Room in Rome (2010) Julio Medem…

In Brief: Two gorgeous women spend an entire film nude in a hotel room, interspersing their soul-searching dialogue with regular bouts of lesbian sex. Perfect Sunday viewing, right? Alas no, Room in Rome is erotica with the Ed Wood lens firmly in place. *

source: Netflix

Welcome to Room in Rome. The cinematography is stately and steeped in shadows. The set-dressing is similarly lush, replete with folds of luxurious bed linen. The walls are adorned in fine art. The hotel room boasts the almost preposterous opulence of an old art gallery. The women’s naked bodies too are flawless, and a hint more mature than those Hollywood sleazily endorses. They stand vulnerable in each other’s presence: strangers separated by their cultures and experiences yet bonded inextricably by their femininity and sexuality. The stage is set for grand inquisitions into the human soul. Except there’s one problem: director Julio Medem’s film has not a whiff of substance to support these sumptuous ingredients.

A brief, experimental shot with the ‘clothes on’ filter

This is an impressive feat when you consider that this film is based on another, Matías Bize’s En la cama. The twist being that the heterosexual one-night stand here becomes a lesbian encounter. So essentially, despite having an already made product to shamelessly crib from, Medem still can’t land a single element right. Instead he rushes to establish every stereotype people tend to trot out about European art cinema- particularly people who’ve not actually seen any such films (see the paragraph above). And yet it plows on- its self-conscious style and ponderous shot compositions reducing the film to inadvertent parody.

History watches. Waits. Falls asleep.

Our two actresses, Elena Anaya and Natasha Yarovenko, both acquit themselves well. Still, while plenty of film critics out there seem unable to separate extensive nudity from ‘brave performances’, what impresses more than these women daring to place their faces near to one another’s crotch is that they can utter the film’s desperately hollow dialogue while keeping a straight face. Perhaps it helps that they each speak to each other primarily in English, a second language to both. “History is watching us,” one of them declares as they pose awkwardly in yet another frame that’s supposed to evoke the vast cultural heritage of the Mediterranean. That’s surely only because History can’t find the ‘off’ button on the remote.

As the women talk they peel away their own guards, revealing more of their pasts and their true identities, having originally seduced one another under false names. The problem is that their tales are neither credible nor interesting. Each peeled layer of intrigue, each vulnerable, freshly exposed psychic wound is an absolute bore- a random event just lumped into a script that seems more interested in the curtains than the travails of women. At one point Yarovenko’s character discusses how she ‘became a woman’ at the hands (and presumably some other parts) of her father. This leads into a bout of grope-y soft-core sex. She later reveals that this was not the case, she merely gained masturbation material watching her twin sister ‘become a woman’ with their father. This is pretty dark stuff, and viable for all kinds of exploration, but Medem just skates around on the surface, making sure to repeatedly employ the phrase, ‘become a woman’- each instance a hammer-blow to my bullshit-o-meter. After a while, accomplishing absolutely nothing, the women move on to the next poorly measured topic and replicate their success.

It’s all erotic until your arm goes to sleep

A thought that occurred to me while my mind wandered amidst the tedium, is that affairs here might have been at least slightly rescued had the actresses engaged in actual sex. That would at least have conjured up something fundamentally carnal, something inherently earthy and human. Instead we’re treated to endless shots of bare, writhing mid-riffs, awkwardly jutting hips, and legs either closed or crossed in poses of discomfort, rendering both models as beached objects d’art within the director’s horribly cloistered shaggy-dog story. In some films we might commend a director for taking sexually explicit subject matter and avoiding the crassly pornographic. With its clumsily staged faux-sex, Rome in Rome could use a leg-up just to qualify as pornographic.

Throughout I was reminded of Woody Allen’s Love and Death, a fantastic spoof of ‘high art’ sensibilities- most notably, from a film perspective, the work of Ingmar Bergman. The same sense of misplaced weighting is evident here except that Medem believes he is Bergman. For a while it’s quite funny but the film’s unceasing tedium, its lack of depth or any genuine emotion, eventually wears the viewer down. There are no people in this film, only two beautiful bodies rubbing against one another. Sometimes they speak and that only pushes the audience’s sympathy ever further away. And then, as if to dare us to push through the monotony, when the women aren’t fondling each other, a significant chunk of Medem’s film is devoted to, of all things, internet map searches. A curious juxtaposition to be sure and one that serves the characters little and the film even less. After all, during these sequences it’s inevitable that we recall how the internet can readily yield copious amounts of more forthright lesbian frothing, with the participants having fun to boot.

“Shit, I think I’m still in this film.”

And then there’s the music. The credits boast original music by Jocelyn Pook but the nauseatingly twee songs that resurface again and again, like bouts of stomach flu, all seem to have been written and performed by someone else. Their continual resurgence, mindless and ineffectual, recall Godard’s aural antics on Le mépris but again, there’s not a hint of subversion here. Medem seems to really believe this is working. This is curious as I’ve heard some positive things about his earlier films, primarily Sex and Lucia, which gained a larger English-language audience than most foreign-language films. Of course, perhaps having the word ‘sex’ in the title and the beautiful Elena Anaya in the lead helped. Yet from almost the first frame, this looks like the accomplished work of a man who flunked every course in film school.

“Let us never speak of this to anyone.”

Room in Rome is the sort of film one might imagine stereotypical US college freshmen watching before spending the night humming and hawing over the very different nature of ‘Europeans’ – a homogeneous entity, of course – while also marvelling at their own open-mindedness for having watched such a daring film. Of course nude women are not at all daring and if Europeans were actually this annoying I’d have no wish to move back to the continent. Room in Rome is only a work of art in so much as its abject failure recalls grand tragedy. And they could probably have filled a whole other room with the emotional baggage the director ineffectually tries to sort through.