In competition at the 81st Venice Film Festival, Pedro Almodóvar’s new film is the Spanish director’s first feature film in English. With Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore playing two women who find each other in the most difficult moment of their lives.
What would you like to do in your last week of life? The protagonists of Pedro Almodóvar ‘s latest film , Martha and Ingrid — played respectively by Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore — try to answer this question.
Longtime friends, the two women find themselves driven by the need to face together the inevitable death of one of them, following a cancer diagnosis. The film follows their journey to an isolated house in New England, where Martha decides to end her life with dignity, assisted by her friend. In a press conference at the 81st Venice Film Festival, the director said he approached the subject as a layman, explaining that he was » born in a region of Spain, La Mancha, where there is a great culture of Death» , but at the same time that he is much closer to the character played by Julianne Moore, unable «to fully understand how a living being at a certain point ceases to exist» .
In some of Almodovar’s most recent films, the main character suffers from an illness, from Antonio Banderas in «Pain and Glory» to Tilda Swinton in «The Room Next Door» . The filmmaker has explained that it comes from a personal condition: having to deal with health problems has affected his activities. And as in all his films, the narrative draws its conclusions from an autobiographical premise, which on this occasion runs parallel to the very personal cinematic reinterpretation of the novel «What Are You Going Through» by Sigrid Nunez.
Death, although present (the director said that during the filming of the scenes in the house in the woods he felt a fourth figure hovering besides him and the protagonists), does not represent the true fulcrum of the story, as Tilda Swinton clarified . It is rather «a portrait of self-determination in the final moment of one’s life: the character I play takes control of her existence and decides how it should end» . «We talked a lot about life lived. In my life experience I feel much closer to Martha’s experience than to Ingrid’s. I have never faced death face to face, I know that at a certain point it arrives and in my life I learned to know it very early» .
Tilda Swinton is echoed by Julianne Moore who talks about her relationship with the Spanish director’s cinematography — «In Pedro’s films there is a great vital force. What does it mean to have a body? What does it mean to be a person? What does it mean to have friends?» — and how she too found the narrative to be a hymn to life and empathy between human beings: «I was really excited to play this character, who, although scared, tells her friend who asks for help «I’ll be with you until the end»» .