The Human Voice - Almodovar and Swinton Make the Perfect Team

Pedro Almodovar follows up his brilliant late career success Dolor y Gloria with an English language short, a decision that may come as a surprise for a director whose style is in many ways synonymous with the international conception of Spanish cinema and television. However, whatever reservations one may have are quickly washed away in large part due to his equally larger than life partner in the form of the enigmatic, one and only Tilda Swinton. While the two artists may come from worlds apart, their unique styles, oozing with utter coolness make for a perfect match.

Swinton, who launched to fame in Sally Potter’s expansively studied and deconstructed adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, has been a strangely intriguing presence since the beginning of her career. In Orlando Swinton’s alien like beauty and androgynous, other worldly looks are used to perfection as inexplicably she changes sex from man to woman in the middle of the film. Her physical presence makes it almost impossible to imagine another person in the role. She was not only cast for her offbeat looks in artistic films, but also in films like Marvel’s Dr. Strange where the character of The Ancient One, traditionally an old Asian man in the comics, was reimagined in the form of a mystically sexless, ageless, bald Tilda Swinton to sidestep the outdated original version.

Swinton must be one of the most eclectic stars to ever live as she easily transitions from her collaborative artistic projects, working with the greatest living auteurs, to doing the occasional big Hollywood blockbuster like The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe, Constantine, Dr. Strange, or Danny Boyle’s The Beach. She is one of the rare actresses who nearly all directors long to work with not only because she is a great actress, but because she is an artistic partner whose influence goes further than the performance. This collaborative style of Swinton’s was developed in the first films she made thanks to the director Derek Jarman whose experimental films and production methods look at filmmaking not as the vision of one director, but as that of the entire team. 

With the Human Voice, Swinton adds Almodovar to the long list of A-list international directors she has worked with including Bong Joon Ho, The Coen Brothers, Wes Anderson, David Fincher, Spike Jonze, Luca Guadagnino, Lynne Ramsay, Terry Gilliam, Sally Potter, Jim Jarmusch, and she has upcoming films by celebrated Thai filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul and Mexican director Guillermo del Toro. Her versatility and aforementioned otherness make her undefinable, and a therefore gripping, wonderfully powerful presence from Ramsay’s small town America, to Potter’s time travelling gender bending England, to the cooky worlds of Bong, the Coens, and Anderson, to the lush Italian palaces of Guadagnino, to the sword wielding action fantasy in Narnia, and finally, to the emotive melodrama of Almodovar’s world of impossibly colorful Spanish apartments. Like her character in Orlando, Swinton flows casually from country to country, language to language, world to world with nonchalant ease, grace, and style.

She steps flawlessly into Almodovar’s film, filling the shoes of the greatest modern Spanish actresses like Penelope Cruz, Carmen Maura, Marisa Paredes, and (the Argentinian) Cecilia Roth. As all of Almodovar’s works, the short is flawlessly designed, almost overwhelmingly, with lush colors, famous paintings, and impeccable decorations covering every inch of Swinton’s apartment. Swinton herself is equally decorated, almost as one dresses a new doll. Her bright orange hair, snow white skin, and carefully administered make up pop wonderfully with Almodovar’s colorful palette. The film begins with her donning a striking red dress that opens up to be what looks like an enormous half red dodgeball. She gracefully walks across a film studio before sitting down on a chair, perfectly placed, as if she was the figure in a moving painting. Suddenly, the film cuts to a close up of her face, completely changed, angry, pained, small, insignificant, and the camera pans out to see her now dressed in a much less extravagant, yet no less unusually impressive, black dress. Here the film seems to experimentally show us the two faces we are about to see of Swinton’s unnamed character, the confident exterior face she shows to the world, and the depressed, hopeless interior face she feels after a break up with her lover.

Almodovar and Swinton’s third partner in this collaboration is the great French poet and filmmaker Jean Cocteau whose play La Voix Humaine, was freely adapted by Almodovar to make the film. The play is a one hour monologue of a woman on the phone with her exlover who is about to marry another woman. Previous actresses to have taken on the role of this woman include Ingrid Berman, Liv Ullman, and Anna Magnani. Almodovar adapts it to fit in perfectly with his style of, as one of his best films is titled, Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, but he also keeps the theatrical style in play. Ever the exuberant over the top dramatist, Almodovar’s films, like Rainer Werner Fassbender’s, always seem to take their audience out of the drama by the exaggerated unrealistic use of color, design, and dialogue. However, in The Human Voice, Almodovar goes a step further by setting nearly the entire film in a beautifully constructed set in the hangar of a film studio. From the beginning shot he makes the audience aware that what they are watching is a fabrication. Even Swinton’s dialogue at the beginning sounds false and stagey. It takes the ear some time to get used to someone talking to an empty room even if there is supposedly someone on the other line. He also makes no effort at all to make us feel as if we are in a real apartment. It is all a construction, as can be seen by some great overhead crane shots that show the entire flat from above and it’s maze of walls and rooms. None of it is real, yet the powerful, contradictory, unforeseeable emotions displayed by Swinton seem to ring true despite all the artifice. This is the beauty of film and theater, the ability to recreate truth despite everything being fake, and not to hide or be afraid of showing this. 

Almodovar also makes the play entirely his own not only with Swinton’s exotic, vibrant wardrobe, and the deep turquoise and red walls of her surroundings, but also by bringing it into the technological 21st century replacing the home phone with cordless earphones attached to a smartphone, and references to DVDs of some of his favorite female centered films like Kill Bill, Written on the Wind, and Jackie. In the Human Voice Almodovar has found a source that makes him feel completely at home. As evidenced in Todo Sobre Mi Madre, great actresses giving big performances is one of his greatest influences, and by pairing Cocteau’s work with Swinton’s ability, and his own flamboyant and unapologetically over the top panache and style, he has created something that could only be a film by Almodovar.

The final symbolic touch he adds to the film is the character of a dog who ceaselessly searches for his lost master in the apartment. When Swinton’s voiceless lover explains to her that he is leaving the dog with her she exclaims that it is his dog, that he will be completely lost without him, that he can’t leave him behind. We quickly come to realize that the dog represents her own heart or soul. She is painfully longing for him, desperately waiting for him. She even comes to the point of attempting to commit suicide at the thought of losing him (The scene where she takes the pills is pure Almodovar. Melodrama turned up to 11, a close up of the pills whose color is so striking as to be attractive enough to be a painting.). By the end of the short the big question is what will come of the dog? Will she become it’s master? Or will he be lost forever, unable to live peacefully without the presence of his ‘master.’

The ending is brilliant, a heroic turn for a heroine utterly destroyed by her lover, and begs us to ask if any of this is true. Is this a drug induced dream inspired by the pills? Does the setting of the sudio hangar mean none of this is really happening anywhere but in the enraged mind of our female protagonist as she imagines dramatic situations to resolve her depressed state of mind? As she looks out the window, supposedly leading out to a sunny, or colorful Madrid sunset sky, but really leading out to the ugly, enormous, empty hangar, she asks her lover to do the same. She has a final goodbye for him that erupts in a fiery message much more powerful than blocking a number from your Whatsapp. Almodovar reaches totally satisfactory melodrama here, satisfying, unrealistic, impossible, but deeply, obviously symbolic, and utterly entertaining. 

While it is hard to hope Almodovar will make films not in his native Spanish, The Human Voice is proof that given the right creative partners he is more than capable of translating his own voice into another language. Let’s hope that more collaborations like this one between him and Swinton will give him the opportunity to continue making films that offer strong female performances, without forsaking the wonderful female talent he has readily available in his native Spain. Whatever he decides, it seems obvious that he will not make any concessions to change the singular style he has perfected over decades of work.