Montclair Book Center on screen

[From The Room Next Door (dir. Pedro Almodóvar, 2024). Click either image for a larger view.]

Here we see Ingrid (Julianne Moore) and Martha (Tilda Swinton) in a bookstore. The wraparound balcony, visible in the screenshot, was the instant giveaway: the scene is the Montclair Book Center in Montclair, New Jersey (with its name edited out of the awning for the movie). I bought Robert Caro’s The Power Broker there last summer.

We spotted Julianne Moore in 2017 when we had lunch with our friend Luanne Koper at the Cafe Cluny in Greenwich Village. And last summer we went to the Montclair Book Center with Luanne’s husband Jim Koper. Somehow that all seems kinda cool — or is it strangely portentous, and if so, of what? Cue the theremin.