Presented at the Venice Mostra, The House next door sign the return of Pedro Almodóvar long form after two medium films, Strange Way of Life and The Human Voice, Released in 2023. This time the Spanish filmmaker attacks at the end of life, its stakes and contradictions by the prism of two old friends gathered by the coming death of one of them, Marta, suffering from a cancer in phase three. More intimate and less fuzzy than some of the director's other films, The House next door is an all-in-one door lock.
Flowers of Evil
Ingrid (Julianne Moore) is a renowned New York writer. While she is in the middle of signing of her last successful book, an insight into the state of health of her old friend Marta. When she suffers from cervical cancer, she re-explores her life, her desires and her failures as an end of the race, when all hope is now lost. Interpreted by Tilda SwintonMarta is crossed by contrary injunctions. Draw a line on its existence or try to rip out life from a bent destiny ahead. In reality, Marta is a determined character, who has learned to tame horror. As a war journalist, conflict theatres make this monolith ready to face death with dignity. In an effort to keep the keys to his destiny, Marta asked Ingrid to accompany him to underground euthanasia. It is she who will cut the thread of her life and nobody else.
In the background, Pedro Almodóvar distills his flagship themes: sexuality and desire in a form of retrospective that certainly echoes the director's questions in the face of a world about to accomplish its moult. Is it when death rode that desire becomes the most ardent? At 75, Almodóvar has mapped all areas of desire. And in the image of one of the lovers common to both women, he glorifies an air of nostalgia for his evenings of night high punctuated by the pleasure of the flesh. But what remains of the desire once caught up in the years? Whether condemned or not, appetite declines over time, recalls the old lover, who was once tempestuous is now reduced to conducting well-lined CSP+ conferences. This physiological and symbolic death resonates in a hollow through the cross-memories of this trio. « Do you remember the New York '80s? » questions Marta. « When it was the night that everything really happened ». This mirror of the past is ambivalent: to dive in it is to reconnect with the traces of desire, to lose it is to remember the sentence to come.
Driven by chiseled dialogues and a game of actors that never sinks into the pathos, The House next door Go for a tone-on-tone device. Thanks to a meticulous image composition and a choice of pastel colours, each confidence is the occasion for a painting that the Fauvists would not deny. Color is the key to reading subjects. And it's not a mistake, cultural references follow each other. First the painted one Edward Hopper, a figure of American realism that we know for his canvases capturing these moments of solitude in urban or rural landscapes. Martha wants her friend in the next room when she takes the lethal pill. This luxurious house is lost in nature. Like Rooms by The Sea The contrast between the intimacy of the bedroom and the escape to the unknown is the American painter. The war journalist finally aspires to peace.
The Antechamber of Death
Almodóvar also raises the question of living with and without. Because if we die alone, we suffer together in different forms. There's this missed maternal relationship and the ones we leave behind. There is also the hybris of the one who decides to die and, in this painful process, forgets those who accompany him. Agonism is the theatrical moment par excellence of any drama. Marta has always been in hell as indicated by a sarcastic embroidery inscribed on her wall in the image of an ethic of life that could be summarized as follows: « I was in hell and I liked it. ». Marta is a character who opens the doors rather than closes them. Every time the sufferer opens a window, a slight breeze infiltrates the room, like a call to this unknown do Hopper. A moment of breath as suspended as ephemeral; Her friend Ingrid comes to close the window immediately. The metaphor is spun out later: when the door of his room is closed, it will have ended those days.
La House next door is like an inner monologue that overflows on the spectator. This vertigo of death on the living is also that of a world that seems to slip our fingers. Like this pill that can be ordered on the darknet in three clicks to put an end to its days, in just a few replicas, Almodóvar highlights the absurdity of existence. A pessimist (but realistic), the director contrasts the world's bustle with the beauty of nature.
Remarkably, one of the film's designs is the exact negative of painting The World of Christina dAndrew Wyeth with, in his Almodovarian rereading, a burning house. The genesis of the painting is illuminating. Anna Christina Olson, the young woman lying in the grass her back against the spectator, was a friend of the artist. Christina had never managed to walk properly. By the age of three, her mother would have made her knee pads to protect her from falling. Probably affected by an incurable disease, Christina could soon no longer walk. Having never used a wheelchair, she had to crawl to move. Christina's world was therefore reduced to the house and surrounding lands. Christina is as skinny as Marta and despite her apparent fragility on Wyeth's painting, she is nevertheless showing a strange quietness. The house is on the horizon line as a space by nature unreachable; paradoxically his determination breaks with the composition of the work where all the guidelines lead our gaze towards this single objective: the house. The symbolism and analogy with Marta is obvious and Almodóvar no longer has to dismantle his sharp sense of image.
Anchored in reality, he also does not hesitate to name the peril that awaits our modern societies: the extreme right. The director also wonders about the fractures of society that we knew before the Covid. In the image of these sequences where Marta contemplates nature behind the window, it is his reflection that is guessed in a mirror. A ghost wandering among the living. Once a literary fan, Marta has lost the taste of Letters or rather she is no longer capable. What is art without the desire to transform reality? And what sense does it have when the real is caught up with Death?
Death on lips
The tandem of the two actresses works, even if one can blame the coldness of the film or some catapulted flashbacks for rather questionable narrative needs. Replica continues and Almodóvar does not always give the viewer time to experience his emotions. Very literary in its approach, sometimes to excess, the film d'Almodóvar may feed over its references. In particular, we are thinking of this somewhat overrated scene where Ingrid laughs at the front Trusted in Folie (1925) where Buster Keaton was chased by a horde of women.
Nevertheless, most of the time, The House next door shows sobriety and gives to see sweetness on this painful stage of the end of life. Without falling into the quasi-neoliberal pitfall of sovereign choice that would make life a contract like another, Almodóvar touches a taboo subject in many societies, at a time when the US is caught up in religious fact. Like Megalopolis recalled the equality of men in the face of time, The House next door shows the universality of death with an extract of Dublin people James Joyce and his adaptation of the new The Dead by John Huston:
« His soul fainted little by little as he heard the snow spread weakly throughout the universe as when the last hour came on all living and dead. »
If Almodóvar denies that it is his last film, The House next door A willful work. As Gustave Thibon wrote, « Love without eternity is called anguish: eternity without love is called hell. » It's this triple tension between Life (Ingrid) and Death (Marta) articulated by desire (l-Amant) made of The House next door a choice piece to start the year 2025 in beauty.
An article that makes me want to find out! Thank you. 😉
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Gracias, I look forward to reading you about Lynch!