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Julianne Moore and Tilda Swinton Are Perfectly Imperfect Together
Who could blame Pedro Almodóvar’s The Room Next Door for being more interested in its leading ladies than in contemplating death?
When Julianne Moore, playing an author named Ingrid in an iconic burgundy lip, stops by for a visit in an early scene, I had to stifle a gasp of appreciation at all the colors involved in the tableau of their greeting embrace. And yet, this time around, the explorations of what it’s like to inhabit a failing body are experienced secondhand, through Ingrid, who just wrote a book about her fear of death, but who finds herself in close quarters with it after reconnecting with Martha, then being asked to accompany the sick woman to a getaway in the Catskills where she plans to end her life on her own terms. As in Pain and Glory, the past erupts onto the screen with even more sensory intensity than the present, in Martha’s recollections of an encounter with a Carmelite friar in war-torn Baghdad who was once the lover of a colleague, or her recounting the death of her child’s father, a Vietnam veteran with PTSD, in a house fire on the side of a highway.
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