Pedro Almodóvar’s Radical Chic

Of 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.