Friendship trumps death in Almodovar's feature at Venice

Spain's Pedro Almodovar has a problem wrapping his head around death.

In his latest film, ‘The Room Next Door’, the prolific 74-year-old director -- whose films have become steadily more melancholy in recent years -- celebrates the strong friendship of two women as one of them is preparing to die.

"I cannot understand with my mind that something that is alive has to die," Almodovar said ahead of the film's world premiere at the Venice Film Festival, where it is one of 21 movies competing for the Golden Lion prize.

"In that sense I am really, really like a child, very immature, because death is everywhere -- we have wars, just to see on the news, it's everywhere," he told a press conference.

The director's first full-length English-language feature sees regular Almodovar collaborator Tilda Swinton as a war correspondent suffering from terminal cancer, and Julianne Moore as her friend, a successful novelist who agrees to be at her side when she takes her own life.

"This is a film in favour of euthanasia," he stated. Despite the heavy subject matter, Almodovar suggested that his focus on close, personal bonds served as an antidote to the divisive rhetoric prevalent in society today.

"Ultimately it's the response to hate speech that we are hearing, every day. This movie is exactly the opposite of that speech," said the "Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown" director.

He also called "profoundly stupid" a proposal by far-right politicians in Spain to intercept arriving migrants with Navy ships, saying that "I want to send a message... to all those unaccompanied children who are fighting to reach our borders."

And he denounced "denialist speech" about climate change: "What I propose is the opposite. The film tells of a woman who is dying in a world that is probably also dying." "We are in danger, the planet is in danger," he warned.

For more than a decade, Almodovar has been embracing a more poignant tone in his work, steering away from the transgressive, over-the-top black comedies of his early days towards films that consider the fear of death or physical decline.

His "Pain and Glory" from 2019 featured Antonio Banderas playing an ailing director that the filmmaker has acknowledged was modelled on himself.

But for Swinton, who interprets the dying Martha, the actors and director "talked a lot about life, we didn't really talk much about death at all".

She told journalists the film celebrates self-determination, "Somebody who decides absolutely to take her life and her living and her dying into her own hands and make it how she wants it to be, as far as she can."

"It's about a triumph, this film."

For Moore, one of the film's most compelling elements was the deep relationship between the two protagonists.

"We very, very rarely see a story about female friendship, especially female friends who are older," Moore said.

"The fact that he chose to portray this relationship, to elevate it, to show it as the love story it is I think is truly extraordinary."

"The Room Next Door" is not Almodovar's first foray into English-language filmmaking. His first, the short-format "The Human Voice", premiered at Venice in 2020, featuring Swinton as an abandoned lover.

At Cannes last year, the director presented another short, "Strange Way of Life", a gay Western starring Ethan Hawke and Pedro Pascal.

Working in English for a full-length feature posed little problem, said Almodovar, who acknowledged he had initially been wary.

"I was very happy because I thought I would have more problems," he said, giving credit to his two actresses.

"Basically they understood exactly the tone that I wanted to tell the story," he said, calling it "austere, emotional, but not melodramatic at all".

Almodovar is a regular at Venice, and accepted a career achievement Golden Lion award in 2019.

His last appearance on the Lido was in 2021, when his "Parallel Mothers", about two women who give birth the same day, won a best actress award for Penelope Cruz.