Tilda Swinton in The human voice.
Photo: Courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics
Tilda Swinton buys an ax at the beginning of The human voice, a new short film by Pedro Almodóvar that brings together a dozen feature films. This trip to the hardware store represents the only case where her character left her apartment for three days, although she lies about it on the phone with the lover who left her recently, telling her that she went to the theater and ate voraciously in restaurants with friends. The truth is that she is waiting alone for him to come and pick up the things she has packed in the bags by the door, giving her the chance to see him one last time. Her unnamed character is an actor, and the purgatory in which she is imprisoned has made her even more dramatic than usual – hence the ax, which she ended up picking up with a gesture. One of her lover’s suits has been placed on the bed they used to share, like the skin of an animal that has grown and moved, and she takes her newly purchased tool to him in a fit of rage. It is a grandiose action that no one else is around to witness next to his dog, who has also been abandoned – and, of course, those of us watching, who make up his true audience.
The human voice it’s all about the blurred lines between the fabricated and the genuine, and how much a performance can be divorced from the sincere feelings that can underlie it. The film, which lasts 30 minutes and marks the debut of Almodóvar in the English language, is the third by the Spanish director to be inspired by Jean Cocteau’s 1930 monodrama. The human voice, and the most direct, although, as a credit note, it is still “freely based” on the piece. Almodóvar highlights the artificiality of the production from the beginning, with Swinton in a Balenciaga ball gown wandering wistfully through a studio that soon revealed to contain the apartment in which his unnamed character lives. It is a beautifully decorated place, with rich colors and inviting textures and enviable furniture, the kind of creation that looks like it came out of an Almodóvar film, with periodic photos from above or of the plywood exterior to remind us that this is exactly what it is. .
This theatricality, with the nature of the scene very clear and the audience recognized by a look of breaking four walls in the opening sequences, combines with the behavior of the character of Swinton, and Swinton, as angular and ironic and fearless as always, inclined if for this. She engages in a kind of suicide attempt in the middle of the road, wearing a sumptuous set of red tights and a face full of makeup before swallowing a careful handful of pills and curling up next to the suit she attacked earlier. When awakened by a call from the man who is leaving her and whose voice we never heard, she informs that she knew that the combination of drugs would not kill her, and that it was another one of those gestures for her and the viewer. After all, he doesn’t seem to have any intention of showing up. “I was hoping someone would find me,” she tells him. “I wanted you to think I was beautiful – dead, but beautiful. It was just an idea. I did nothing today, except wait.
The human voice it is often described as a gift and a rebuke to the actors, a play that consists entirely of a woman alone on stage, talking on the phone with the man who left her to marry another, and alternately cajoling, punishing, reassuring, manipulating and losing control over the course of their conversation. It is a mature material, although it is not exactly flattering. But Almodóvar has always liked melodramatic impulses more, and his interpretation has more empathy to offer the protagonist, even when she experiences her own solitary breakdown. In Almodóvar’s view, the ax, drugs and the final incendiary act are all the same, all bizarre gestures with a core of emotional catharsis. He is willing to allow the character’s behavior to be seen as a journey towards closure, rather than just a few desperate attempts to maintain a relationship that is already gone. There is a stubborn dignity in the way the character acts, even when it falls apart. The film delights in her suffering, not because of some sense of sadism, but because of a feeling that all great emotions are magnificent, even those that accompany the pain. Sometimes you have to burn it all up to start over – or see Tilda Swinton do it in a pair of golden lamé pants, which, frankly, is just as good.