Just back from watching
Pedro Almodóvar‘s
The Human Voice, starring
Tilda Swinton.
Almódovar‘s short—his first English language film—is an adaptation and updating of
Jean Cocteau‘s monodrama
La voix humaine (known to music lovers because of
Francis Poulenc‘s operatic version of 1959); it’s quite effective and visually arresting, and
Swinton is excellent in her rôle. It’s “very
Almodóvar” in it aesthetics, and also has some typical self-references (the filmmaker already used
Cocteau’s play for some passages of his early
La ley del deseo, and
Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown was originally supposed to conclude with the telephone call that is
The Human Voice, but then that sequence vanished (as the director himself acknowledges in a short address to the Spanish audience before the start of the film proper).
With this I’ve seen the play and the opera (in a clever staging by
Gerardo Vera here in Madrid some 25 years ago, in which we got the play in Spanish translation—with
Cecilia Roth—immediately followed by
Poulenc’s version with a wonderful
Felicity Lott), and now
Almodóvar’s screen version.
