she's typically no-nonsense with it, describing instead a mounting inner conflict over the degree to which this bond is being tested almost as soon as it's been renewed. Yet often those adoring close-ups seem like a defensive strategy, and a giveaway of the film's one great narrative limitation. We get a lot of what's inside these two women - concerns, dreams, fears, regrets, all poured out in torrents of verbosity - but only ever a sketchy feel for the world around them. Almodóvar hasn't quite got his feet under this particular designer coffee table just yet, and that's odd to witness in someone who's spent the past quarter-century appearing generally sure-footed.

Flashbacks reveal Swinton's reporting on a naggingly unspecified conflict; the exteriors are so visually generic, in the main, that they may as well be Vancouver passing for New York. There's the odd foray into Edward Hopper pastiche, one of a series of nods to American artists (Faulkner, Hemingway, Buster Keaton, John Huston) which indicate the director is being canny indeed about currying the favour of new executives, audiences and awards voters, but it's a curious thing to see Almodóvar aspiring to the art of others, rather than finding (and then redecorating) a room of his own. The best Almodóvars (you'll have your own favourites; this filmography is now rich enough to allow everyone else theirs) expand in every direction as far as the eye can see; every character gets instilled with complex, turbulent life, and every line assumes two or more meanings. Room can seem poky and tinny by comparison: two women operating in a self-engineered bubble, corresponding to two actors working their butts off on a tightly guarded set. The Human Voice felt more expansive in its gestures and repercussions, and that was shot when social distancing was a thing. The new film retains lovely, absorbing, properly Almodóvarian scenes and spells: the deployment of birdsong, for one, the understanding art may be both a solace and finally not enough for another. It is also self-evidently the work of an artist thinking seriously about serious matters (mortality, euthanasia, war, climate change). Yet he's doing so at one crucial remove, in a second language, which partially explains why certain elements don't come together or seem irresolvably detached from the core: a fumbled scene between Moore and her personal trainer (Alvise Rigo) that has the shape of comedy but not the laughs Pedro massages into his Spanish films, John Turturro as a horny afterthought, a police investigation halted after five minutes. "Think of this as a rehearsal," Swinton tells Moore in the wake of one false alarm, and Room, strained and self-conscious, does have the feel of a runthrough for one of those illustrious theatrical engagements where star names alone ensure the tickets sell out in ten minutes or less. The best Almodóvars have always had a little of that theatre about them, but they've also been so much more besides - cinema, in fewer words.

The Room Next Door is now playing in selected cinemas.