It’s probably Pedro Almodóvar’s fault that I started thinking about late work. In 2019, a time that now seems so distant as to take place in someone else’s memory, I went to see Pain and Glory at the Angelika on Houston Street, the same movie theater where, as an annoying, lonely teenager, I’d gone to see All About My Mother twenty years before. I have no idea why, at 14, I decided to see that movie in particular, but I know it played like an uncannily personal fever dream, speaking the exact same private language I spoke with myself. Nearly everything I loved as a teenager was a text about grandly miserable middle-aged people with grandly miserable middle-aged problems—the hyperbolic, self-pitying prose of Truman Capote and Jean Rhys; the dazzling sweep and velvety textures of old movies like All About Eve; the smoke and blood and tenderness in Cassavetes’s collaborations with Gena Rowlands—and all of those same texts were referenced in All About My Mother, woven right into the film’s fabric. I was instantly obsessed with this filmmaker whose name I hadn’t known earlier that same day. I was certain I would never get over it, and I was right; I never have.
It’s embarrassing, now, to write all this down, to look directly at how adolescent it is; I’ve never loved anything in quite as teenage a way as how I loved All About My Mother when I first saw it, and, in all the years since, I’ve never managed to love it in a less teenage way. On every rewatch, I hope I’ll be rigorous and critical, coolly regarding this movie with suspicion and cynicism. Instead, All About My Mother resurrects the person I was when I first encountered it, naively desperate for the world to be as grand and as miserable as the movies. We change, erase and rewrite ourselves, disappear and appear again in new forms and vocabularies. A movie, though, stays exactly the same. I was young and now I’m not and the technology with which I watch something is entirely different than it used to be, but when I sit down with All About My Mother, it’s as if no time has passed at all.
Time moves forward no matter how familiar images on a screen might make it seem to run the other way. The notion of “an Almodóvar film” that exists in the cultural imagination—primary colors, screwball hysterics, telenovela plots, a playful or provocative approach to themes of sex and gender—derives mostly from his early work in the 1980s and ‘90s. It’s jarring to consider the late work of someone so defined by the movies they made at the beginning of their career.
Almodóvar’s early films raised me, a thing I say like it’s a joke, trying to disguise how much I actually mean it. After discovering All About My Mother, I sought out everything else by Almodóvar that I could find, and quickly tumbled down a raucous and vivid-hued rabbit-hole where everything was beautiful and strange and everyone was always screaming in a great outfit. My local video store could only offer the greatest hits of Almodovar’s career up to that point, but each of these became, in rapid succession, my entire personality for at least several months. I was obsessed with Law of Desire (a glossy murder ballad heaped thick with references, as though a 1980s hotel-channel porno came with a ten-page syllabus), then with Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (a giddy and hysterical roller-coaster that distilled the feeling of staying up all night with a new best friend into 88 delirious minutes), and then with Tie Me Up! Tie Down! (a screwball psychosexual tale of kidnapping and violence that’s still, two decades later, my favorite romantic comedy). These movies contained sex and drugs and attractive young people, but, more than that, what they offered was a glimpse of a world in which punk-rock cool and sweeping old-movie sentimentality could not just cohabitate, but could be one and the same. As bizarre and disgusting and maybe-offensive as early Almodóvar movies occasionally could be, something about them simply made me want to be involved in mankind, as John Donne might have put it. The best I can do to explain it is this: Pedro Almodóvar’s movies were the first thing that ever made me want to go to a party.
As a teenager, I’d loved these movies so much I wouldn’t shut up about them; as an adult, I loved them so much I never talked to anyone about them at all. By 2019, I hadn’t fallen out of love with Almodóvar’s work, exactly, but I had fallen out of conversation with it, filed it away in the back of my mind. In a neat symmetry, though, Pain and Glory rekindled my personal obsession with the filmmaker’s work. Almodóvar’s early movies had made me want to go to a party, and going to parties had made me want to be a different person than who I’d been when I was very young.
Almodovar came up in the La Movida Madrileña (colloquially known simply as the Movida), the counter-cultural underground scene that blossomed in Madrid immediately after Franco’s death. The Movida—triumphantly queer, lavishly vulgar—elevated that which generations of fascism had silenced. “I am still in recovery from that time,” Almodóvar confessed in a 2004 interview. His earliest movies are barely movies at all, more like provocations, like opening the door to a party to which you weren’t invited.
“Before a dictator is ousted or dies a natural death,” Almodóvar wrote in his recent essay-collection-memoir, The Last Dream, “the oppressed people can wait for years with champagne chilling in the fridge.” All the shimmeringly young and beautiful actors in those early movies were born under fascism. The future would have been something they had grown up hearing their parents talk about, a longed-for time when the tyrant would at last be defeated. And now here they were on screen, living that future in the present tense. It would have been absurd to cast their gaze even further forward; the present tense was the farthest possible future, arrived miraculously and against all odds in the here and now.
Although Almodóvar’s movies gained sophistication and crossed genres, that radical present tense persisted all the way through the 1990s, even after his breakthrough into international acclaim. Emotions in Almodóvar’s work are enormous and temporary, ideas are purposely untrustworthy, nothing stays in a fixed shape or form. Loyalties shift between frivolous and sincere, between tragedy and comedy, sometimes within a single scene. Everything is rendered in immediacy, and everyone is too young and too hot and too beautiful to ever actually die.
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Beautiful people are always trying to die in Pedro Almodóvar’s movies, as a joke, as a prank, by accident, for revenge or heartbreak, smashing themselves up against one another, desperate to make the biggest possible gesture in the best possible outfit. In Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (1988), Carmen Maura’s Pepa, resplendent in a sharp-shouldered red blazer, mixes handfuls of sleeping pills into a batch of gazpacho, while her friend Candela (María Barranco) climbs up on the ledge of her terrace in a striped crop top and matching miniskirt, crosses herself, and jumps.
Near the end of Almodovar’s most recent movie, The Room Next Door, Tilda Swinton’s Martha—a former war reporter with inoperable late-stage cancer—stands in front of a mirror and puts on a glamorous face. Martha’s appearance has been ravaged by disease, and until this point she’s worn the evidence almost proudly, her skin yellowing and blotchy, her face sunken and makeup-less, a flesh-colored bandage visible on her chest. Thorny and brusque, Martha doesn’t want to be coddled or comforted. She’s angry at her body’s defeat, and her every movement vibrates with impatience. She has very little time, and she’s ready to be done with it.
Now, however, she appears serene. Looking directly into the camera, she peels the bandage off of her chest, then begins to put on makeup. In a tight close-up, she applies a heavy dark-pink lipstick. Soon, she’s dressed in a dazzling acid-yellow suit and matching shoes, her face even and pale with a dark-wine slash of a mouth. She walks outside, slowly and deliberately, as though aware of her audience, settles onto a sage-green lounge chair and turns her head to the side. The green sets off her suit, her lipstick, and the bold white shock of her hair, as though harmonized on a canvas, primary colors glowing out from a small frame. She closes her eyes. This is the way her body will be found: staged in the sunlight, made beautiful. Before the movie ends, there will be repercussions, both emotional and logistical, from her death. But in this moment, what she’s left behind of herself is perfect, an artist’s triumphant final statement.
If someone’s always trying to die in a Pedro Almodóvar movie, it’s equally true that somebody’s always coming back from the dead. The teenage son whose death sets in motion the events of All About My Mother is resurrected as the child his mother later adopts. In the opening scene of Volver (2006), we learn that a mother is dead; by the end of the movie, she’s alive again. In Pain and Glory (2019), Antonio Banderas’s Salvador finds a means of resurrecting the dead through art and memory. In the final, indelible image of Parallel Mothers (2021), victims of the Spanish Civil War are simultaneously resurrected and mourned. Even those early, zany suicide attempts nearly always fail: in Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, the spiked gazpacho only puts a few characters conveniently to sleep; Candela is improbably hauled back up onto the terrace by her friends. Almodovar grew up in the Catholic Church, and while he rejected its religion, he hung onto its pomp and circumstance. His films perform high-church miracles in the vulgar and offhand language of punk rock. Someone is always trying to die, and someone is always coming back from the dead.
In The Room Next Door, a loose adaptation of Sigrid Nunez’s semi-autobiographical novel What Are You Going Through, a successful middle-aged writer, Ingrid (Julianne Moore), reunites with an old friend and former colleague, Martha, who, following her cancer diagnosis, has acquired a suicide pill on the dark web (one of the movie’s purest joys is hearing Tilda Swinton say “the dark web” several times). Martha asks Ingrid to come with her to a house she’s rented upstate for this final act; she wants a friend to be with her—not right beside her, but “in the room next door.”
It’s easy to describe The Room Next Door as a typical Almodóvar movie: a beautiful woman tries to die in a great outfit. There’s a gorgeous house and a terrace filled with luscious, well-tended plants. Everyone dresses in vivid colors; every kitchen is dreamy; every set is a place you wish you could live. Characters make sweeping, stilted statements about sex and death. Fashionable middle-aged women wear very bold lipstick and you think maybe you should try to find the same lipstick and wear it every day of your life. It’s about mothers, but not in any conventional sense. It’s a statement on old friendship, and how if, in old friendship, you don’t speak for years and then reunite, those years still count toward the old friendship. It’s about family and what forms it takes. It’s about that one ex everybody has, and about how the important people in our lives are often not the ones we expect, and how proximity becomes another word for love. The central relationship isn’t quite what it seems, and stays unsteady and unsettled right through to the end when, in one way or another, it breaks your heart. Everything is beautiful; everyone is slightly hysterical. It’s not totally clear, for much of the movie, what the point of it is: all this reference, all this beauty.
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Late work is often thinking about early work. If Almodovar’s early movies exist in a perpetual present tense, an acknowledgement of the past signaled the shift to the next era that began with his most famous film. Almodovar was 50 years old when he released All About My Mother in 1999. Franco had been dead for nearly a quarter century. Twenty-five years is a lifetime to a young person, and a blink of an eye to one already old; at 50, a young person who never thought they’d live to get old has little choice but to accept the fact that they have.
Almodovar’s mother died just before All About My Mother was released; she was dying all through the movie’s production. The film is dedicated to her. It’s a film that begins with a death, whose main character is a grieving mother. It’s still a party, but the party is shaped by loss. It’s still campy and over-the-top, but the pranks it pulls are more likely to make you cry than scream. It borrows implausible plot twists from telenovelas, but renders them tragic instead of comic. It’s the film that definitively sheds the pure present tense of Almodóvar’s early period, moving on from youth and turning to face whatever comes next.
If All About My Mother marked the end of one era in Almodóvar’s work and the beginning of another, Pain and Glory—a movie about memory and aging and how we construct ourselves out of the art we love—did the same 20 years later. Antonio Banderas plays Salvador, a barely-fictionalized stand-in for the filmmaker himself. A wildly successful Spanish filmmaker, Salvador struggles with physical and psychological afflictions which, in late middle age, have driven him to isolation and despair. When one of his early films is given a restoration, he’s asked to speak at its screening, and reconnects with an actor with whom he’d had a falling-out during that film’s production. This reunion slowly opens his life back up: the actor finds a draft of a memoir on Salvador’s computer and stages it as a one-man play; the play catches the attention of Salvador’s former lover, Marcello, who reaches out to him for the first time in 30 years; Salvador’s resigned shell cracks open. That reunion spurs forward a meditation on bodies, memory, addiction, and art’s ressurrective force in a sometimes-unbearable world.
We’re always our own subjects; every author tells on themselves and every work is at its foundation autobiographical. Almodóvar’s movies spill over with references to other artists, eager to recite their litany of influences. Whether Cassavetes’ Opening Night (1977) or Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks, Billy Wilder or Alfred Hitchcock, Pina Bausch or Jean Cocteau, silent films or horror movies, there’s always at least one secondary text leaking out the seams of the story and doubling its meanings. In Pain and Glory, however, the filmmaker himself becomes the secondary text with which his movies so often entwine themselves.
Longtime collaborators of Almodóvar’s, including Banderas, were shocked by how much of himself Almodóvar chose to reveal, in the film’s script and design elements as well as in his attitude and behavior during its production. A long list of great filmmakers have their own version of Amarcord (1973), and very few of them were made at the start of their careers. In much late work, self-portraiture becomes explicit, stripping away the translating layers. Auto-fiction, a genre Salvador mentions by name in Pain and Glory, can be dismissed as immature, yet an auto-fictive quality often arrives in work made near the end of a long career, by an artist looking backward at decades of accumulated material.
Pain and Glory is the sort of late-career masterpiece that you hope any artist you truly love makes as a final statement, so much so that I’ve resented each of Almodovar’s subsequent films, 2021’s Parallel Mothers and, now, The Room Next Door. But taken together, these three films solve one another, forming a sort of triptych about what it means to make art at the end of a life. Each film asks what we leave behind in the world, what lasts, what remains. Together they form an almost scandalously hopeful answer: art is enough, and equal to love, and no different from it. What we make matters just as much as who we love, and is as great a romance.
Pain and Glory features one of the most romantic—and sexiest—interludes in any Almodóvar movie. When Salvador reunites with Marcello, the one kiss they finally share is so devastatingly hot that you feel like you shouldn’t be allowed to look at it. Then the story moves on. The film ends in an unlikely and longed-for romantic reunion, but not between the two men. Instead, its great romance is that of the filmmaker and his work. Salvador has been unsure he’ll ever make another film, uninspired, too depressed and too ill to work. But in the very last shot, the camera pulls back to reveal another camera, and a set, and lights, and a crew at work. The thing that endures is the work of turning life into art. Written down on the page, Pain and Glory isn’t a romance, but up on a screen, in the rise and sweep of it, it’s perhaps the most straightforward and sincere romance its filmmaker has ever made. Our hero reunites with the great love of his life, his art, and the music swells.
Art is worth life, the film says, and to render one’s existence into material is to give one’s pain meaning. Parallel Mothers, too, seems like one kind of romance, and turns out to be a different one. Its many characters fall in love, sleep together, betray one another, fight bitterly, break up, reunite, question and re-assemble their feelings, but in the end, the who-ends-up-with-whom resolution is pushed to the side. The motherhood, and family, in which the film is most interested is ultimately between a community and its history. The story returns to one character’s quest to find the remains of her relatives who were killed in the Spanish Civil War, to make a record of their death and their existence.
Parallel Mothers takes place almost 50 years after Franco’s death, and close to 100 after his murderous rise to power, but the losses and history of a family and a country remain present. The story ends not with individual relationships, but with image-making, what endures across generations, and how what we make can in some form raise the dead. Franco’s army not only killed these ancestors, but tried to write them out of memory; creating a record that undoes that disappearance is a secular resurrection.
The Room Next Door makes it clear that you’re watching an artist create her final work. Concerned on its surface with questions of assisted suicide and what it means to die with dignity, the movie is ultimately most interested in how those ideas relate to art and to late work. Martha is able to choose the manner and time of her own death, which means she’s able to create one last statement. That her death is beautiful—that she can wait for the right weather, find her light, and make herself into a painting—gives her pain and her death meaning. Earlier in the film, watching it snow out her hospital window, Martha points out how beautiful the spring light renders the unseasonable weather: “Pink snowflakes. There had to be something good about climate change.” Beauty is the consolation prize for grief, personal or global. All those gorgeous technicolor objects hanging around the movie arrive at a greater meaning, the whole world dying in a vivid technicolor extinction bloom.
Almodóvar is known for making movies about mothers, but the mothers and the mothering in his movies are rarely literal or straightforward. When Swinton reappears in a new wig and costume as Martha’s daughter, Michelle, the surreal oddness of this choice seems intended to draw attention to the artificiality of family itself. The potential future relationship between Ingrid and Michelle is another creation of Martha’s. We learn little about Ingrid’s history, but her whole affect is achingly maternal; the main thing we learn about Michelle is that she’s always wanted a mother. By doubling Swinton in both roles, the film implies that Martha’s death is what makes it possible that her friend and her daughter might fill these roles for one another. In the final scene, Ingrid composes a letter to Martha in her mind, in which she refers to herself as having “inherited” Michelle. The tenuous connection between a childless mother and a motherless daughter is Martha’s creation, another work she’s made at the end of her life.
If Almodóvar has always written unconventional families, these three films together are his final statement on them: the work we make is a family, too, a legacy and an inheritance no different than passing down genetics, a way of leaving ourselves behind in the world, and of having been enough in it. The art an artist makes is the only thing left after the heady concerns of youth and the thick tangles of middle age have faded or worn away. Late work is the final romance between art and artist.
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Maybe Pain and Glory was why I started thinking about late work sometime around when 2019 turned into 2020, in the sharp inhale before global crises piled up in the brand-new decade. Maybe it was all the other late work in the last few years, from Killers of the Flower Moon to The Boy and The Heron, or any of a dozen other recent films that felt like the kind of thing someone might make if they knew it might be their last.
But maybe thinking about late work is merely part of realizing youth no longer includes me. I started the pandemic making fun of Boomers; by the time I was getting on planes again, my generation was the butt of Gen Z’s jokes. I blinked and I was on the other side of it, resentful of having never managed to feel correctly young when I had been. If I’ve experienced the first half of this decade as a parade of one elegy and deathbed confession after another, there are perhaps young people who’ve experienced it as a time filled with early work from artists they’ve just now discovered, whom they’ll one day watch get old.
Yet this may be the same desperate nostalgic revisionism of trying to claim pink snowflakes are the one good thing about climate change. In an interview with Film Comment in 2019, Almodóvar said that the sense of nostalgia, present for the first time in his work, had “something to do with the fact that I don’t like the world in which I’m living right now.” Since he gave that interview, a world that on most days felt like a bad bargain has transformed into an unremitting catastrophe. The kinds of long, experimenting careers that make possible late work, that divide into eras at all, in which art at last justifies life and gives worth to it, are increasingly out of reach, available only by way of nostalgia. Cinema’s importance, like that of art in general, wanes precipitously; late work seems more and more a relic of the twentieth century. Maybe I see late work everywhere lately because I’m getting old, or maybe because late work itself is dying out along with the artists whose careers made the category possible to name and to consider.
In the end, this is what it means to care about something, to stay in a relationship of any kind. We age alongside the things we love, movies and books and albums and bands, parents and children and siblings, lovers and exes and old friends, institutions and technologies and notions of the future, too. Everything runs on the same one-way track. To love something—or to hate it, or to care about it at all—is to watch it get old, and to watch yourself get old alongside it.
The late part of a party is often the miserable part, when the vibe has turned, and everybody just wishes everyone else would leave. You can remember how optimistic you felt when there was light in the sky, but now it’s dark out and all the bars have closed and you have to start figuring out if you can afford a cab home. Sometimes, though, staying late at the party is when small talk softens into confession, when guests sit on the floor and start telling secrets, when the real party begins. Sometimes the last two people at a restaurant are on a date so good they’ve lost track of time. Sometimes the bartender locks the doors after last call, when the sunlight is already peeking in through the windows, hands out drinks for free, and tells you the good gossip. There’s no promise that anything lasts, that it isn’t the end; but these tragedies, like a woman dressing up in a gorgeous outfit and trying to die, can perhaps be made temporarily beautiful.
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The gorgeous rental house in which The Room Next Door takes place happens to boast a spectacular physical media collection, which includes John Huston’s 1987 film The Dead, and in the film’s warmest sequence, the two women stay up all night watching movies together. Martha asks to watch The Dead, and falls asleep halfway through; Ingrid stays awake, her dying friend asleep in her lap, as the last frames of Huston’s last film play under the words of James Joyce’s short story.
In one sense, The Dead is an incredibly simple movie: it merely puts Joyce’s story on screen, from beginning to end, with minimal added text or action, and a great deal of voice-over. Not much happens. A couple goes to a party. They stay at a hotel on the way back home. It snows. During the evening, Gabriel Conroy (Donal McCann) learns that his wife, Gretta (Anjelica Huston), had a first love who died very young. The couple have a brief, sad conversation. She falls asleep, and he stays awake and watches it snow, meditating on how we each carry the dead with us until we join them. The film ends with the story’s most famous passage, a description of the landscape on which the snow is “falling faintly through the universe, and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, on all the living and the dead.” These two categories—the living, and the dead—are hardly two categories at all; the former is merely a brief stop on the way to the latter. The collective noun of the story’s title refers to everyone: every vivid, living, breathing person, young and old, happy and sad, dancing and giving toasts at a bright, crowded party.
Huston’s adaptation of Joyce’s story is the latest possible late work, a film practically directed from beyond the grave. Eighty years old and severely ill with emphysema, Huston directed the film from a wheelchair, breathing through oxygen tubes, rarely able to sit up for a whole day’s shooting. In the gentlest way, The Dead works on the viewer as a living, witnessed miracle, the same lowercase wonder and secular resurrections to which Almodóvar’s movies aspire. Huston, another lapsed Catholic, stayed alive to make The Dead, and passed almost as soon as it was completed, much like Martha leaving a final, beautiful image of herself.
Almodóvar chose The Dead as a secondary text deliberately; references to the short story weave throughout The Room Next Door even before the DVD conveniently appears. In her hospital bed, Martha quotes the famous final lines as it snows. The movie concludes with the same quotation, rewritten slightly by Ingrid, who recites it to Martha’s daughter as they lie side by side on the lounge chairs where her mother died. By braiding The Dead, and Huston’s movie in particular, into The Room Next Door, Almodóvar acknowledges mortality as his final inevitable subject.
Late work is always aware that there is little time left, and that there is nothing to be done about it. But perhaps, these late works argue as they fade with their whole category toward oblivion, nothing is wholly lost. Perhaps it’s possible to reach backward, to live on in the things we create, in the grand romance between art and artist, a romance that carries on past the end, for all the living and the dead.