“I deserve a good death,” says Martha, a successful war photographer played by Tilda Swinton in Pedro Almodóvar’s new movie, The Room Next Door (2024). After its world premiere at the 81st Venice Film Festival, the film played in the Official Competition at the 52nd San Sebastián International Film Festival (SSIFF), where the Spanish director also won the Donostia Award, recognizing his contributions to the art of cinema.
In Almodóvar’s wistful, autumnal work, after feeling crushed by the failure of her cancer treatment, Martha decides not to prolong her suffering, but instead to end her life with a euthanasia pill. She recruits her writer-friend, Ingrid, played formidably by Marianne Moore, as her emotional support. The two women retreat to a handsome brutalist house in the countryside for Martha to help Ingrid steal herself psychologically, and to prepare for the inevitable police interrogation; since euthanasia is illegal in the United States, where the film takes place, Ingrid must lie to avoid being accused as an abettor, and ends up needing a lawyer.
In a late-Almodóvar fashion, a good death as defined in The Room Next Door – the title itself referring to Martha’s request for Ingrid to be nearby when she dies – is first and foremost an aesthetic event. In nearly all of the film’s settings, from Martha’s hospital room, whose color palette skillfully plays out autumnal contrasts with tasteful bouquets of lilies, to Martha and Ingrid’s impeccably elegant attires, to the house itself, one senses that for the Spanish auteur, in death, as in life, one ought to become a work of art. True to form, Martha dies dressed regally in a canary suit and a matching pair of footwear, Swinton’s delicate, gaunt face becalmed, as if it were a gilded visage of an embalmed pharaoh. Which is not to say that Almodóvar lingers merely on the stoically sublime aspects of death: though the screenplay, adapted from a novel by Sigrid Nuñez, suffers from stilted dialogues, burdened by the weighty exposition with relatively little action arising organically in the present, clearly for Almodóvar, physical frailty, coupled with psychological suffering, and the fear of death, all feel terribly personal, at least since his earlier potent drama, Pain and Glory (2019).
Waiting for death consumes not only the Spanish director but in fact a good number of filmmakers featured in this year’s SSFF: I counted at least five films in the Official Selection approaching to some extent the subject of aging and dying with dignity, and of terminal illness and death’s wider psycho-sociological impacts, not to mention two films, The Room Next Door and Albert Serra’s Afternoons of Solitude (2024), which explore the topic of death primarily from the point of view of visual plasticity and mise en scene. Other films, which I discuss below, delve into the psychological and social ramifications of illness, of facing one’s mortality, and of needing to debate with one’s loved ones and to negotiate a dignified ending.
The character of Ingrid, as a confidant, but also someone who, unlike the dying Martha, is only beginning to reconcile herself with the inevitability of losing someone dear, is mirrored in the character of Isabel in The Glimmers (2024), directed by the Spanish filmmaker Pilar Palomero. The film is an astounding feat for the Spanish actress Patricia López Arnaiz, who deservedly won SSIFF’s Best Actress award. Similarly to Ingrid, who at first uses as her defensive argument against helping Martha the fact that they didn’t see each other for a long time – until Ingrid accidentally learned of Martha’s hospitalization from another friend – Isabel is at first paralyzed by fear. She hears of her ex-husband’s rapidly debilitating illness from her daughter, Madalen (Marína Guerola). Overcome with filial love, and a sense of duty, Madalen considers giving up the university to act as her father’s caretaker. Isabel’s utter rejection of this idea is at first a source of a sullen tension between mother and daughter. Isabel bulks at the notion that she should get involved in caring for a man with whom she severed any romantic ties. In the film’s chillingly quiet scenes, she tiptoes awkwardly around her ex’s apartment after bringing him groceries, moving stealthily, mortified to see him naked in the bath. With her stern gaze and reticent performance, López brilliantly conveys her character’s emotional and spiritual growth, from flinching in her ex’s presence, resentful of the burdens thrust on her and determined to live out her new romance and independence, to increasingly concerned, helpful, accepting, and tender. It’s an unforgettable role, not the least since, as is well known, women carry out most of elderly and parent care, their labor and complex psychological choices which they make often unsung – certainly under-explored on the big screen. In the end, similarly to Almodóvar’s film, the goodness, or the generosity of death – its dignity – stems from the deep interpersonal connection between the dying and the living, in which those departing as well as those staying behind recognize that the passage is an opportunity for growth, and that the continuous physical presence is its own reward.
A similar emphasis on physical presence – and specifically on touch, as well as on the need for empathic honesty in communicating with patients and helping them face difficult decisions – is stressed in Costa-Gavras’ somber drama, Last Breath (2024). In it, a palliative-care doctor, Augustin Masset (Kad Merad), welcomes a slightly neurotic nonfiction writer Fabrice Toussaint (Denis Podalydès) into his clinic, so that the latter may write a book on aging and dying. Although mostly unsatisfying dramatically – since it feels driven by the profusely amassed research on the subject and weighty abstract considerations rather than attentiveness to the narrative arc or the fleshing out of individual characters, the film nevertheless contains a number of moments that persuasively convey the daily dilemmas of medical practitioners having to face the dying patients’ fears, denial, and ardent hopes. In one striking scene, for instance, an inconsolable wife (played by Hiam Abbass) of a terminally ill patient berates Masset for his alleged incompetence, demanding changes in her husband’s treatment, including a forceful feeding, despite it being agonizing for the man she loves. Again, as in the other films, prolonged death is paradoxically abrupt yet slow: it dramatically and irrevocably separates the dying from the living, and yet, through its many stages, the consciousness’ ebbs and flows, it also gradually introduces the possibility of death as a communal ritual – as Costa-Gavras beautifully shows in the scene in which that same wife, family and the family’s dog return to say goodbye at the man’s bedside.
The notion of having a choice as determining a good death lies at the heart of Bound in Heaven (2024), a visually stunning fiction debut feature by the Chinese director Huo Xin. In the film, a successful professional woman (Ni Ni) fatefully meets a young scalpel (Zhou You) when her manipulative and physically abusive husband spitefully gives away the tickets for a concert she long wanted to attend. Unable to scalpel another ticket from the young man, she’s taken by him to a highrise construction site, where she sees and hears the concert through a tiny window by standing on the man’s shoulders. In this way begins an improbable romance between the two. What seems to bind them is a life-altering sense of transition: for the woman, an opportunity to reassert, or perhaps to discover, her inner strength and resolve; for the man, an opportunity to lean on a loving and passionate companion, as he opts not to seek treatment for an advanced stage of cancer. Despite the premise of Huo’s story – adapted from a Chinese genre novel – sounding sweeping and emotionally rather bloated, the resulting film is nothing but. Consummately attentive to tone (for example, offsetting the melodramatically charged scenes by more subdued thriller elements), Huo has her characters oscillate convincingly between fear and audacity, calm and desperation, heartbreak and joy. Joyfulness is perhaps the film’s most surprising and affecting aspect. In one scene, the two lovers race on a motorcycle towards a ramp from which they will witness their last concert together: as they ride, their mood is defiant, nearly jubilant; when they part moments later, they do so without touching, or sharing weighty words. Here Huo recognizes that when the stages of dying are minutely born out by action, and earned, there is no need for analyses or grand pronouncements. Her achievement is finding the plastic form that fully conveys the uncanny jouissance of life’s fullness in death.
Ela Bittencourt
© FIPRESCI 2024