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  • Recuperating Losses:History, Spectacle, Motility in Julio Medem's Room in Rome/Habitación en Roma
  • Susan Divine

The dominant theme throughout the oeuvre of Basque writer and film director Julio Medem is a deconstruction of identity as built through national or familial ties. To do this Medem manipulates the language of film, plotting and narrating romantic love stories in a way that reveals a subjective and individual nature of the "id" that transcends or evades definition within a national context. His 2010 production, Room in Rome, adds to this exploration with a provocative take on the presence of women in western historiography, especially questioning the role spatial constructs play in the recovering of lost histories. Room in Rome sets out with a lofty goal: to problematize women's representation in history and their ability and "motility" (potential for mobility) to figuratively and literally direct their own political, historical, and cartographic movement. To this end, the plot and story of the film provide an example wherein women assume the roles of artistic and historic "subjects" through a conscious reclaiming of their position as artistic and historic "objects". Medem employs the mise-en-scène as an attempt to re-insert women into the historical trajectory of European historical and political space by means of, one, allegories that appropriate narratives of women from antiquity and, two, metonyms and metaphors of spatial mobility. In both allegory and metonym Medem attempts to collapse the binaries between public and private histories and spaces. In redefining how public history, and private individual experience in and through space construct identity, Medem also aims to question heteronormative imperatives of romantic love, as well as the history of intellectual thought. Room in Rome problematizes women's histories through a visual narrative featuring the female form itself as the vehicle for interrogating notions of power and spectacle. Although successful in setting [End Page 261] up a visual analogy to make this all possible, where the director ultimately fails is in his inability to release authorial control over the story. While Room in Rome diverges from his previous films in some regards, it clearly contains the director's famous lyrical signature.

Medem: the director, the author, and the film

Beginning with Vacas in 1989, through Medem's highly acclaimed films in the 1990s and early 2000s – La ardilla roja (1993), Tierra (1996), Amantes del círculo polar (1998), Lucía y el sexo (2001)–, the trope of the unreliable narrator has been an essential part of Medem's style. As a writer-director, he favors plots where the protagonists are not honest storytellers, especially in terms of their own motivations. This feeling of incredibility is further reinforced by the use of subjective shots, where the viewer witnesses the scene from the point of view of animals or inanimate objects. It is imperative to understand that as Medem is constructing the individual psyche, he is also de-constructing and destabilizing an identity based on myths that prop up the nation and nationality. Nathan Richardson understands the use of the subjective shot in the film Vacas as essential to how nationality is deconstructed: "… camera work problematizes the production of the illusory subjectivity based on the manufacture of an ego-ideal built upon identification between camera, protagonist, and spectator. Thus a film that would be about Basque identity is problematized by a meta-cinematic exploration of the very notion of identity" (197). In this way, the spaces of any of his feature length films – the Spanish wine country and the Basque countryside in Vacas or Tierra, a café in the center of Madrid or a forest in Finland in Amantes del círculo polar, a Southwestern landscape in Caótica Ana (2007) and, in Room in Rome, a public street and a posh rented room in the historic center of Italy's capital – are all spaces marked as simultaneously "Spanish", "Basque", and "European".

Through this destabilization of a notion of self via a geographically determined identity, the personal, individual and subjective drive of emotion and sexual desire comes to define Medem's characters. In this regard, part of Medem's style is what Rob Stone in his monograph, Julio Medem, has...

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