Spanish filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar returned to the Venice Film Festival with stars Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore, and his latest film and English-language debut, The Room Next Door. It went over pretty well, reports the AP, receiving a standing ovation for nearly 20 minutes. "My insecurity disappeared after the first table read with the actresses, with the exchange of the first indications," he wrote in his director's statement. "The language wasn't going to be a problem, and not because I master English, but because of the total disposition of the whole cast to understand me and to make it easy for me to understand them."
Moore and Swinton play disconnected friends, who met in their youth at a magazine job, and whose lives took different paths. Ingrid (Moore) wrote novels. Martha (Swinton) became a war reporter. After years apart, they meet again in New York, when Ingrid finds out Martha has cancer and is in a nearby hospital. Over the next months, they reconnect, learning about one another's lives through a series of revealing conversations. Before the film's premiere, Swinton said that it would never have occurred to her that Almodóvar might eventually find a space for her in one of his films. She said she has "worshipped in his high church" ever since seeing Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown in the late 1980s in London.
But she was English and he worked solely in Spanish. The idea of collaborating seemed like a fantasy. Then one day, she said, she got up the nerve to say something to him. "I said, 'Listen I'll learn Spanish for you, you can make me mute,'" Swinton said. "Characteristically, he laughed." Moore added: "I don't know how I managed to walk into this world, but I felt lucky that he chose me." Almodóvar's last Venice appearance was in 2021, where he presented the film Parallel Mothers, for which Penelope Cruz won its best actress prize. In 2019, Venice also gave him a lifetime achievement award. The film is playing in competition at the 81st edition of the Venice Film Festival. Winners will be announced Saturday.
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