Guest Writer Wednesday: Room In Rome

Room In Rome, the Spanish director Julio Medem’s deft pas de deux with Psyche, is everything Hollywood blockbusters are not.

It consists of three people, a street, a hotel room and a piazza in Rome. By comparison, the animated junk of Hollywood’s sacrifices to Mammon seem gross and tasteless.

Two young women played by Spanish actress Elena Anaya and Russian actress Natasha Yarovenko meet one tipsy night in Rome and share a room whose walls are painted with Renaissance themes. The room becomes the alembic in which their lives are transformed. They discover that they are not the personas they wore when they met.

Few more delicate, lyrical films have ever been made. As the tall Russian girl teaches the Spanish engineer to pronounce her name, emphasized the sha in Natasha, our collective memory of Hollywood extravaganzas becomes white noise and motel paintings. All we want to hear and see is Natasha coaching Alba to say her name, as if the future of the world depends on it.

Reviewers have used words like steamy to describe this film, suggesting the prurience of their own minds; the film is like watching a poem being written, a painting being painted. There is no evil here, no villain, no tragedy, just flowers unfolding, honey drawn, Psyche paid her due.

Alba and Natasha have lives to renew. Alba is involved in a good relationship, Natasha is scheduled to be married the following Saturday. They must depart in the morning, they tell each other they must, and in the morning they do, but only for seconds, as Natasha walks away and then rushes back into Alba’s arms.

I have lived 77 years and seen many films, but only a handful so memorable, so affirming of our power to transcend circumstance and the power of chance encounter to transcend our settled notions. Room In Rome is, not least, about freeing ourselves from the captivity of received ideas.

Room In Rome suggests to us the Wagnerian hyperbole of so many Hollywood productions like John Carter, which, for all their pyrotechnics and spectacular animations, lack the fundamental subtlety and nuance that defines our lives. But there are other kinds of hyperbole to which Room In Rome puts the lie. Wild Things, for example, a 1998 noir film which, in spite of a stellar cast and reasonable budget, had so many plot twists that in the last half hour it becomes painfully embarrassing, inviting the viewer to cry, Oh, come on!

Medem understands and Hollywood, for the most part, rejects, that our everyday transactions are filled with drama and suspense. Life, when lived sensitively, really doesn’t need hyperbole. Our characters don’t need to be overdrawn; they’re quite well drawn when we decide to inhabit them. And that is exactly Room In Rome’s point. Two people, observed humorously and with good will by a singing hotel employee, Enrico Lo Verso, decide to inhabit their lives. They decide to live in accordance with their inmost impulses. They decide to listen to the testament of their intuitions, and neither technical improvisations nor authorial twists provide more suspense or excitement.

By dialing down momentous incident Medem achieves more than by pumping up every available aspect of filmmaking. Room In Rome is not so much minimalist as it is refined and true to what the camera is itself witnessing. Under his direction the plot never imposes itself on the true wont of the characters, or at least it never seems to, and this is surely a hallmark of great direction.

The director, cinematographer Alex Catalan, and composer Jocelyn Pook seem at one with each other and the actors, creating a seamless séance of great beauty and affirmation.

Djelloul Marbrook blogs at www.djelloulmarbrook.com and is the author of two books of poetry (Far from Algiers, Kent State; Brushstrokes and Glances, Deerbrook Editions) and three novellas (Artemisia’s Wolf, Saraceno, and Alice Miller’s Room). A retired newspaper editor, he lives in New York with his wife Marilyn.