It’s going to be hard writing this up without sounding like a perv…
Ah, Room in Rome… The movie adolescent (and many not-so-adolescent) males everywhere get down on their hands and knees each morning to thank the Good Lord exists; where two impossibly beautiful women spend the entire running time cavorting around a hotel room nakedly, having repeated sex. Many would roll their eyes at the mere concept, tossing it off as some late night Cinemax wank-fest. But where Room in Rome is different is that the movie does not exist primarily to titillate - filmmaker Julio Medem isn’t making his film to satisfy the whims of a masturbatory audience (although I’m sure he wouldn’t mind said audience plunking down their money to see it), but instead uses the central concept to explore romance and sexuality and everything that exists between two people sharing a bed and their bodies for one frantic evening. The film doesn’t quite work, and in fact comes dangerously close to falling flat on its face, but is still admirable in its attempt to tell a serious story through sexual imagery.
There’s always been this rather curious separation of pornography and erotica; the former exists primarily to showcase the physical act of sex, while the latter supposedly has higher artistic aspirations. The fact that there is a distinction between the two probably has more to do with the type of people who consume it, but both essentially serve the same purpose. Porn has become something of a dirty word in our culture, primarily because its target audience has been single men. Existing as a tool for male masturbation, porn has evolved into the utmost extreme of masculine loneliness and alienation - ugly, degrading, misogynistic and more than a little subliminally violent. In other words, we’ve made porn a dirty word because we’ve allowed it to become a dirty institution. But it doesn’t have to be that way… Action movies use set-pieces to move their story along, musicals use song-and-dance numbers - why not a story that uses sex scenes to advance the plot and characters? It’s the reason we’re all here anyway, after all... And what influences a good deal of our decision-making (especially the younger and more prone to hormonal persuasion of us).
But, in mainstream entertainment at least, sex is an immediate red flag - you can fill your PG-13 movies with as much death and mayhem as you like, but god help you if you dare show a bare breast *. But that doesn’t stop Spanish filmmaker Julio Medem from tackling sexually-explicit stories, such as his earlier (and much better) Sex and Lucia. In Room in Rome, Medem scales his story way back, focusing on two women who meet in a bar in Rome and decide to spend the night together. The women are Alba (Elena Anaya), a Spanish lesbian who’s never been with a man, and Natasha (Natasha Yarovenko), a Russian woman who at first claims only to prefer men, but is open to experimentation. As the night goes on, the two slowly reveal their secrets and their own haunted pasts in a variety of lies and half-truths, as they grow from friends to lovers to - for however brief a time - soul-mates.
Anaya and Yarovenko give fine (if somewhat unremarkable) performances, made all the more impressive considering both perform nearly the entire running time completely naked. Medem even finds a way to make this integral to the story itself, as the film is all about the two of them baring it all to each other, emotionally and physically. The explicit (but tastefully shot) sex scenes as well serve the narrative, punctuating the character reveals and providing a natural transition into the next scene. Medem directs the movie rather well; confining the story to the titular hotel room, Medem’s camera never leaves the confines of its walls, even when his actors do (such as two nicely-framed tracking shots where Alba and Natasha enter/exit the hotel and the camera shoots them above from the balcony). Despite the limited location, the film never feels claustrophobic, due in large part to the design of the room itself and the various works of art littered about - which also play a part in the film’s narrative and development of the characters.
Where Room in Rome stumbles is in its final moments, where the rather natural relationship between Alba and Natasha becomes rather forcefully melodramatic. The whole film prior to that slowly builds the trust between the two characters, delighting equally in the awkwardness and excitement that comes upon two people meeting and having that instant electricity of attraction. Alba and Natasha create their own world in their hotel room away from the real world - each crafting the perfect sexual fantasy for the other. The relationship becomes so perfect indeed, that each woman is tempted to leave their real lives behind and stay in Rome with the other. But as a wonderful breakfast scene on the balcony attests, the fantasy only holds up for that one night, as the perfect eroticism between the two begins to erode in the rather mundane activity of eating toast - perfectly underscoring that the fantasy only exists in that room, completely unable to survive in the outside world (which is also highlighted through the filmmaking, where the camera never leaves the room).
It’s a nice summation of the perils and pratfalls of attraction, and the film seems to be arriving at a nice crescendo when Alba and Natasha decide to leave the relationship where it will work best - as a memory, a moment in time where each experienced that perfect love, however briefly. But then the film swerves headlong into full-on melodrama, where the already raw emotions get cranked up to eleven seemingly out of nowhere. As an example, throughout the film there are various cutaways of Alba looking up at a painting on the ceiling of Cupid firing an arrow. As if it wasn’t already obvious, Medem then actually has Alba take a literal arrow to the heart, where she and Natasha then struggle to pull it free from her chest. It’s taking the themes of the movie too far into the abstract, and completely incongruous with what came before. The film also kind of betrays the themes its sought to build over the course of its runtime by having a not-so-ambiguous ending where Natasha and Alba decide to stay together after all. Couple that with the end credits provided by Bing (© Microsoft 2009), and the film pretty much loses whatever artistic credibility it previously had.
Still, Room in Rome is a film far deeper than it first appears, and a refreshing use of sexuality as a means of telling a story rather than merely fodder for wanking off.
Although it’s perfectly good for that, too. Pervs.
* I’ve been working on a theory where the whole “Sex Bad, Violence Good” mentality of popular entertainment is merely a form of systemic population control - where, if you think of culture as an organism unto itself, destruction is promoted and celebrated (in some respects) while creation is demonized; thus acting as antibodies to keep the organism in check. This mentality also has roots in our religion-fueled morality, where celibacy until marriage is held in high esteem - thus limiting the amount of sexual partners for an individual and keeping the population from growing unwieldy. But that’s a rambling, typo-laden article for another day…
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