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 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. Where Room in Rome stumbles is in its final moments, where the rather natural relationship between Alba and Natasha becomes rather forcefully melodramatic. 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.
#Room in rome' (2010) movie
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). 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 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. 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.Īnaya and Yarovenko give fine (if somewhat unremarkable) performances, made all the more impressive considering both perform nearly the entire running time completely naked. 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. 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. But that doesn’t stop Spanish filmmaker Julio Medem from tackling sexually-explicit stories, such as his earlier (and much better) Sex and Lucia. And what influences a good deal of our decision-making (especially the younger and more prone to hormonal persuasion of us).īut, 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 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. In other words, we’ve made porn a dirty word because we’ve allowed it to become a dirty institution. 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.
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Porn has become something of a dirty word in our culture, primarily because its target audience has been single men. 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. 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 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. 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.
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Many would roll their eyes at the mere concept, tossing it off as some late night Cinemax wank-fest.
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It’s going to be hard writing this up without sounding like a perv…Īh, 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.