Tilda Swinton, Julianne Moore receive 17-minute standing ovation at Venice

Spanish filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar returned to the Venice Film Festival with stars Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore. Their film, “The Room Next Door,” had its world premiere on the Lido Monday evening, where it received a standing ovation for nearly 20 minutes, the longest of the 2024 edition so far.

Though a new Almodóvar film is always an event for cinephiles, this one has special significance: It’s his English-language debut.

“My insecurity disappeared after the first table read with the actresses, with the exchange of the first indications,” he wrote in his director’s statement. “The language wasn’t going to be a problem, and not because I master English, but because of the total disposition of the whole cast to understand me and to make it easy for me to understand them.”

Moore and Swinton play disconnected friends, who met in their youths at a magazine job, and whose lives took different paths. Ingrid (Moore) wrote novels. Martha (Swinton) became a war reporter. And now after years apart, they meet again, in New York, when Ingrid finds out Martha has cancer and is in a nearby hospital.

Over the next weeks and months, they reconnect, learning about one another’s lives and Martha’s estranged daughter through a series of revealing conversations.

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Before the film’s premiere, Swinton said that it would never have occurred to her that Almodóvar might eventually find a space for her in one of his films. She said she has “worshipped in his high church” ever since seeing “Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown” in the late 1980s in London. In Almodóvar was a kindred artistic spirit, she thought.

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“I still feel like a student seeing his first film,” Swinton said.

But she was English and he worked solely in Spanish. The idea of collaborating seemed like a fantasy only. Then one day, she said, she got up the nerve to say something to him.

“I said, ‘Listen I’ll learn Spanish for you, you can make me mute,’” Swinton said. “Characteristically, he laughed.”

Moore added: “I don’t know how I managed to walk into this world, but I felt lucky that he chose me.”

Almodóvar’s last Venice appearance was in 2021, where he presented the film “Parallel Mothers,” for which Penelope Cruz won its best actress prize. In 2019, Venice also gave him a lifetime achievement award. But his history with Venice stretches back 40 years.

“I was born as a film director in 1983 in Venice,” he said. A few years later, he’d return with the classic “Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown.”

Of his latest, he wrote “Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore carry the weight of the whole film on their shoulders, and they are a spectacle. I have been fortunate in that both give a veritable recital. At times during shooting, both the crew and I were on the verge of tears watching them. It was a very moving shoot and, in some way, blessed.”

Though death looms in the film, when Martha asks Ingrid to join her in a house upstate for her final days, all felt that it’s a film about life.

“We talked a lot about life, but we didn’t really talk about death. What can you say? You can talk about dying,” Swinton said. “This film is a portrait of self-determination … This feeling of (death) being a celebration felt for me very real and very relatable and I can’t say that I wouldn’t act in the same way if I was in her shoes.”

Both Swinton and Moore were excited to be in a film that spotlighted a female friendship between two women at their ages.

“We very, very rarely see a story of female friendship and especially a story about female friends who are older,” Moore said. “The importance that he shows us is so unusual and was so moving to me that he portrayed this relationship as so profound, because it is.”

The film is playing in competition at the 81st edition of the Venice Film Festival, alongside the likes of “Maria” and the yet-to-premiere “Queer” and “Joker: Folie à Deux.” Winners will be announced on Sept. 7.

Sony Pictures Classics will release “The Room Next Door” in theaters in December.

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