World cinema at the Philadelphia Film Festival: 'The Room Next Door,' 'The Seed of the Sacred Fig,' 'Who by Fire' and 'La Cocina'

Looking at some PFF33 films from around the world

Image: Sony Classics

We’re about halfway through the 2024 Philadelphia Film Festival, and in addition to plentiful centerpieces and documentaries, the fest has also featured films from all over the world. Some highlights of what I’ve seen: 

The Room Next Door 

The festival includes the latest film from one of the leading voices of world cinema, Spain’s Pedro Almodovar. The twist? It’s his first English-language feature, and also his first film set in the United States. 

It feels a lot like an Almodovar film, including the two actresses (Julianne Moore and Tilda Swinton) you would most expect to star in an English-language film in his style. I liked it fine, but it doesn’t quite have the go-for-broke spirit of the director’s best work, like All About My Mother, Talk to Her and Volver. 

In the film, shot mostly in a Madrid that passes plausibly for New York, Moore and Swinton star as old, long-estranged friends who re-connect after many years when one of them gets sick. 

Ingrid (Moore) is a famous novelist, who frequently writes about death but has a fear of it. Martha (Swinton) is a war correspondent, now dying of cancer. 

Early in the film, there are a couple of intriguing flashback sequences, including a story from Martha’s time covering wars, and the fate of the father of her child. I thought maybe the entire film would have this structure, but it soon drops it in favor of something else: Martha proposes that the two rent a house upstate, where Martha will end her life at some undetermined time; she wants to know that Ingrid is in “the room next door.” 

Both actresses are wonderful in their scenes together, even if the film is sometimes overreliant on expository dialogue. 

There’s a lot of discussion of mortality and morality, and a lot of digressions that have little to do with the main plot. John Turturro shows up, as a man obsessed with climate doom with a romantic history with both women. These scenes represent a Big Lebowski reunion with Moore (although Jesus Quintana and Maude Lebowski shared no scenes.) When the film briefly turns into a police procedural, Alessandro Nivola shows up as a police detective. 

I didn’t dislike the film, and I’m glad Almodovar made it. But The Room Next Door doesn’t have that wild, over-the-top spirit that’s been present in the director’s best work. 

It lands in theaters this December.

Who by Fire 

Speaking of old creative friends reconnecting, that’s also the jumping-off premise of Who by Fire, a French-Canadian drama from Philippe Lesage.

Blake (Arieh Worthalter), a director, and Albert (Paul Ahmarani), a screenwriter, made a series of popular movies together years earlier. Now, Albert has invited Blake to his secluded house in the woods, and has brought his son Max (Antoine Marchand Gagnon), daughter Aliocha (Aurelia Arandi-Longpré) and Max’s aspiring cineaste best friend Jeff (Noah Parker.) A few other friends, as well as a private chef, are also present for the long weekend. 

Two throughlines quickly emerge: Blake and Albert have a couple of decades worth of buried resentments both personal and professional, which will come to the fore during a series of long, uncomfortable meals. And also, Jeff is wildly, awkwardly in love with Aliocha, his best friend’s sister, although his wooing skills leave a lot to be desired. 

It’s a well-crafted film, with Lesage’s camera gorgeously photographing the Quebec woods, although the running time is a bit long-winded, at 161 minutes. 

And in case you were wondering: Despite the title, the film has nothing to do with Yom Kippur, Unataneh Tokef, Leonard Cohen, or Judaism, although it is set in Cohen’s home provence of Quebec, and it is very concerned with who will live and who will die. 

The Seed of the Sacred Fig 

As with a lot of Iranian films, The Seed of the Sacred Fig is really two films: What happens on screen, and the story of how the Iranian government tried to suppress the filmmaker. And as with many other films from that country, the two things are somewhat intertwined. 

Writer/director Mohammad Rasoulof — who was sentenced to eight years in prison by Iranian authorities and has since fled to Germany — has set his film against the backdrop of the protests in Iran in 2022, following the death of Mahsa Amini.

The plot is focused on one family in Tehran: The father Iman (Missagh Zareh) is a lawyer in the Revolutionary Court. His daughters (Setareh Maleki and Mahsa Rostami) are sympathetic to the protests, while his wife (Soheila Golestani) is less so. 

Things intensify when a friend of the daughters is injured and then arrested, and even further when Iman loses his gun, the sort of thing that could ruin his reputation and career. 

Over the course of the film’s nearly three hours, the tension is racheted up within the family, along with the mystery of what happened to the gun. In the third act, set at a country house, resembles The Shining the longer it goes on. 

I saw The Seed of the Sacred Fig at the New York Film Festival a few weeks ago, as part of a nearly seven-hour double feature with The Brutalist. It’s a fine work, one that absolutely made me wish for the Iranian regime to collapse as soon as possible.

La Cocina 

It took several days into the festival, but La Cocina was the first PFF film that I really truly disliked. 

Based loosely on Arnold Wesker’s 1950s play The Kitchen, La Cocina follows a day in the life of the kitchen in a Times Square tourist trap. Fans of The Bear will likely find a lot of elements that look familiar, including a lengthy single-take scene set in a chaotic kitchen, but the plot is way too busy, with way too many characters to serve. 

The film is mostly in black and white, although there are flashes of color on occasion.

We’re introduced to this world through a young female immigrant looking for a job in the restaurant kitchen, although she ends up not being important to the plot at all. The main thrust of the plot ends up being a complex romance between cook Pedro (Raúl Briones Carmona, who resembles the former ballplayer Nomar Garciaparra), and waitress Julia (Rooney Mara.) 

There are various other subplots, and I was entertained by Oded Fehr as the boss who rules the kitchen with an iron fist. There’s one very long monologue in the middle of the film that I was transfixed by, although it seems to only exist to set up a punchline at the movie’s end. 

But overall, I found it sort of boring. There’s also the issue that the outdoor scenes don’t look the slighest bit like New York or Times Square. Or that it’s oddly timeless- there are some contemporary references, but no one has cell phones and there are still phone booths. It could be 1954 or 2024, it’s not clear either way. 

The Philadelphia Film Festival continues through October 27.