Inside Out 2011: ‘Room In Rome’ – A long drawn out perfume commercial
Room In Rome
Directed by Julio Medem
Written by Katherine Fugate (dialogue advisor) / Julio Medem
Spain , 2011
You know those perfume ads that feature beautiful people, dramatic music and languid shots of these beautiful people not really doing anything but being terribly seductive? And then at the end, we get in a breathy voice something like “Armani – Desire for Men.” You know exactly what I’m talking about. Well, have you ever seen one of these commercials and thought to yourself “If only this was two hours long instead of just thirty seconds and featured a lot of female full frontal nudity and lesbian sex”? If so, you are going to love this movie or you are filmmaker Julio Medem. Either possibility seems equally improbable to me.
Room in Rome tells the story of two young women, one from Spain, the other from Russia, who have just met and end up in a 
hotel room in Rome together. What unfolds is a long (long, long, long) night of passion, sex, stories, secrets and lies mixed in with some misplaced humour and irritating art history and geography lessons. Throughout the movie I am wondering, how did this get made? Who read this script and thought, “Sounds great. Let’s make it.” A quick look around the movie theater makes me think I’m not the only one wondering this. I think about it some more. Then it makes sense. I can imagine Julio Medem pitching this to some movie executive only to be interrupted by the executive saying, “You had me at hot, naked lesbians.” I realize I haven’t been paying attention to the film for the last ten minutes. As I focus my mind back onto the screen, nothing has happened. And nothing interesting will happen for the rest of the film.
Room in Rome is exactly what I described it as in the first paragraph: it amounts to a long, drawn-out perfume commercials that features two 
incredibly beautiful women (Elena Anaya and Natasha Yarovenko) but manages to become incredibly boring incredibly fast. It occurs to me that these two actresses are actually very good but even they cannot salvage this thing. Still, they seem to do their best with what they’re given here. Though the film is less than two hours long, when I walked out of the theatre I was somehow convinced that at least three hours must have passed. A look at my watch proved me wrong. As I walked outside, I overheard a snippet of someone else’s conversation about the movie that summed my feelings up perfectly; “Every time I thought the movie was finally ending, they just had sex again and it just kept going.”
Laura Holtebrinck
21st Annual Inside Out Toronto LGBT Film and Video Festival / May 19 – 29, 2011
Laura Holtebrinck has been interested in films from a very young age and when it started to dawn on her that she wanted to be a journalist, the fact that she wanted to write about film went without saying. During a newspaper internship in high school she got to write articles for the film section, getting her first real experience in writing on film. She is currently at the University of King's College doing her Honours in Sociology and Contemporary Studies and a minor in film.
Her favourite films include 'A Hard Day's Night', 'Rushmore', 'Stand By Me', 'Psycho' and 'The Graduate'. 
If you were truly a quality film critic you would have known that the movie is actually a remake of a famous (award winning) spanish movie called “In Bed”. What makes this movie different then the original is that the talented director, Julio Medem, deeply focused on the concept of “love at first sight” that he took away the standard gender focus of a man and a woman, he took away a specific language…which is why you hear English, Italian,Russian and Spanish being spoken by both women throughout the film. The point is that love has no barriers, it’s stronger than our control over society norms. It’s actually a well done movie. Those that choose to focus on the lesbian sex simply lack artistic integrity. But that’s ok, a majority of the human race can’t see past their own perversions.
Ok, I almost agree, however, like the long perfume ad, or better yet, a Victoria’s Secret commercial, I can’t help but stop breathing and am unable to turn away until it’s over.
That said, I love the bike the mechanical engineer designed. Might you know how I could find if such a bike is real and where they got the design? I’ve envisioned such a bike for a long time and would love to own one.