Based on a play by Jean Cocteau, which has its most famous film adaptation in the 1948 film by Roberto Rossellini with Anna Magnani, “The Human Voice”, Pedro Almodóvar’s new medium-length film (about 30 ‘) is a little gem whose release in the hall is due only to the exceptional period of pandemic we are experiencing. A woman spends hours next to her ex-lover’s suitcases (who maybe will come to take them back) and to a restless dog because his master has abandoned him: two living beings in the face of abandonment. During the three days of waiting, the woman left the house only once to buy an ax and a can of gasoline. The woman puts on make-up, wears a new dress as if for a party, considers jumping off the terrace, until her ex-lover calls her on the phone, but she is unconscious because he has swallowed a cocktail of thirteen tablets and not. can answer the phone. The dog wakes her up by licking her face. After a cold shower, revived by a coffee as black as her mood, the phone rings again and she can answer …
«The Human Voice» is a great Almodóvarian film, a work in which we can recognize the poetics and style of the Spanish director: the burning passion of desire, love and death as essential impulses of life, the research on identity starting from the body, existence in the form of pop melodrama, the saturation of colors, the attractiveness of his camera towards the face of the leading actress, etc. Free to experience your own vision in a new form, Almodóvar creates a closed / open box (the woman’s apartment is part of a set) in which to place the contemporary iconicity of Tilda Swinton. The film thus opens up to a reflection on the stage space as a potential “place” of the contradictions between reality and fiction (another great theme dear to the director), just as Swinton’s acting makes clear the distance from the character played, especially in moments of greater emotional intensity. The images thus become a mirror of something else, whose solemnity is softened by the explosion of warm colors. In the end, everything refers to the tragic and painful essence of the love feeling, which moves from the woman’s gaze, “impressing” itself forever elsewhere, as in the reproduction of Venus painted by Artemisia Gentileschi, towering over the woman’s bed.
Direction: Pedro Almodovar; Interpreters: Tilda Swinton; Film script: Pedro Almodóvar from the play by Jean Cocteau; Photography: José Luis Alcaline; Music: Alberto Iglesias; Assembly: Teresa Font; Scenography: Antxon Gomez; Costumes: Sonia Grande. Distribution: Warner Bros. USA, Spain, 2020, 30 ‘.
May 14, 2021 | 14:55
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