Film: Room In Rome
Release date: 18th October 2010
Certificate: 18
Running time: 103 mins
Director: Julio Medem
Starring: Elena Anaya, Natasha Yarovenko, Enrico Lo Verso, Najwa Nimri
Genre: Drama/Erotica
Studio: Optimum
Format: DVD
Country: Spain
This is an English-Language release.
Perhaps best known for Lovers Of The Arctic Circle (1998) and Sex And Lucia (2001), Basque director Julio Medem clearly has an abiding interest in love and sex. His latest film, Room In Rome, continues the theme, only this time he has chosen to focus on a lesbian one-night stand that takes place in a hotel room in Rome.
Room In Rome opens with Alba (Elena Anaya) and Natasha (Natasha Yarovenko) on a deserted street outside a hotel in Rome late at night, as seen from the balcony of Alba’s room. It is clear there is a strong, if slightly awkward attraction between the two women, and Alba persuades an initially hesitant Natasha to join her up in her room - even though they have only just met that evening, and Natasha makes it clear that she’s never been with a woman before.
Once in the room, they shed their clothes quickly – they remain off for most of the film - but then Alba falls asleep and Natasha decides to leave, only to return again shortly afterwards when she realises that she has left her mobile phone in Alba’s room.
What follows is prime art house erotica, coupled with Alba and Natasha sharing stories about their lives - some of them true and others fabricated or with details of their lives swapped around. We learn that Alba recently lost one of her children, and is an eco-aware Spanish engineer who is in a relationship with a Basque woman, and that Natasha, a professional Russian tennis player, is engaged to a man who was previously in a relationship with her sister.
Eventually, after much physical and emotional drama in the bedroom and the bathroom, Alba and Natasha discuss what it might be like to remain together, before parting ways…
Though it has been described as a remake of Chilean director Matias Bize’s 2005 film En La Cama, Room In Rome obviously has a very different dynamic in that it is about two women, rather than a man and a woman. However unusual this may be, there are several aspects of the film that are disappointingly predictable.
As characters, Alba and Natasha simply aren’t that believable, and never really come to life. It probably has a lot to do with the dialogue (mostly spoken in English, but with brief smatterings of Spanish, Russian, Italian and Basque), which often sounds stilted and lazily written - both characters often come across as little more than art house lesbian fantasy caricatures. In short, Medem, who also wrote the screenplay, has taken one impishly beautiful Spaniard with a complicated past, one strikingly beautiful blonde Russian with a complicated past and thrown them together in a lavish hotel room complete with soft lighting and old art.
The sex is not particularly convincing either, mainly since Medem seems to have focused almost exclusively on making it look picturesque. There is very little sense of intensity or passion, just one carefully choreographed, artfully lit set-piece after another.
Worse still, there is one laughably pretentious scene in the bathroom that tips Room In Rome over the edge into unintentional farce: a scene in which an arrow pierces Alba’s heart while she and Natasha are writhing around in the bath together. Cue much blood in the bath water, a dementedly giggling cherub dancing on the ceiling and…oh, wait, it was just an overblown flight of the imagination, a jolt of symbolic drivel. And the bit about the cherub dancing on the ceiling isn’t true, strictly speaking, though earlier in the film there are shots of painted cherubs aiming arrows from the bedroom ceiling.
It’s not all bad, though, and Jocelyn Pook’s beautiful soundtrack helps to prevent Room In Rome from lapsing into utter tedium. Similarly, Russian Red’s hauntingly simple song ‘Loving Strangers’, though overused, adds a sense of poignancy.
As far as the performances of Elena Anaya and Natasha Yarovenko are concerned, both fare reasonably well considering the ponderous dialogue they had to work with, but whatever chemistry there is between the two is hampered by an overwhelming sense that it was contrived by a male would-be auteur who is more interested in surfaces than substance.
There’s no doubt that Room In Rome will attain a certain cultish appeal as a result of its meticulously styled lesbian carnal activity, but its dramatic qualities are mediocre, at best, and its unlikely to add anything to Julio Medem’s reputation as an ambitious filmmaker. JG
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