Pedro Almodovar’s first English film continues his consistent Spanish theme — the challenges of being female in a world unsympathetic to ambitious or unconventional women. After his several queer male heroes he here centers on two women whose careers have cost them community, family, close support.
The primary center is Martha (Tilda Swinton) whose imminent death plumbs her into isolation. After her other friends have declined her request to attend her self-euthanasia she recruits Ingrid (Julianne Moore) to share her last days.
The film’s power derives from Swinton’s off-beat beauty. It stresses her masculine leanness, hair-style, carved face and assertive spirit. As a war reporter she had a male career amid men. The required traveling completed her detachment from her daughter, who even as a child found Martha lacking in maternal comfort.
Martha had a daughter when, as a teenager, she submitted to her war-bound boyfriend. When he returns broken he eschews his new family to begin anew elsewhere, including marriage. He in effect kills himself by running into an abandoned burning farmhouse, driven by his illusion of hearing cries for help.
Martha’s death brings her daughter a connection that the journalist’s nature and career had denied them. Hungering for a parental link, the girl told her father’s widow that she had been in that pyre crying for help and he had saved her. That delusion is her only connection until she now meets Ingrid. Here she learns about — and we see — her connection to her mother in character, emotion, and — confirmed by Swinton’s double-casting — bearing. The gulf that separated them in life has been bridged by this death. As the daughter slips into her mother’s mood and reflexes, a bond they were denied in life, the film salvages a happy ending in this drama of women isolated by their own success.
Subtly, Ingrid parallels Martha despite their antithetical spirits and appearance, Much more the conventionally feminine, Ingrid as a highly successful writer has also lost closeness to her friends and has no apparent family. When Ingrid turns this experience into a book she will be paralleling Ingrid’s battlefield reportage, its emotional casualties and destruction. Martha frees her to tell the personal story that she was forbidden to tell when she interviewed the male lovers in a wartime monastery.
Both women had sequential passionate affairs with academic Damien (John Turturro), in whom Ingrid now confides. Despite his sexual reputation Damien seems effeminate, especially in contrast to her hyper-masculine gym trainer. He sexualizes his session by explaining the company policy not touch their clients. That prompts Ingrid to break down crying at her friend’s condition. The lawyer Damien brings Ingrid is a strong, slender young woman who bristles at the male cop’s belligerent religiousness. The cast is a gender spectrum, that penalizes the feminine.
Now, to unpack the title. Across the entire feminist discussion looms the liberating shadow of Virginia Woolf’s A Room of Her Own. Martha wants Ingrid to occupy the next-door bedroom in her rented (luxury) flat. Craving more space Ingrid takes the bedroom below. The desired space is both within the room and away from Martha. The shift is a detachment, the need for space even in — or especially at — this situation of such intimacy. The room below also admits the subconscious into the domestic landscape.
Similarly, the several film allusions within the work extend the characters’ self-awareness to the outer structure. For relief the two women watch Buster Keaton’s Seven Chances, where the hero is assailed with a double avalanche, of boulders and of bolder marriage-craving women. A clip from John Huston’s The Dead materializes the recitation thrice of the closing Joyce lines. The allusions to A Letter from an Unknown Woman and A Journey to italy respectively parallel Martha’s missed marriage and empty relationships. Indeed, the advertising image of the two heroines’ heads evokes that of Bergman’s Persona. There two women briefly merge into one, as the parallel heroines here discover a bond where they initially appeared antithetical.
No comments:
Post a Comment