The Human Voice caters to progressive political allies.
The Human Voice caters to progressive political allies.
O f all the politically correct selections in this year’s New York Film Festival, Pedro Almodóvar’s The Human Voice will be the most watchable, but it exemplifies Procrustean cinema that is cut and structured to fit the current political dictates.
Announced as “freely based” on Jean Cocteau’s 1928 play, The Human Voice is Almodóvar’s first English-language film, and it stars Scottish actress Tilda Swinton, which suggests further distance from Cocteau. Yet that play has long been part of Almodóvar’s personal canon. A scene from it was staged in Law of Desire (1987), and his 1988 breakthrough Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown was an expanded fantasy farce inspired by Cocteau’s story of a woman falling to pieces when her lover rejects her.
Almost a century after Cocteau’s conception, it would surely be a scandal if Almodóvar had stuck to the play’s original text in which the protagonist, an unnamed actress, speaks on the telephone to her lover and then melodramatically strangles herself with the cord. The idea of female madness is verboten in the #MeToo era, so Almodóvar has to work around wokeness while paying homage to his master and updating him according to political fashion.
As always, Almodóvar emphasizes visual pleasure. He and cinematographer José Luis Alcaine use bright colors and culture references that mix realistic perception with artifice: In a lavish soundstage/apartment, the Actress (Swinton) could be going through personal agony or simply playing a part. She shuffles through hipster bric-a-brac: All That Heaven Allows, The Phantom Thread, Kill Bill DVDs and paperbacks of Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Other Men’s Daughters, and Tender Is the Night. Her varied décor exudes sexual sophistication: Venus and Cupid, by Gentileschi, Memories of Olive, by Vargas, and a wire mannequin statue by de Chirico, each one representing the Actress’s mercurial emotional state.
All this high style distracts from the essence of The Human Voice so that Almodóvar stays out of trouble and Swinton holds on to her political art-icon status. They’re both allies of contemporary social movements — Swinton more than Almodóvar, whose humane artistry tends toward irreverence. Yet the way Almodóvar’s formal delight replaces Cocteau’s probe of his protagonist’s psyche makes The Human Voice minor rather than emotionally powerful.
When Anna Magnani performed The Human Voice in 1948 for Roberto Rossellini’s omnibus film featuring The Miracle, she conveyed tragic and comic sides of romantic ardor and religious naïveté. (The Miracle, controversial at the time, was written by Federico Fellini.) Magnani’s extraordinary earthiness and spiritual depth almost transformed Cocteau’s theatricality, but slender, modish Swinton (she gets six costume changes in 30 minutes) relies on artifice — almost defensively.
In the cellphone age, Cocteau’s phone cord — an essential communication link — is obsolete. It’s no longer a lifeline (or noose as in Detour). Bereft of that symbol of connection, we need some indication of general, modern disaffection that technology has caused. But Almodóvar’s tricky cinema-vs.-theater effects are merely clever. The Actress’s shifts from phone monologue to interior monologue just seem weirdly artificial. Swinton starts with a wonderful swagger; babbling compulsively and insecurely, threatening and cajoling, then being self-effacing. But she doesn’t break down fabulously like Magnani did — Tilda “persists” — and so this solo #MeToo cliché never becomes a tour de force like Magnani’s or like Tom Hardy in Locke, an equal-time masculine update of Cocteau.
In every Millennial detail, from ear buds to meta-movie edits and camera moves, Swinton and Almodóvar defy Cocteau’s spiritual possibilities. The Human Voice’s compassion — Cocteau’s sensitivity to the laws of desire that supposedly made gay men allies to women’s deepest struggles — is forfeited for feminist chic.