Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.Woody Allen has twice made movies in Spain — Vicky Cristina Barcelona and Rifkin’s Festival. Now Pedro Almodóvar returns the compliment by setting his first feature-length English-language film in New York among the city’s well-to-do literati in a style that begins in similar fashion to late-period Allen.The opening overhead shot of a Manhattan bookstore is a Mondrian of bold colour and pleasing geometry that suggests Almodóvar is firmly at home. But the script suggests something different, the dialogue lacking his usual fluency and crackle, perhaps the result of working in translation even while adapting American writer Sigrid Nunez’s 2020 novel What Are You Going Through.Quickly we find ourselves in a dense blizzard of exposition, Tilda Swinton saddled with much of it as her Martha chews over the facts of her life in conversation with longtime friend Ingrid (Julianne Moore). “I was never what a mother was supposed to be,” she confesses, having devoted her life to a successful career as a war reporter. Now she is fighting her own war against stage-three cervical cancer — one she has little chance of winning.Flashbacks take us to her teenage pregnancy to a Vietnam veteran, Esther McGregor (daughter of Ewan) playing the young Martha, and to a visit to a Carmelite order during the Iraq war. Death again looms large as it long has done in Almodóvar’s work, the preoccupation intensifying since 2019’s Pain & Glory with frequent meditations on illness, regret and raking over the past.The film gets better as it goes along. Moore in particular brings a welcome warmth to the screen as the empathetic Ingrid, bolstered by the gentle presence of John Turturro, playing an ex-lover of both women who is now obsessed with the ravages of climate change. But mostly this is a two-hander, Swinton and Moore bedding in for a moving final act in verdant upstate New York.If a missing pill evokes the gazpacho spiked with sleeping pills in Almodóvar’s 1988 breakthrough, Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, here it serves no punchline, the tone more sombre than screwball. These days, even moments of humour in this director’s films come tinged with pathos. Better to delight in the lyricism of his gracefully fluid camera moves and eye-catching production design.The script too eventually finds notes of poetry with help from copious quoting of James Joyce. “The snow is falling indiscriminately, covering both the living and the dead,” a voice intones as the flakes fall on the Hudson Valley and words become superfluous. The dense blizzard has become a gentle flurry.★★★☆☆In UK cinemas from October 25
