Spanish director Pedro Almodovar returns to the Venice Film Festival on Monday with his first English-language feature, "The Room Next Door," starring Julianne Moore and Tilda Swinton.
The film is a meditation on death and friendship set in New England, and Almodóvar regular Swinton is a war correspondent suffering from terminal cancer. Moore is her friend, a successful writer, who agrees to be by her side in her final moments.
Actor John Turturro rounds out the leading trio in the film, which translates into English what the director has been developing for more than a decade in his native language - an increasingly melancholic cinema that tends to analyze the fear of death or physical decline.
"My insecurities disappeared after the first table read with the actresses... The language was not a problem," says Almodovar of his latest film, which has its world premiere at the Lido tonight.
"In my films people talk a lot... In 'The Room Next Door' Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore carry the weight of the whole film on their shoulders and are a real spectacle," he said, quoted by AFP.
This is not Almodóvar's first foray into English-language cinema. His first, the short The Human Voice, premiered in Venice in 2020. In it, Swinton plays a jilted lover.
Last year at Cannes, the director presented "The Strange Way of Life" - another short film, this time a gay western starring Ethan Hawke and Pedro Pascal.
As an iconic character in Spanish cinema, Almodovar began with kitschy black comedies such as "Pepi, Lucy, Bom and other girls at the stake" or "What did I do to deserve this".
His breakthrough came in 1988 with the film Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, which won the Best Screenplay Award at Venice and the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film.
But over time, the prolific Spanish director's more cautious streak prevailed, developing from films like 2002's Talk to Her — which earned Almodovar an Oscar for best original screenplay, a rare feat for a non-English-language film — and Bad Education from 2004 to the more recent Pain and Glory from 2019 dedicated to his career as a director.
Parallel Mothers, the story of two women who give birth on the same day, won Penelope Cruz a best actress award at Venice 2021.
Almodovar's film is one of 21 competing for the prestigious Golden Lion award, which will be presented on September 7. | BGNES
