MUBI

A Room in Rome tells the short but passionate love between two women in a hotel room in Rome. Both women are about to leave the city which they have come to visit for different reasons and meet coincidentally in a pub the night before they go back to their homelands. They somehow spend the night together making love and sharing their stories which are at some point impossible to be distinguished as real or fantasy. Though the dialogues and the acting is not unbearable, the plot seems to be floating on air from many perspectives. The attempt to relate the stories of the women with the ancient paintings in the hotel room turns out to be quite unsuccessful and the character Max could not be placed aproppriately in the storyline,seeming to have been popped out of an absurd play. However the worst aspect of the movie is the binary opposition on which the relationship/love between the two women is based. The only difference from a heterosexual relationship is the absence of a penis in one of the parties. As the film quickly unfolds, on of the women is white caucasian, the other is a dark mulatto with hispanic and arab origins. One is tall, long-blond haired, studies history of art, heterosexual and willing to leave this memory as a secret, while the other is a short, dark-short haired, masculin mechanical engineer and an open lesbian who plays the active part in both the emotional and the sexual initiation of the relationship between the two. Even though the end is not totally unpromising, the representation of queer love in a so called festival movie should not be so shallow and so much located with in the boundries of the binary opposition of man/woman which it exists to attack and deconstruct.