‘The Human Voice’ Has Both Style and Substance: LFF Review

“I wanted you to find me looking pretty. Dead, but pretty.”

From the mind of Pedro Almodóvar comes a new adaptation of Jean Cocteau’s The Human Voice, starring an impeccably dressed Tilda Swinton. Almodóvar has always excelled at delving into the psyche of a woman scorned, perhaps never so literally as in his 1988 feature, Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, of which Cocteau’s The Human Voice was a conceptual sounding board. But intelligent subversions of his usual style combined with familiar aesthetics makes this new adaptation a must-watch.

At its core, The Human Voice is a thirty-minute meditation on grief. Swinton’s nameless scorned woman moves effortlessly through denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance, sometimes in the space of ten seconds. Though little is revealed in the way of context, the emotional pain of Swinton’s role is at once universally relatable and darkly comical, a winning combination of a stellar script and a tour-de-force performance. Rarely has a short film included so many killer lines that feel both natural and poetic at once, no doubt in part because of its lead actress.

Swinton, always in monochromatic haute couture ensembles, draws you in with subtle fury, “a mixture of madness and melancholy”, and puts in one of her finest and – surprisingly – one of her most restrained performances, essentially acting her way through a duologue with an invisible, mute partner. This is only surprising because the pairing of Almodóvar and Swinton should be an explosion of melodrama (in the best way). However, just as his lead actress keeps her grander theatrics under wraps this time, Almodóvar steers clear of his more extreme tendencies.

Where once his protagonist will have wandered into a delightfully colourful, expertly crafted florists, Swinton eases into a messy hardware store. Her apartment is merely a set, the views are a soundstage, the crockery’s just a prop. It’s a teasing nod to The Human Voice’s stage-play origins, but also draws back the curtains on the artificiality of Almodóvar’s previous aesthetics in a meta-textual move, keeping them on a surface level, but likewise deconstructing them to reveal a deeper, darker reality – everything is too perfect, so of course it’s fake.

The conclusion of the piece is similarly both familiar and subversive, echoing the feminist end to Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, whilst providing an emotional catharsis that is largely absent from that film. Through fire and brimstone, the unnamed woman emerges from her breakup stronger, the master of her own fate and, most crucially, her lover’s dog. Her final quip to the incoming firefighters is enough for us to know that she has come to the end of her grief process, as she finally leaves the trappings of her beautiful-but-fake apartment/set and into the wider world.

The Verdict:

Expertly styled and directed, with a standout script elevated further by Tilda Swinton’s powerhouse performance, Pedro Almodóvar’s The Human Voice is a stunning collaboration between two of the world’s finest camp artists, filled to the brim with humour, heart and humanity.

Rating: 9/10

Words by James Nash

Other reviews from the London Film Festival can be found here.

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