By JOSÉ CASTILHO MARQUES NETO*
Considerations on the film directed by Pedro Almodóvar
“I don’t have room in my house for makeup, I don’t pretend on my face what I don’t feel in my heart”
(Erasmus, The praise of madness.
1.
We have arrived in the first quarter of the announced 21st century, a symbolic time frame in which looking at the world around us not only seems sensible to me, but also necessary for our (sur)vival. More than our personal achievements and affirmations and the increasingly rarefied social gains – and both should be celebrated on this date –, looking at the world next door in these times that we usually call a “crazy world”, where everything is “crazy”, is above all prudence, the kind that makes us look at the present by looking at the past and glimpsing the future.
But it is not enough for us to just look, because our eyes are tired of so much that we see in the interconnectivity of hyper images controlled by Musks e Zuckerberg's used in order to corrupt the critical eye, demobilize rebellions and tame any non-bovine reactions.
Despite living in an age of high technology, this whole set of events that defines the current world, which combines the normalization of violent relationships in everyday life with the exaltation of the worst that is in us as a public spectacle and authoritarian literature, finds similarities in other times when humanity faced moments of profound transition. The exhibition Figures of the Four, in the Louvre Museum, reminds us that before the contemporary conception of madness as a mental illness, it was attributed to those who rebelled against the world in which they lived.
The latest film released by Pedro Almodóvar, The room next door, based on the book What are you facing?, by Sigrid Nunez (Ed. Instante, 2021), and winner of the Golden Lion at the last Venice Film Festival, has the contemporary world as its protagonist. That's how I read it, that's how I saw the world and that's how I share it with you.
2.
The characters of Julianne Moore and Tilda Swinton, sensitive interpreters of the drama surrounding the visceral friendship of two women, permeated by the death of one of them by suicide, are mixed with a look at and for the planet and the lost human beings who inhabit it in this very sad moment.
Pedro Almodóvar closes in The room next door the central anxieties of our time and composes them as only the genius of a great artist can achieve: with subtle and economical gestures, speech and touches, almost a reverse aesthetic of the profusion and exuberance of colors, speech, gestures and touches of his first films and which made him unique in cinema.
Amidst the chaos of social networks; the vain stridency of coaches e influencers that flood us with fake news minute by minute; of the age-old hypocrisies of soul saviors disguised as priests and pastors; of the political and religious fanaticism that takes us back to the barbaric beginnings of humanity; of an ultra-right that is increasingly close to the genocides that once outraged us; of the growing barbarity of war crimes that persist in conflict zones in every corner of the earth, whether as regular war or the daily extermination of the poor, women, blacks and vulnerable; Pedro Almodóvar denounces this sad world with the forceful personality of a dying and free woman, autonomous, conscious, a peace activist who is a war reporter, and the master of her own destiny.
The serene and at the same time desperate decision to commit suicide with the assistance of a friend in order to die with dignity, as exemplified by the great poet and essayist Antonio Cícero, in a similar reflection, is the guiding thread of an intelligent and sensitive plot that shows the power of a human being who is aware of his or her humanity and his or her limits. The war journalist, played by Tilda Swinton, who is dying, exposes all the autonomy that we as human beings are losing when we give up on being aware and autonomous in our thoughts and actions.
In her decision to die by an act of her own conscious will, and not by the intricacies of suffering from incurable cancer, she reaffirms the secularity of thought, the purity of being who she can be on her own and, in a sensitive connection that we are gregarious beings and that others should exist for solidarity among us, she calls for the presence of her friend because, even though she is conscious and firm in her purpose, she needs someone by her side. The “holding hands”, an appeal so present in moments of great vulnerability, appears in the film at its freest moment, that of liberation from pain and the achievement of a dignified death through a reasoned decision.
Julianne Moore’s character, who is, I think, not by chance, a writer, is called to accompany her friend on her journey, not as a witness or observer, but as a supportive human presence at the moment of affirmation of another integral human being. By overcoming her fears expressed in her literary work and expressing a deeply human solidarity with her dying friend, Moore’s character experiences something that the world of neoliberalism, false morality, and religiosity manipulated by power is killing: our ability to be empathetic, that is, to put ourselves in the other person’s shoes.
The film unfolds in a climate of strange and blunt delicacy, and I can't help but think that perhaps it is a narrative that the ancients called a "slap with a kid glove", in this case in the face of all of us who watch, with dejection and despair, as the apocalypse is being built in our backyards in a world that is in full disintegration, just like the decaying body of the terminally ill character. Once again, Pedro Almodóvar warns us in this film about what is at stake and how much we are being negligent in not rebelling enough to rescue the dignity of human life. There is, as I understand there has always been in his filmography, a bold but true radicalism, with deep roots.
3.
It is also impossible not to notice the gender subtleties that the film conveys. The only two male characters, although they are contrasted – one is an intellectual, theoretician and activist against climate destruction and the other is a fanatical religious police officer, defender of the morality of these dark times – are the weak link that represents either the discouragement of a world that already considers itself lost or the obtuse and fascist attitude of being guided by low instincts and repetitive dogmatic thoughts.
They are the opposites of the female characters, human in their doubts and anxieties, but firm in defending life and building the possibility of getting out of this. In one of the dialogues, the man says to his supportive friend: I have always admired you for your ability to be firm in facing conflicts and harmonizing them. This says a lot about the female perspective and seems to me to say more than many treatises about the central place of women in the difficult contemporary society.
With the announcement of perhaps even more difficult times for humanity, of the continuation of wars and new fascisms, The room next door rescues a possibility of looking with courage and autonomy at who we are and what we want.
Perhaps we are in time to start, this New Year, the movement to take the boats adrift towards the island of madness, looking critically at what Sebastian Brant wrote in his famous text The ship of fools, vision of the world that he envisioned in 1494, times of change like ours: “The world remains in deep darkness and persists, blind, in sin. The streets are full of madmen. They carry out their madness everywhere, but they don’t want anyone to say it. That’s why I studied the project of equipping the ships of the madmen for them! ….It is the Mirror of the Madmen in which everyone can recognize themselves. Anyone who looks closely will understand that it would be wrong to consider himself a wise man, because he will see his true face.”
May we be able to take back the helm of our collective lives. Let us salute the good fights of 2025!
*José Castilho Marques Neto He is a retired professor of philosophy at FCL-Unesp. He was president of Editora Unesp and the Mário de Andrade Library and Executive Secretary of the PNLL (MinC and MEC). Author, among other books, of Revolutionary loneliness: Mário Pedrosa and the origins of Trotskyism in Brazil (WMF). [https://amzn.to/3XNwXEi]
Originally published in the newspaper Draft.
Reference
The room next door (The House Next Door).
USA, Spain, 2024, 107 minutes.
Directed by: Pedro Almodovar
Screenplay: Pedro Almodóvar and Sigrid Nunez Cast: Julianne Moore and Tilda Swinton, John Turtur
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