Julio Medem | Habitación en Roma (Room in Rome) / 2010

infatuation

by Douglas Messerli

 

Julio Medem (screenwriter and director) Habitación en Roma (Room in Rome) / 2010

 

Spanish director Julio Medem’s Room in Rome is quite frankly one of the sexiest and most convincing of lesbian films I have encountered for a long while. In this work, despite being directed by a male, the gaze does generally not seem to be from a male point of view—although we do have, upon occasion, the intrusion of the hotel waiter Max (Enrico Lo Verso), who even proposes that the two women at the center of the film might want to explore a threesome—but, for the most part, it is the women themselves who are enchanted with one another’s bodies, and the film’s actions are motivated by their infatuation with one another.

     Alba (Elena Anaya) and Nastasha (Natasha Yarovenko) meet up evidently in a bar, both a little drunk. At first Alba is the more forceful of the two, the true lesbian who has convinced her inexperienced beauty to share her quite luxurious hotel suite, filled with famous art pieces, presumably reproductions.

       Alba tries almost immediately to make her guest at home, but Natasha remains shy and removed, insisting that she has never before had a lesbian liaison and is terrified about what it might mean. Alba, seemingly more forthright about her experiences suggests that she has always been a lesbian and has never had sex with a man.

     The two begin with simple touches, lying side by side until Alba actually falls asleep, Natasha quietly dressing and escaping the situation.

       Before long, however, fearful of the situation after a kiss or two, Natasha escapes, but forgetting her cellphone, returns, this time spotted by Max, delivering dinner to another room. Alba suggests to Max that they will be hungry later, as she again pulls the beautiful Russian girl into her room.

      This time, between intense sex, the two tell each other Scheherazade-like stories about their own past and identities, Alba claiming that her mother abandoned her when she was a little girl in Saudi Arabia where a wealthy Arab man adopted her and eventually made her a slave. She escaped, she proclaims, when she realized she would soon simply become one of his harem.

      Using a google map, Natasha tells her own lie about how her abusive father nightly took her twin sister into her bed, leaving her behind, an action of which when she discovered the truth made her envious of her sister and confused about why her father had ignored her over her twin.

      Later the story shifts to a tale about her sister being a gifted tennis player and art historian.

     Between continued bouts of raw sex, mutual masturbation and participating in a 69 position, which they both fully enjoy, they also point to various art pieces on the wall, noting small details which relate to their lives, including a cupid and a small man lecturing a room of men on Greek history.

      Over the next 10 hours they have sex several times, with the handsome Max delivering up a cucumber for a sexual tool and proposing his own sexual participation. He is refused.

       Gradually, they both discover the seeming truth about one another, that Natasha, whose real name is Dasha, comes from a wealthy family outside Moscow. It is she who is the tennis player, while her twin sister is a model. Even more shocking is that she is planning to be married the next day to a Russian man, Vlad.

        Alba admits that it was her mother who had an affair with a Saudi Arabian sheik, that she, having been taken to Greece eventually wound up in Spain where she is now in a relationship with a woman named Edurne, who has two children, the three speaking Basque. However, the woman’s on has died accidentally while in the charge of Alba. She explains that Edurne does not blame her for the death, yet…. which may explain, in part, why she has escaped temporarily to Rome. Alba reveals that she is actually a mechanical engineer and inventor.

        By this time, having had sex in the bathroom as well—including a fantasy scene wherein Natasha is forced to pull an arrow, obviously shot by the pictorial cupid, from Alba’s breast—they call Max for breakfast, who enchantingly sings an operatic aria to them as they spread their jam upon their toast. They now even imagine leaving their romantic partners so that they might live together, while still realizing that such a radical act as what they imagine is not plausible.

     Finally, called by her sister Sasha who wonders where her errant twin might be, Natasha/Dasha dresses and prepares to leave, but not before she hangs the bed sheet up on the balcony flagpole as evidence of their relationship.

     Now suddenly reacting to her strange experiences of the night, she insists that the relationship was an exception and must be kept within the walls of the room, never spoken about to anyone else.

     Together they both walk away in opposite directions, Alba toward the airport which will take her back to Edurne, Natasha to her marriage with Vlad. But at the last moment Natasha calls out to Alba and runs toward her.

      Quite inexplicably most of the reviews that I’ve read of this film were highly negative, describing it as a boring art film. And even semi-positive reviews such as that by Jonathan Holland in Variety who argued that it was a “typically challenging, potentially divisive item from Spanish auteur Julio Medem,” concluded that “there’s the sense that he’s more interested in his ideas than in his people.”

      I can certainly perceive why some people might question a film in which the women remain fully nude for most of the film, but I feel if they had been two males they might have seen this film as ground-breaking, while the focus on the female body here might be perceived simply as further erotic exploitation. But the two actors are so perfect as a couple that I totally believe their electric attraction in a way that I was convinced by Chantal Akerman’s on the road film, I you he she of 1974, in which the central character made her way through sexual contact with a man in order to return to her lesbian lover.

 

Los Angeles, August 1, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (August 2026).