Film, because…

I’m borrowing the idea from a post series by Kate of Books Are My Favourite and Best that compares books and their adaptations. It’s now vanishingly rare for me to see movies – I can probably count on the fingers of one hand the ones I’ve seen in the last three years – because we haven’t had a television for a decade or more, don’t subscribe to any streaming services, find going to the cinema too expensive, and mostly can’t be bothered to get out an old laptop to watch our measly collection of DVDs. It’s kind of a shame, because I was a real cinephile in my high school and early college years, making my way through the American Film Institute’s top 100 list, recording B&W classics from late-night TV, and following the Oscars race to enter a low-value pool. It certainly means a lot more time for books, though.

BUT I watched two streamed movies while I was staying with my sister in the States, both chosen for their literary influences or similarities. (I ran out of time to watch Women Talking, which I was eyeing up but it would have incurred a separate cost.) One was The Menu, about a megalomaniac chef for whose extravagant multi-course meals the mega-rich travel to a private island. Elle suggested it as a companion to Land of Milk and Honey with its chef protagonist and questions of power, sexuality and wealth. The Menu, starring Ralph Fiennes, was good fun, with a twisty plot and strong performances, but got darker and gorier than expected as Fiennes’ character uses dishes to explore childhood trauma and settle old scores.

The other was Pedro Almodóvar’s first English-language feature, The Room Next Door (2024). It’s based on Sigrid Nunez’s What Are You Going Through (2020), which I read at its release. It’s the story of a writer whose friend, ravaged by cancer, asks her to be present when she ends her life. As is typical of Nunez’s sparse, Cusk-like autofiction, the characters have no names and minimal histories, there are no speech marks, and the scant plot is layered with various other found stories and aphorisms. The film is, of necessity, very different: it zeroes in on the assisted suicide plot, makes events more concrete, and goes as far as the aftermath rather than just-before-the-end. I watched it with my sister because, as a hospice nurse, she has an interest in the topic.

Julianne Moore at The Room Next Door premiere (BFI LFF: Royal Festival Hall, 19 October 2024) (Raph_PH, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons).

{SPOILERS IN THE REMAINDER}

In The Room Next Door, Ingrid (Julianne Moore) is a writer whose latest book explores her fear of death. She and Martha (Tilda Swinton) were acquaintances when they worked for the same magazine, but they seem to have lost touch over the decades. Martha’s journalistic career was much more exciting, taking her to war zones as a correspondent. Martha has a daughter, Michelle, whom she’s really not in touch with, partly as a result of not being frank about the identity of Michelle’s father. Ingrid is shocked by Martha’s request and it takes her a while to come around to the idea of being the person ‘in the room next door’ when Martha takes the euthanasia drug she’s bought off the dark web.

Nunez’s novel opens with the narrator attending a doom-and-gloom lecture by her ex, who is convinced that climate change won’t be addressed and the human race will die out. I was surprised that he’s included in the film and in fact given an expanded role: not only is there the scene from the book in which Ingrid meets Damian (John Turturro) for lunch and tells him what’s going on with her friend, but we learn that he was an ex for both of them, and he helps Ingrid deal with the fallout of Martha’s actions. He also seems to function as a reminder of sexuality, which remains a powerful impulse even in the face of individual or collective death.

When I got home from the States, I reread the Nunez and – though she’s a favourite of mine – I confess I was disappointed. The philosophical and storytelling asides seem like unnecessary distractions when all you want to know is what happens with her friend. (I have, of course, also read The Spare Room, which preceded the Nunez by 12 years, in the meantime.) My original review seems generous as well as admirably succinct. (It’s depressing for me to go back to old reviews; not only have I not gotten any better, my writing has deteriorated, if anything. Is it laziness? Erosion of formality? Lack of time? Loss of focus?)

My sole complaint then was that Nunez spent too much time recounting the plot of a mystery novel the narrator reads. Well! Having reviewed her collected short stories, It Will Come Back to You, I can report that said plot is that of her “The Plan,” published in LitMag in 2019. How (playful and meta, yes, but) self-indulgent to borrow her own short story! So while I still appreciated the overall theme of empathy and the wise observations (“The only thing harder than seeing yourself grow old is seeing the people you’ve loved grow old … most people are in denial about aging, just as they are about dying”), and enjoyed the monologue from a cat which I’d forgotten about, I got bored and impatient the second time around. (I’m still a Nunez stan, though. – Am I using that right? Are we still saying that?)

Ultimately, then, The Room Next Door surpasses its source material for its focus, its performances, its locations, and its weirdness. Almodóvar cuts most of the peripheral material and makes it all about the women’s relationship with each other, as well as Ingrid’s with her ex and Martha’s with her daughter. The elegant Moore does a fine job in the role; the only way to have given a flavour of Nunez’s narration would have been to use voiceover or diary-writing scenes, which could have been naff. But Swinton is a marvel. Her American accent is ever so slightly strange, but that works; she’s such a striking person that it fits for her to be somewhat otherworldly. She is a perfect vessel for Martha’s frustrated rage and her body language, as well as the costuming and makeup, highlight the differences between her well periods, when she’s vibrant, and her worst relapses, when she’s pale and gaunt. (I was astonished to learn that both actors are now 65, by the way!)

Tilda Swinton, Pedro Almodóvar, and Julianne Moore at 81st Venice International Film Festival (Harald Krichel, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons).

In the book, the friends stay in an Airbnb in upstate New York. In the film, Casa Szoke, an hour from Madrid in Spain, stands in. It’s a stunning Modernist (also described as “brutalist”) house, and the pool terrace and the staircase dividing Martha’s room from Ingrid’s downstairs are key features. Probably the single most interesting decision Almodóvar made was to have Swinton play Michelle as well, which emphasizes the persistence of family traits and – because Michelle has a scene after Martha is dead – makes it seem like she’s not completely gone. Of course, Almodóvar has always gone in for surrealism and doubling, and I loved this hint of the mysterious. I also appreciated the repeated quotes from James Joyce’s novella The Dead (“faintly falling … upon all the living and the dead.”).

The gist may be the same, but the reading and viewing experiences are really very dissimilar and, while I wouldn’t dissuade you from either, it was the film that impressed me most.

Book

My original rating:

My rating now:

Film