Room in Rome (2010)
(Habitación en Roma)
Country: SP
Technical: col/2.35:1 109m
Director: Julio Medem
Cast: Elena Anaya, Natasha Yarovenko, Enrico Lo Verso
Synopsis:
A Spanish mechanical engineer and a Russian tennis player meet on their last night in Rome, and spend a passionate night in each other's company, gradually learning of each other's past and present lives, and deceiving themselves that theirs is something more than a one-night stand.
Review:
The Basque director's achingly beautiful chamber piece is in one sense a fulfilment of the female doubling in many of his earlier films, in another a guilty pleasure for director and (male) viewer alike. But there is more to this than stunning actresses and gorgeously lit flesh tones: as Medem's camera pans and glides around the apartment, luxuriating in the impeccably appointed rooms adorned with classical and renaissance art, the tension between fantasy and reality becomes palpable. In many ways this is the perfect movie, and one ideally suited to the 100-minute format: an islet of refuge from prosaic everyday life, where two souls can for a brief time wallow in the illusion that time has stood still, that the dream can last forever; at the same time there is the awareness that the film must end with their parting, as if to acknowledge the fantasy. Put another way, it is the movies' perennial and paradoxical reassurance to us that real love can exist, if only in the movies.
(Habitación en Roma)
Country: SP
Technical: col/2.35:1 109m
Director: Julio Medem
Cast: Elena Anaya, Natasha Yarovenko, Enrico Lo Verso
Synopsis:
A Spanish mechanical engineer and a Russian tennis player meet on their last night in Rome, and spend a passionate night in each other's company, gradually learning of each other's past and present lives, and deceiving themselves that theirs is something more than a one-night stand.
Review:
The Basque director's achingly beautiful chamber piece is in one sense a fulfilment of the female doubling in many of his earlier films, in another a guilty pleasure for director and (male) viewer alike. But there is more to this than stunning actresses and gorgeously lit flesh tones: as Medem's camera pans and glides around the apartment, luxuriating in the impeccably appointed rooms adorned with classical and renaissance art, the tension between fantasy and reality becomes palpable. In many ways this is the perfect movie, and one ideally suited to the 100-minute format: an islet of refuge from prosaic everyday life, where two souls can for a brief time wallow in the illusion that time has stood still, that the dream can last forever; at the same time there is the awareness that the film must end with their parting, as if to acknowledge the fantasy. Put another way, it is the movies' perennial and paradoxical reassurance to us that real love can exist, if only in the movies.
(Habitación en Roma)
Country: SP
Technical: col/2.35:1 109m
Director: Julio Medem
Cast: Elena Anaya, Natasha Yarovenko, Enrico Lo Verso
Synopsis:
A Spanish mechanical engineer and a Russian tennis player meet on their last night in Rome, and spend a passionate night in each other's company, gradually learning of each other's past and present lives, and deceiving themselves that theirs is something more than a one-night stand.
Review:
The Basque director's achingly beautiful chamber piece is in one sense a fulfilment of the female doubling in many of his earlier films, in another a guilty pleasure for director and (male) viewer alike. But there is more to this than stunning actresses and gorgeously lit flesh tones: as Medem's camera pans and glides around the apartment, luxuriating in the impeccably appointed rooms adorned with classical and renaissance art, the tension between fantasy and reality becomes palpable. In many ways this is the perfect movie, and one ideally suited to the 100-minute format: an islet of refuge from prosaic everyday life, where two souls can for a brief time wallow in the illusion that time has stood still, that the dream can last forever; at the same time there is the awareness that the film must end with their parting, as if to acknowledge the fantasy. Put another way, it is the movies' perennial and paradoxical reassurance to us that real love can exist, if only in the movies.