Pedro Almodóvar's aesthetics in four films From Pepi, Luci, Bom to The Room Next Door, premiering at the Venice Film Festival

«Red is an instinctive choice for me. Of course, I love the colour red very much. But I suppose I use it because it gives an intensity to the place where you use it. It’s a very expressive colour, and in Spain red also represents life, fire, death, blood, passion and carnations – which is the national flower. From a technical standpoint, if you’re filming a night scene, red will give a certain brightness. Also, this is the reason why all the cars are red in my movies. If you put a red car in the countryside, red enhances the natural colours.»

The first films by Pedro Almodóvar were watched by the author of this article together with her mother, from a red sofa in the house where she grew up. It may sound like a fabricated image, considering the theme we are about to discuss, yet it’s true – perhaps the most concrete proof of how, through the colors and poetry with which he narrates the lives of women, the Spanish director strikes a chord. He manages to do so even when addressing euthanasia, in his new film (his first in English after the short film Strange Way of Life) The Room Next Door, premiering this week at the Venice Film Festival and set for release in Italian theaters in December. Almodóvar's latest project deals with a subtle and divisive theme like assisted suicide through the story of a friendship between women, sharp, courageous (sometimes excessively so) protagonists with startling emotional intelligence. The characters played by Julianne Moore and Tilda Swinton are reminiscent of the Spanish director's early works, albeit Americanized. Even in The Room Next Door, if Almodóvar’s much-loved blood red seems to only nod at the colors of the director's homeland, at sex, and drama, it soon reveals itself as something else – a passionate reflection of the heroines it represents. For understandable reasons, in The Room Next Door we don’t find red as sensuality, but as care; nevertheless, it’s always there on the screen, visually conveying the same pathos that the director imbues in his scripts, leaving the audience routinely unsettled by strong but ordinary women.

La Movida Madrileña - Pepi, Luci, Bom and Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown

In the last twenty years, Almodóvar’s red has faded, but the importance of the color in the director’s works remains unchanged. In The Room Next Door, it reappears in the clothes, faces, and homes of the protagonists at precise moments, almost to draw the audience’s attention to key scenes where the lines require careful listening. Although his filmography is less kitschy than before, more polished and orderly, we find in every stylistic choice the same Almodóvar from All About My Mother: a creator obsessed with women’s emotions and their representation in the form of clothes, sofas, and ironic remarks. Today, Almodóvar’s surrealism has found space in luxury thanks to Saint Laurent, which designed the costumes for Strange Way of Life, and Loewe, with Jonathan Anderson crafting the looks worn by the director of The Room Next Door at the Venice Film Festival. But his universe continues to speak to the same audience as always, made up of ordinary people with extraordinary lives: women who try to make their boyfriends faint with drug-laced gazpacho, women who swear allegiance to God but find themselves pregnant by a mortal, women who watch a movie with their mother from a red sofa, and finally, women who suggest their daughter do the same, from that very same red sofa.