When Pedro Almodóvar’s “The Room Next Door” won the Golden Lion for best film at this year’s Venice Film Festival, it was the first time that the Spanish director had garnered the top prize at one of Europe’s major film festivals. What made this victory even more impressive and unusual was the fact that “The Room Next Door” was Almodóvar’s first full-length film in English.
For a leading auteur of contemporary cinema, and one whose work is so bound up with the textures of his native tongue, Almodóvar’s late-career shift to English-language filmmaking feels daring. If the film’s reception at Venice is any indication, it appears that the gamble has paid off and that he has succeeded where many others have failed.
Almodóvar, 75, is only the latest in a long line of European directors to make the leap to English-language filmmaking. The history of such transitions is uneven, and ranges from the Golden Age Hollywood classics of the Austrian-born Billy Wilder to infamous missteps by Ingmar Bergman and François Truffaut.
The Hungarian filmmaker Kornel Mundruczo said that both working in English and directing Hollywood stars presents European directors with a unique set of hurdles. “It was a huge challenge to understand the cultural differences and not to create something which is symbolically, say, sinking into the Atlantic Ocean,” he said, recalling the making of his English-language debut, “Pieces of a Woman,” in a recent phone interview.
“There are so many movies like that,” added Mundruczo, who finished shooting “At the Sea,” his new film starring Amy Adams, in Boston this August.
Hollywood was, in certain ways, a European invention. Many of the pioneers of American cinema were immigrants, fleeing repression or seeking opportunity in a new world. German, Austrian and Hungarian émigré directors, including Fritz Lang and Wilder, brought sharp chiaroscuro lighting, existential dread and savage wit to Hollywood, reshaping American cinema into something darker and more psychologically acute.
Postwar film history, however, is full of examples of foreign directors who have stumbled while scaling the peaks of mount Hollywood. The English-language efforts of continental auteurs were frequently dismissed as European art films in American drag. They often left the impression of an artist struggling to translate his artistic vision and sensibility into a language he neither spoke fluently nor understood intuitively.
In his review of Truffaut’s “Fahrenheit 451,” for The New York Times, Bosley Crowther wrote that the director “got himself tangled up” with “language he couldn’t fashion into lively and witty dialogue.” Five years later, Vincent Canby called the dialogue in Bergman’s English-language debut, “The Touch,” reminiscent of “those early, grammatically perfect, and lifeless translations of Ibsen.”
There have been notable exceptions, including Michelangelo Antonioni in “Blow-Up” and Wim Wenders, who won the Palme d’Or, the top prize, at the 1984 Cannes Film Festival for the English-language “Paris, Texas.” Then there are films that were largely derided or ignored upon their release, but which have since undergone a critical re-evaluation, like Federico Fellini’s “Casanova” or Antonioni’s “The Passenger.”
For some, making films in America and in English has been as much about survival as it has been about art. During the Cold War, Roman Polanski and Milos Forman left Eastern Europe for the West, escaping repression and censorship in Poland and what was then Czechoslovakia.
“Milos Forman was, for me, a role model when it came to stepping over to the English language,” the Swedish filmmaker Ruben Ostlund said in a recent phone interview. Two of Forman’s American films, “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” and “Amadeus,” took home Oscars for best picture and best director, a sign of the Czech filmmaker’s mastery in making films in his adopted language. Ostlund’s two most recent films, “The Square” and “Triangle of Sadness” (his first film entirely in English), both won the Palme d’Or. The director called his own turn to English-language filmmaking “a very organic development.”
“I wanted to combine the best parts of U.S. cinema with the European cinema,” he said. “I wanted to try to use the connection with the audience that U.S. cinema had and the intellectual and the approach of art that European cinema has,” said Ostlund, whose next film, “The Entertainment System Is Down,” will also be in English.
Like Ostlund, Mundruczo, the filmmaker behind “Pieces of a Woman,” has found creative opportunities in working in English, including greater visibility, but making movies on the other side of the Atlantic has also been an artistic necessity for him. In recent years, many have warned that artistic freedom in Hungary is under threat. Mundruczo said he hasn’t been able to secure major funding for a project in his home country since 2017. “I definitely want to do Hungarian movies and it feels just impossible right now,” he said.
For Almodóvar, the turn to English-language filmmaking is neither a response to artistic repression at home nor the dream of a director who knows that films in his native tongue will have limited appeal. Unlike Swedish or Hungarian, Spanish is one of the most widely spoken languages on earth.
“English is an interesting language for Almodóvar, because English is the language of punk and rock,” said the scholar Ana María Sánchez-Arce, author of “The Cinema of Pedro Almodóvar,” in a phone interview. “And I think that he’s got to a point where he can make this film the way he wants to make it,” she added, noting that “The Room Next Door” features many of the director’s usual collaborators, who help give his films their distinctive texture.
“It’s quite different from going to the States and having to bend to a particular system,” said Sánchez-Arce, who teaches at Sheffield Hallam University in England.
Michael Barker, co-president of Sony Pictures Classics, which has distributed the bulk of Almodóvar’s films since 1987, recalled a warning that Wilder gave the Spanish director many years ago: “Be careful when you make a film in English. Many have tried and failed.” Almodóvar’s response to this challenge has been cautious and deliberate. He made two short films in English, “The Human Voice” and “Strange Way of Life,” before taking the feature-length plunge with “The Room Next Door,” which will be released in Los Angeles and New York on Friday.
“Pedro just wanted to make sure he was on top of the language,” Barker explained. “He wanted to make sure he had the right project. And I think he also wanted to make sure that the language of the film still possessed his character and the way he spoke: the way he spoke in Spanish, the way he speaks in English,” he said.
“It’s like when you see a Woody Allen movie, you hear Woody Allen speaking,” Barker added.
According to Ernesto R. Acevedo-Muñoz, who has written a monograph for the British Film Institute on Almodóvar, the director’s eye-popping visual style and how he uses and plays with genre conventions have long been key to his success internationally.
“Almodóvar found a very idiosyncratic but well-defined spectrum of melodrama where he works in terms of mise-en-scène and topics like death and motherhood and loss and grief,” said Acevedo-Muñoz, a professor of cinema studies at the University of Colorado.
“The language of the cinema, especially when it comes to genre, is universal. And I think that’s where Almodóvar can say, ‘OK, I’m going to make this movie, but I’ll work still within my own aesthetic.’ And his aesthetic has become increasingly visual in a way that transcends national specifics,” he added. “Or even language.”
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