Room in Rome (2010)

Julio Medem's Room in Rome takes two women, a hotel room, and roughly ten hours of a Roman summer night, and asks them to sustain an entire feature. Alba, a Spanish engineer, and Natasha, a Russian who is not quite what she claims, undress, talk, lie, undress again, and occasionally consult a first-century map of the city. It is Medem's first English-language production and a loose reworking of an earlier Argentine film, though the debt is acknowledged mostly in the premise. The room does the heavy lifting. So do the bodies.

The same-sex relationship is not a subplot, a garnish, or a third-act revelation. It is the film. Two women circling each other, negotiating desire, inventing and discarding identities, constitutes the whole of the dramatic machinery. That earns the picture a genuine place in the queer cinema canon, however ambivalent its gaze. The camera, it should be said, belongs to a man, and it lingers where a male camera tends to linger. Female desire and female agency are on the menu, but the plating is voyeuristic. The casting of a Spanish and a Russian lead gives the affair a pleasingly unglamorous European texture, though nobody involved is treating this as a statement about anything.

What the film refuses to do is lecture. There is no sermon about systems, no climate anxiety, no economic indictment, no messaging about bodies or brains or the correct reading of history. Two people, one bed, a great deal of talking that never becomes a thesis. In an era that treats every intimate drama as a delivery mechanism for a position paper, this is almost quaint. The film is erotic, uneven, occasionally tedious, and entirely uninterested in instructing us. For that restraint alone, it deserves a quiet nod.