Elena Anaya and Natasha Yarovenko in Room In Rome |
This is a guest review by Djelloul Marbrook.
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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.
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!
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.
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