More Complete, More Pleasurable, More Bearable

Carla Marcantonio writes about Pedro Almodóvar and adaptation in relation to his two new works: “The Room Next Door” and “The Last Dream.”

By Carla MarcantonioDecember 20, 2024

• Film

• Cultural Studies

THIS SEPTEMBER, PEDRO ALMODÓVAR won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival for The Room Next Door (2024). Almodóvar’s 23rd feature film, this is his first feature-length work in English; his previous English-language films include the shorts The Human Voice (2020) and Strange Way of Life (2023). The Golden Lion is the director’s first top prize—the award for best film—at one of the global film industry’s most prestigious competitions.

In his acceptance speech, Almodóvar said he wished to share the award with his entire team, but particularly with the film’s two leads, Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore. Ultimately, he noted, The Room Next Door is about two women. He then paused, clearly overtaken by emotion, and told the gathered audience, “As directors, we are privileged to be the first witness when a miracle occurs in front of the camera.” Aside from offering an expression of admiration for the acting talent of his two leads, the director was referring to that intangible quality we call photogenicity—a kind of alchemical process whereby the camera reveals something about the person or the world captured that the naked eye cannot see.

In an interview at the National Board of Review screening in October, Swinton was asked about Almodóvar’s efficient and methodical approach to directing. She attested that, indeed, the director arrives on set with an exact idea of what he wants from the day’s shoot—from the cadence of the performers’ dialogue delivery to the meticulously selected costumes and décor to the exact blocking for the scene. She praised his attention to detail and clarity of vision, which ensures that only one or two takes are necessary on set. And yet, she marveled at how, even with so much control over his creative vision, Almodóvar would brim with awe, excitement, and even surprise at the results captured in the daily rushes, which he shared with his actors the next day. The transformation of what once existed before the camera into projected images, she suggested, is part of the magic—the miracle—of cinema.

Movies are built from a process of transformation and transmutation that begins when actors breathe life into the words on the page and continues when the camera captures their likeness and that of the world around them. In the case of adaptation, an underacknowledged aspect of Almodóvar’s creative process, this transformation begins even earlier. The Room Next Door is based on Sigrid Nunez’s novel What Are You Going Through (2020). Adapting a work of literature to cinema involves its own alchemical process—imprecise in its adherence to certain novelistic details that escape the possibilities of a visual and time-based medium but, when done well, remain faithful to the spirit of the original text. For his adaptation, Almodóvar focuses on one of the novel’s central situations: an unnamed, first-person protagonist, also a writer, goes to visit an old friend who is convalescing at the hospital. Her friend is dying of cancer and asks the protagonist to keep her company during her last days as she prepares to end her own life: “Cancer can’t get me if I get me first.”

This becomes both a terrifying and a seductive proposition. “This is a new adventure,” the friend says. “What if something goes wrong? What if everything goes wrong? I need to know there’s someone in the next room.” In the film, the protagonist accompanies her friend to a rented house in the woods, and what ensues is a poignant exploration of the protagonist’s thoughts and experiences of her friend: one woman prepares to die, while the other wrestles with the prospect of her death. In the film, the characters have names: Martha (Swinton), who is terminally ill, and Ingrid (Moore), who accompanies her friend on her journey toward death.

In interviews, Almodóvar has been candid about the fact that the film is a loose adaptation of the novel, given that the meandering inner dialogue of the book’s narrator is impossible to translate onto the big screen. Once refracted through the director’s distinct aesthetic and cultural sensibility, the story takes on a different incarnation—one that also involved the novel’s translation from English to Spanish, and the script’s from Spanish back to English. Perhaps most significantly, however, the adaptation becomes an opportunity for the director to infuse the story with his own perspective and ruminations about mortality. The Room Next Door drives home how Almodóvar’s adaptations of English-language original texts inspire a more austere and contained register than the baroque universe for which his cinematic emotional and aesthetic style is better known.

Julieta (2016), based on three Alice Munro stories from Runaway (2004), heralded this new turn in Almodóvar’s filmmaking. Julieta was initially intended to be his first feature film in English, but Almodóvar ultimately opted to transpose the stories to a Spanish context. Nonetheless, it marked a definitive departure from his heavily plotted, over-the-top scenarios that burst with the spirit of revolt, confronting everything Franco’s Spain might have stood for (Almodóvar began his filmmaking career just as Franco’s 40-year repressive dictatorship was sunsetting). Like Julieta, Pain and Glory (2019), Parallel Mothers (2021), and The Room Next Door are intimate, spare pieces centered on loss and mortality, but they are no less political.

The Room Next Door is about a person’s right—as the director sees it—to euthanasia once life has nothing left to offer but pain and suffering. The film also raises the alarm about global warming. As in the novel, the protagonist’s ex-lover, who is an impassioned environmentalist, rails against climate change deniers in the face of mounting evidence that our ecosystems are also in a death spiral. (In the film, he is a former lover to both Martha and Ingrid.) Yet, in typical Almodóvarian fashion, despite the grim topics that The Room Next Door tackles, it still affirms life through its characters’ vitality and sense of self-determination.

Perhaps the more significant “liberty” that Almodóvar took with the original text is the role he cast for Martha’s estranged daughter. In the novel, the friend has, as the narrator puts it, reconciled with not being reconciled with her daughter. In the film, though this remains true, Almodóvar imagines a different ending: Michelle, Martha’s daughter, arrives to visit Ingrid at the house in the woods shortly after Martha’s death. Michelle is also played by Swinton, lending the scene an air of reincarnation—or, one might also say, regeneration and transmutation. Ingrid will get to share Martha’s stories with Michelle, revelations that may help Michelle understand her troubled past with her mother and perhaps allow her to heal.

Reincarnation, transformation, and transmutation are as much descriptors of Almodóvar’s creative process as they are motifs in The Room Next Door. An original and fiercely independent filmmaker, he is less often recognized as a master of adaptation—and not just in its traditional, literary meaning. References to his former films live within his current film, as do works of art—film, music, literature, and painting—that have moved him. These references never just stand alone as pure homage but instead become an integral part of the storytelling; they inflect meaning, and, in turn, their meaning is transformed by the role they play in the narrative. Like Swinton playing Michelle, they are living, breathing entities with clear reference points to a moment past while they animate a new future.

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Nunez’s text is filled with ample references to other literary and artistic works, but Almodóvar imports his own distinct set of references to The Room Next Door. The most explicitly foregrounded is James Joyce’s 1914 short story “The Dead,” by way of John Huston’s 1987 film of the same title, his final directorial effort. One day, while the narrator of What Are You Going Through visits her friend in the hospital, it begins to snow, as it does throughout “The Dead.” The friend notes that the snowflakes falling on the New York City landscape are reflecting the light of dusk: “Pink snowflakes […] I’ve lived to see that.”

Almodóvar includes this moment in his film, but, unlike in the novel, he returns to the motif of snow twice more. The first time, as in the novel, the women watch the snow falling upon New York City; in this scene, Almodóvar is true to the words spoken in the novel. The second time, snow is referenced at a narrative turning point, after the two women have spent an entire night watching films, including The Dead. We see the final scene of Houston’s film projected—a film within the film—and hear, in voice-over: “[Gabriel’s] soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.”

Snow appears a third time in the film’s closing sequence, as it falls upon Ingrid and Michelle—blessing, in a way, the potential of a budding relationship between surrogate mother and daughter. It feels as if Martha is making her presence felt, orchestrating their meeting (Swinton’s “resurrected” presence ensures this). Ingrid riffs off Joyce as she voices the film’s final words: “The snow is falling. It’s falling on the lonely pool we never used. It’s falling on the woods, where we walked and you lay, exhausted, on the ground. Falling on your daughter and on me. Falling upon the living and the dead.” And thus, the transformation occurs, from Nunez to Huston to Almodóvar.

The fragile and evanescent nature of the snowflake becomes, in Almodóvar’s film, a larger metaphor for both the fragility of life and its regeneration. It becomes a key to appreciating the director’s relationship to adaptation (and citation), as the repetition of the trope underlines how, in Almodóvar’s film, the persistence of life is foregrounded over that of loss and death. Moreover, as the film’s recurring motif, the snowflake is a mark of all the multilayered temporal movements encased in the process of adaptation and citationality. It emerges from Nunez’s novel, takes us back to its mention in Joyce’s “The Dead” (not cited in the novel), then forward in time to Huston’s cinematic adaptation of the story—and with it, a reminder that the film, too, was made at a moment when Huston was confronting his own impending death. Viewers are also aware that, starting at least with Pain and Glory, Almodóvar himself is wrestling with his own mortality.

When asked in interviews whether he sees himself continuing to make films, Almodóvar answers that he wishes to emulate Huston, who made his last film despite being confined to a wheelchair and hooked to an oxygen tank. To extend the metaphor one last time, the image of falling snow reflects the recognition that the fragile and fleeting nature of life has been explored in countless literary and cinematic works, each offering its own unique variation.

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It is perhaps not a coincidence that as Almodóvar reflects on his long career, he has released a book of short stories and essays coinciding with the release of his new film. The Last Dream is a collection written over the course of almost 60 years (1967–2023). The stories give us a glimpse into a kind of “backstage” of the director’s creative process: he always writes in prose first, well before he adapts his own stories into script format. In fact, he has repeatedly confessed that he is a filmmaker only because he was first a frustrated novelist.

As Almodóvar shares with his readers in the introduction, his primary vocation is not that of filmmaker but, rather, of storyteller (“fabulator”), and the collected stories in The Last Dream are a testament to this. The collection takes its name from one of its stories; more than a story, though, “The Last Dream” captures the artist putting thoughts to paper the day after his mother has died. Nowhere in Almodóvar’s writings or films does he appear quite as vulnerable. When asked in interviews why he is so inclined toward making movies about women, he always responds that, for him, women are at the source of fiction.

In “The Last Dream,” Almodóvar explains how this starts with his mother: “I learned much from my mother, without either of us realizing. I learned something vital to my work, the distinction between fiction and reality, and how reality needs to be complemented by fiction to make life easier.” He explains that when they moved to a small town in Extremadura when he was still a young boy, his mother would read letters for neighbors who were illiterate. Almodóvar could read, and as he looked over his mother’s shoulder, he could tell that she did not always stick to what the letter said. His mother often either embellished the content or made it up altogether. When he pressed her for an explanation, her answer provided the future storyteller with a transcendent piece of logic: “But did you see how happy she was?” He learned that “reality needs fictions in order to be more complete, more pleasurable, more bearable.”

Almodóvar briefly captures his relationship with his mother in his semi-autobiographical film Pain and Glory, and the short stories in fact contain clear reference points to the films. “The Visit,” in particular, has a long history. It is a story that Almodóvar wrote in his late teens, before he ever made a film; aspects of it made their way into Law of Desire (1987), only to be revisited and expanded for Bad Education (2004). In the latter, a text titled “La Visita” brings together the film’s characters and organizes its temporal shifts. There are elements of “Too Many Gender Swaps” in Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (1988) and All About My Mother (1999)—particularly the latter’s shared references to John Cassavetes’s Opening Night (1977) and Tennessee Williams’s play A Streetcar Named Desire (1947).

Almodóvar’s penchant for paying homage to his influences—personal, aesthetic, and intertextual—is as evident in his stories as it is in his films. In “Adiós, Volcano,” he bids farewell to one of Mexico’s most beloved singers of ranchera music, Chavela Vargas. Vargas was a celebrated singer who fell from grace due to excessive drinking and disappeared from public view for decades, only to eventually reemerge in full diva glory in her seventies. It is a story fit for an Almodóvar film, even aside from the fact that Almodóvar played a role in her rediscovery. He tells us that he searched high and low for 20 years until he finally found her, and his description of her songs could easily describe many of his characters: “Chavela Vargas fashioned loneliness and abandonment into a cathedral that turned no one away and from which we emerged reconciled to our mistakes, and willing to carry on making them—to try again.” Her voice has not only graced the soundtrack of his films; in I’m So Excited! (2013), the plane “Chavela Blanca,” where most of the action takes place, is named after her (and after Blanca Sánchez, another of Almodóvar’s friends who, like Chavela, had recently died).

Almodóvar never stops writing. This collection, he explains in the introduction, is only a selection from the archive maintained by his assistant, Lola García. He writes set pieces to entertain himself or just pass the time; writing, he continues, is an antidote against boredom. Some of these writings became the basis of films produced decades later, as is the case with a conversation between two former lovers that inspired the short film Strange Way of Life, the play (“The Addiction”) within the film in Pain and Glory, or the silent film (“The Shrinking Lover”) within the film in Talk to Her (2002).

In his words, Almodóvar likes to cheat on his current project, particularly once he is at the promotion stage of a film, by starting something new. In the book’s introduction, he shares that he revisited the short stories he had not read in decades and made his selection of them for The Last Dream as a “side project” during the preproduction and postproduction of Strange Way of Life. He wrote Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown and Pain and Glory in a few weeks. Others, like Bad Education and The Skin I Live In (2011), he worked on for eight, even 10 years, storing various working drafts in his “desk drawer” (or computer desktop). This is his answer to writer’s block—if he gets stuck on one project, he moves to another until he feels one of his stories is finally ready for production. In fact, his next film project, expected to enter preproduction in the next couple of months, will be an extension of one of The Last Dream’s short stories, “Bitter Christmas.”

Almodóvar’s artistic output forms one great mosaic of interwoven connections, everything in the director’s creative career linked together through a sort of multidimensional grid—his own kind of art-house multiverse. The tropes of reincarnation, transmutation, and transformation at the core of The Room Next Door reflect the intricacies of an artistic career that, though not autobiographical, finds new and varied ways to stage the personal. This goes beyond transposing events, people, and relationships from his life into a world of fiction; it also incorporates elements of his lived experience: what he has written, filmed, watched, read, heard about, and dreamed. Parallel Mothers, Pain and Glory, and The Room Next Door even use some of the director’s own still-life photographs and paintings as part of the decor.

Both women in The Room Next Door are writers—one was a war correspondent, and the other writes autofiction. In this respect, the film is a love letter to the writer’s struggle to capture and convey life for posterity, which also makes it, inevitably, about communicating how one lives and dies. Swinton and Moore, in the roles of Martha and Ingrid, traverse a kind of limbo throughout the film—they are frequently shot in reflection, through windowpanes, appearing almost ghostly at times. Facing death, they tread along the edges of reality.

Returning to the fragility and mortality invoked in the film’s closing shots, the recurring image of falling snow underscores Almodóvar’s cyclical approach to meaning-making, his emphasis on how cinema itself has always been invested in a cycle of death and rebirth; like snow, film itself is made by evanescent elements, light and shadow. The closing scenes of The Room Next Door, in which two women rest upon red and green lawn chairs, bring to mind Talk To Her, which follows two women in comas who also rest next to one another; the latter is arguably the first film where Almodóvar tackled the connection between mortality and creativity. In the posthumous, latent reconciliation that the relationship between Ingrid and Michelle portends, one can also discern a kind of corrective to the story of Julieta, which revolves around the estrangement of a mother and daughter. And given the recent revelations about the relationship between Alice Munro and her own daughter, the scene is driven by the impossible desire to heal intractable wounds.

The imagination can be a political tool, one almost impossible to counter. Fiction not only has the power to reflect the world but also the power to create it. The Room Next Door may be shot in a different language from the rest of Almodóvar’s features, but it stands squarely within his oeuvre as an example of the director’s artistic investment in projecting worlds where the ultimate gifts people exchange are profound acceptance and hope. Translation is a form of adaptation, adaptation a kind of transmutation, and at the heart of the director’s creative vision, in its most baroque or austere forms, is a commitment to the power—personal, creative, and political—of transformation.