An Aesthetic of Death and the Color Red in Pedro Almodovar’s Film The Room Next Door
An Aesthetic of Death and the Color Red in Pedro Almodovar’s Film The Room Next Door

Summary/Abstract: This essay discusses a change in the aesthetic of film director Pedro Almodóvar, as „shown in his latest film, The Room Next Door. The change consists mainly in distancing himself from certain means specific to melodrama or likely to be part of the arsenal of this genre. For decades, his so vivid chromatic palette played an important part in associating his films with melodrama. The primary, saturated colors, and especially his red gave the already temperamental characters and their actions and frequently shocking plots an extra dose—or should we say overdose?—of passion, which placed them in a dangerous proximity to melodrama. Inevitably, this essay will also explore the relationship between this new aesthetic of color and the film’s main topic: death. And not death as such, but death in a form that generated (over) heated discussions in contemporary society: euthanasia. Almodóvar’s view of death and euthanasia is reflected in the film’s poetics, in the use of colors, especially red. So, we are going to follow this red thread, as it interacts with other colors in order to stress the film’s message and the filmmaker’s means to create beauty, to create an “aesthetic of death”.

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