Cult Figures
No other star appearance on the red carpet caused as much hysterical excitement as that of George Clooney and Brad Pitt. The handsome men from Hollywood presented their film ‘Wolfs’ (directed by John Watts), which was shown out of competition. The story begins quite excitingly. In a luxury hotel in New York, a prominent public prosecutor wants to spend an erotic evening with a man 30 years her junior, who is suddenly lying dead on the floor. In her distress, she calls a specialist for precarious situations, played by George Clooney as a professional ‘crime scene cleaner’. The situation seems to be saved until Brad Pitt turns up, who is entrusted with the same task by the hotel management. For better or worse, the two have to work together.
What begins as a thriller set in New York City at night soon develops into a slapstick story with a star-studded cast. The dialogue between the two is trying to be funny, but predictable. As the film progresses, the script becomes increasingly tattered, with characters appearing and disappearing without contributing much to the story. In the end, the two have to help the supposedly dead man, who has suddenly come back to life, to deliver a huge load of cocaine to the right destination. On the way, first the Albanian and then the Croatian (?) mafia turn up. But our heroes remain cool even when their stylish black BMW is completely riddled with bullets.
The subsequent press conference offered more entertainment value than the film itself. George Clooney proved his qualities as a quick-talking entertainer and delivered a number of allusions to his partner's recent facelift.
Pedro Almodóvar is the Spanish director par excellence, a cult author of European arthouse cinema. For Venice his first English-language film was announced, ‘The Room Next Door’, based on the novel by New York author Sigrid Nuñez ‘What Are You Going Through’, and hailed by festival director Alberto Barbera as an absolute masterpiece, Almodóvar's ‘most disturbing and heartbreaking’ work of recent years and a unique study on the subject of euthanasia. Most critics were similarly enthusiastic, and there were said to have been 17 minutes of applause at the premiere.
The author Ingrid (Julianne Moore) looks after her friend, war reporter Martha (Tilda Swinton), who is suffering from cancer. After her cancer treatment has been unsuccessful, Martha wants to end her life. But to do so, she needs the help of a friend who is supposed to be there for her in the room next door. To disguise the whole thing as a break, she rents a fancy house in Woodstock, north of New York City.
Money doesn't seem to be an issue, if dying, then at least in an expensive and elegant setting. The dilemma of this friendship assistance is that all the dialogues are accompanied by corresponding mood music, which creates a certain doubling effect and leaves little room for the viewer's imagination. At times, the dialogues sound like proverbs about life and death. Martha laments neoliberalism and the extreme right, while John Turturro as her ex-lover prophesises the imminent end of the world in the face of dramatic climate change.
The ostentatious name-dropping seems strange. James Joyce's short story ‘The Dead’ is constantly quoted. References to Faulkner, Hemingway, Edward Hopper and Martha Gellhorn testify to the cultivated background of the characters without contributing anything to the dramatic structure. The backstory about Martha's daughter and her father, whom she never knew, and the resulting estrangement from her mother is also not very convincing.
The subversive humour that distinguished Almodóvar's early films has completely disappeared from his work. The once anarchic filmmaker from Madrid has become a brand name, frozen in the pose of an internationally admired cult director. The Almodóvar brand can now be marketed better in the USA than in his native Spain.
If you want to see a compelling film about an assisted suicide, you should watch Francois Ozon's tragicomedy ‘Tout s'est bien passé’ (Everything Went Well, 2021) with André Dussollier and Sophie Marceau. Or the Italian drama ‘Miele’ by Valeria Golino with the superb Jasmine Trinca as a suicide helper, which was honoured by the Ecumenical Jury in Cannes in 2013.
