Martha, a journalist played by Tilda Swinton, has terminal cancer. She asks her friend Ingrid (Julianne Moore) to come away with her to a house in upstate New York and be in the room next door when she takes a suicide pill she bought on the dark web. Like all of Pedro Almodóvar’s films, The Room Next Door is gorgeous to look at, completely unsentimental, and staunchly uninterested in absolutes, rules, or dogmas. This is Almodóvar’s gift: moral gray tones painted in vibrant colors. When Martha says the gangster line, “Cancer can’t get me if I get me first,” we sense that it’s an expression of Almodóvar’s own defiant punk spirit.

Almodóvar is an artist of eros, in the sense that the dynamics between the characters tend to escalate into sex, not infrequently rape. The director is sex obsessed, but in earlier films like Talk to Her and Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! he also uses sex to provoke discomfort, disgust, and titillation in the viewer. It works because he himself is a siren, and he is seducing us. His movies are so ravishing and hilarious that we find ourselves helpless to patrol our boundaries, and we just give in to their transgressive spell.

In recent years, his films have become more serious, moving away from the campy melodrama and drugged gazpacho we knew and loved him for, toward a mature reckoning with the bigger questions of existence. The conflicts between the characters have become more delicate, reflected in ways that are less bluntly sexual and violent, more as a subliminal dance that may or may not turn to sex.

The covertly erotic dance at the heart of The Room Next Door is the slow seduction of Ingrid—who’s so afraid of death she wrote a book about it—by Martha’s desire to kill herself. When Martha invites Ingrid to be a part of her self-euthanasia, it’s much more intimate than anything Ingrid imagined happening between them. Ingrid’s first reaction is, “Wouldn’t you prefer someone you’re closer to?” Ingrid accepts the assignment, but at first keeps herself wary and emotionally distant, taking a room downstairs rather than next door. As the movie evolves, she is touched by Martha’s bravery and can no longer protect her feelings. In the third act, she climbs into bed with Martha and spoons her. We see Ingrid’s face layered over Martha’s, a doubling that lets us know she has allowed herself to be fully lured in by Martha’s struggle. Martha, facing the camera, smiles in triumph.

The Room Next Door should be a great movie, but something’s wrong. Without any line being badly written, the dialogue is too sincere and deadpan, and Almodóvar’s black humor is completely missing. The taboo nature of a subject never stopped him from being funny before; so I have to assume it’s the English.

For someone to say to a personal trainer she just met, as Ingrid does, “This world is absurd and inhumane, I don’t see it improving any time soon,” might make sense in Madrid. But in upstate New York it comes off a little bizarre.

If, in my wildest fantasies, I could talk to Almodóvar—whom I consider to be the greatest living director—I would suggest that if he wanted to work with Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore, why not just have them be English-speaking characters in a Spanish-speaking movie? A visiting art dealer, a retired porn star, an exiled Hollywood diva? There’s something untranslatable about his sensibility, but that makes it great. The world is absurd and inhumane. We don’t need more American movies; we need Almodóvar movies.

In his mature period as a filmmaker, Almodóvar’s first salvo was Pain and Glory (2019). The film chronicles aging director Salvador Mallo’s struggles with a battery of chronic pains, which he medicates with heroin, as he is constantly invaded by memories of his mother, old lovers, and the actor who was his muse and became his bête noire. Here, as in The Room Next Door, Almodóvar takes the erotic tension underground. When Salvador and the actor he hates freebase heroin together, their shared ecstasy stands in for the conflict they could never work out, and refusing to forgive each other becomes a form of mutual self-destruction.

Their relationship is only one instance of many things in his history that Salvador has evaded and tried unsuccessfully to put behind him. The childhood home Salvador recalls, one of the most vivid, gorgeous, and somehow funny mise en scènes in Almodóvar’s work, is a cave in the ground containing Penélope Cruz. This is both a visual joke about the caverns where Roma people hid themselves away from persecution for centuries, and a Jungian metaphor: the childhood past Salvador recalls is also Spain’s past, the crushing years under Spain’s long-term dictator Francisco Franco. (If that’s not the most Jungian thing you ever heard: growing up in the basement of Spain’s collective unconscious.) Salvador is recalling the period that formed his parents’ lives and his own childhood, four decades of corruption, censorship, poverty, and fear.

Almodóvar was a central figure in La Movida Madrileña, the countercultural explosion that followed the death of Franco. The spirit of the movement was “To live as if Franco never existed.” Defiance, punk rock, loud colors, open queerness—everything was the opposite of what Almodóvar’s generation had grown up with: church ladies in black, repression, and submission to authority. Almodóvar and others found an aesthetic that was punk not only visually but formal and ideologically.

So, when Almodóvar begins to look at the past, this is an important shift. It is an older man reckoning with what he himself, as a younger man, would probably have thought was stupid.

What Janis—Old Almodóvar—wants Ana—Young Almodóvar—to understand is what a barbaric toll fascism takes on a country, and how we can never let it happen again.

Almodóvar’s 2021 film Parallel Mothers is about is about the same thing on a larger scale: historical memory. Two women—one, Janis, is 40; the other, Ana, is a teenager—meet in a hospital while giving birth. Without giving too much away, metaphorically, the baby of Janis (Penélope Cruz), the older woman, is Memory; and the baby of the teenager, Ana (Milena Smit), is the Future. The man Janis got pregnant with, the father of Memory (Israel Elejalde), is an archaeologist. Together, he and Janis hope to dig up a mass grave in Janis’s hometown, where Franco’s forces rounded up and massacred dozens of people, among them Janis’s great-grandfather.

Janis hires Ana as a nanny, and at one point, they fall into fighting about the point of the excavation. Why dredge up ancient history? Ana says. Won’t it just make people feel bad? Why should the young care? Janis, infuriated, argues that we need to give the dead a voice; that we, the living, owe it to them and to the Future—the Future babies—not to forget.

This is the conflict at the heart of Parallel Mothers, the layer of feeling that gives the film its power: the argument between Almodóvar’s younger self, as represented by Ana, and his older self, as represented by Janis. As the women circle each other and attempt to form a family, their conflict only becomes more complex and freighted with libidinal tension. (On another level, because he’s Almodóvar, we sense him asking himself a very fun question: If I met myself as a cute young man, would I want to have sex with me? I won’t spoiler the answer.)

The role of Janis, Old Almodóvar, is to be the mother of Memory. She’s the body-in-between, the bridge between Future and past, between the old and the young. She fights to carry the stories of the ones who came before down to the younger generations. What Janis—Old Almodóvar—wants Ana—Young Almodóvar—to understand is what a barbaric toll fascism takes on a country, and how we can never let it happen again.

My German husband has nightmares of a night sky lit up by rockets and aerial explosions as he watches from the ground. This dream describes what his father actually experienced as a 14-year-old conscripted into the Hitler Youth during World War II. Given the ominously spritely title Flakhelfer, or flak-helper, my father-in-law loaded ammunition into anti-artillery guns as Allied planes bombed the city. He must have experienced the sights and feelings of terror his son dreams about now. If not, then my father-in-law’s descriptions alone were vivid enough to emerge from my husband’s unconscious 80 years later.

This was only the beginning of the nightmares my husband’s parents lived through as children under the Nazis. My husband’s life still reverberates with the oppression, violence, and cruelty they survived, and no doubt it impacts our kids, as well. It’s what Almodóvar means when he says, through the mouth of Janis, “You need to know your past, so you can know who you are.”

Parallel Mothers seems to have gone largely overlooked in America, probably for the very reason that it lacks a roofied soup, an act of transgressive sex, or anyone shooting up heroin in the corner of a plaza. And yet, for my taste, Parallel Mothers is the most masterful Almodóvar film thus far, a perfect construction in which every aspect of the director’s theme has its reflection in the drama, but in so light-handed a way that it doesn’t hit you until the end, in a scene of startling, poetic simplicity.

In the final scene, Janis, mother of Memory, leads Ana, mother of the Future, to the site of the excavation. Together, they look down at the skeletons of the murdered that have been exposed.

And then Almodóvar makes the bones disappear. In their place, contemporary people wearing modern clothes fill the pit, lying in the same positions as the dead. I suspect they are the film’s crew, but it doesn’t matter, they’re just people. It’s the simplest way to say: This could be you. This could be me.

How do we break the cycle? How do we fight to remember that fascism is not just a political event, a thing that happens, but a septic wound in time?

This dilemma is hitting me especially hard right now, as I imagine it is you. Since the Supreme Court’s Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision overturned Roe v. Wade, I’ve organized live events where people can share their abortion stories, both to raise awareness about how important bodily autonomy is to a person’s full humanity, and to give relief to people who’ve been afraid to tell these stories. At these events, many women in their 70s and older have come to talk about their horrifying pre-Roe illegal abortions. Their rage is electric; before Roe was overturned, at least they had the solace of believing this could never happen to anyone else.

Like Janis, I’m the bridge-in-between, trying to figure out how to pass the lessons of the past from the old to the young. It’s a desperate feeling, a sense of racing against some kind of cyclical human tragedy. People need safe spaces in which to talk about the past. But that’s the trick of fascism: there are no safe spaces.

Lately, when the weather allows, I’ll sometimes sit in Tompkins Square Park with two chairs and a sign that says “Tell Me Your Abortion Story.” I will wait for a few hours under the Hare Krishna tree, noticing how every once in a while someone will approach the venerable American elm to touch a palm to it. I will enjoy an entire concert given by an excellent indie band called Pan Arcadia, and the singer will give me a shout out. “Go tell your abortion story to the nice woman over there … or don’t. Your choice.” I will be surprised by a Gen Z policewoman who walks up to me and says, “Just so you know, many people consider this tree sacred.” I will be delighted when a man who lives in the park, carries around a bong made out of a vitamin pill bottle, and has been telling me stories of several abortions he knew of and has complicated feelings about, rushes to defend me. “She’s not doing anything wrong. The tree people wouldn’t mind.”

I will think, Only in the East Village. (And maybe Portland?)

I will be approached by a squirrel who stares into my eyes as he attempts to find a spot to bury a giant acorn he’s carrying, and I’ll be entranced by how graceful his fingers are as he smooths the ground to cover his treasure. I will have the feeling he’s telling me, Keep going, keep going, never give up. Every nut counts. 

A day has not gone by without someone telling me a story. 

Featured image: Penélope Cruz and Milena Smit in Parallel Mothers / IMDB.