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‘The Human Voice’ Review: Almodóvar Meets Cocteau Meets Swinton

The first English-language film from the Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar stars Tilda Swinton and adapts Jean Cocteau to sublime results.

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By Glenn Kenny

A woman is brought to the end of her rope by a recalcitrant former lover. In what could be their last exchange, she speaks to the man over the phone. She cajoles, she feigns composure, she sneers, she renounces — things get kind of crazy.

Sounds like a Pedro Almodóvar movie. It was, and it is again. It’s a little complicated.

This movie, a mere 30 minutes in length but as fully fleshed out as almost any feature by the dazzling Spanish filmmaker, is an adaptation of the venerable 1930 monodrama “La Voix Humaine,” a magnificent actress’s aria by Jean Cocteau . Back in 1988, Almodóvar borrowed its narrative elements for his film “Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown,” which helped the director advance into the mainstream. Previously, he’d been a near-underground cult figure.

Almodóvar had been planning to make an English-language film for some time, and now he’s done it, working with the British actress Tilda Swinton. Does this sound like a match made in heaven? Yeah, it pretty much is. Almodóvar’s sense of cinema design — the décor simulates a luxe apartment and lays it bare as a soundstage illusion — is acutely keyed to Swinton’s performance here, which projects mercurial emotion with Swiss watch precision.

The credits specify that this is a “free” adaptation of the Cocteau work. One factor of that freedom is that the monologue doesn’t begin until about 10 minutes in — unlike Cocteau’s work. But Almodóvar’s own poetic spirit meshes nicely with that of the old master’s throughout. Hardly surprising.

The Human Voice Rated R for language. In English and Spanish, with subtitles. Running time: 30 minutes. In theaters. Please consult the guidelines outlined by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention before watching movies inside theaters.

‘The Human Voice’ Review: Tilda Swinton Sets the Screen Ablaze in Pedro Almodóvar’s Iridescent Short

Pedro Almodóvar's delicious, exquisitely dressed miniature adapts the old Jean Cocteau chestnut into something quintessentially his own.

By Guy Lodge

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“These are the rules of the game, the law of desire,” Tilda Swinton sighs, playing an unnamed woman — who, let it be said, looks and speaks and dresses an awful lot like Tilda Swinton — whose lover has left her, and can only be bothered to say goodbye over the phone. We don’t hear his side of the conversation, as she vents hers, crisp and enunciated even in despair, into discreetly tucked airpods; it looks for all the world as if she’s talking to herself, and perhaps she even is. It’s not as if anyone talks like this anyway, articulating violent heartbreak through film references as neatly coordinated as her Technicolor apartment decor. We’re in the world of Pedro Almodóvar, where raw human feeling and dizzily heightened artifice are complementary modes of expression, not contradictory ones: “ The Human Voice ,” his palate-cleansing vodka shot of a short film, distils his own rules of the game and laws of desire into a concise, concentrated burst of demented passion.

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Almodóvar’s first short film in 11 years, and his first of any length to be made in English, “The Human Voice” outwardly seems like more of a departure for Spain’s most celebrated living auteur than it really is. It’s not, in fact, his first stab at filming the oft-interpreted Jean Cocteau monodrama of the same name. After explicitly referencing the one-woman theater piece in his 1987 film “Law of Desire,” he made it the conceptual starting point of “Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown” the next year. The latter film also probed the frenzied mind of a woman recently dumped, though amid a slew of chaotic subplots, never worked its way to the cathartic phone conversation that forms the spine of Cocteau’s work.

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A closer adaptation that nonetheless takes plenty of its own vibrant liberties with the text — Almodóvar opts for a “freely adapted” credit on screen — the poised, punchy “The Human Voice” is the yin to the yang of that bustling early film, indicating how the director’s filmmaking has evolved even as his fixations remain constant. Premiering in Venice as a noncompeting apéritif to Jasmila Zbanic’s Competition feature “Quo Vadis, Aida?,” the 30-minute miniature is an essential for Almodóvar and Swinton completists alike, and will likely cultivate a keen following via specialist streaming platforms following its festival run.

The simple core of Almodóvar’s version remains true to the source, as Swinton’s high-strung heroine receives a call from her recently shed ex, and proceeds to talk him through her state of mind in the days since his departure. In doing so, she cycles through moods of rational acceptance, girlish pleading, near-suicidal desperation and more — the various stages of breakup grief, but compressed into one volatile, erratic confessional. It’s in the framing of this one-sided conversation, however, that Almodóvar gets wittily inventive. Following a series of pre-credit tableaux that present the protagonist silently waiting for her lover’s return — clothed in outlandish Balenciaga haute couture that gives extreme meaning to the term “all dressed up with nowhere to go” — he surprises us with a trip to that least fabulous of locations, the hardware store, into which she glides with alien serenity, to purchase a large axe. Rest assured the next 25 minutes will not disappoint us in putting it to use.

Before we hear the human voice in question, meanwhile, Almodóvar and Swinton taunt us with all manner of riveting wordless business, as she restlessly stalks around her plush, primary-colored apartment like a woman on the verge of, well, anything. Followed insistently by a mournful-looking border collie, she makes and drinks a cup of coffee with fidgety unease, gathers and downs a cocktail of prescription pills, and takes a head-clearing shower without removing her svelte scarlet cashmere pantsuit. (However many runway-ready designer lewks you think Swinton can rock in the course of half an hour, costume designer Sonia Grande coolly exceeds your expectations.)

Almodóvar has always delighted in watching his stars swagger through domestic minutiae, and in Swinton, he’s found an English-language actor ideally attuned to his dual flair for everyday observation and heightened, blooming melodrama: She’s equal parts Jeanne Dielman and swooning Sirkian heroine, tensely mesmerizing even when you know exactly what she’s going to do. Anyone familiar with Anna Magnani’s reading of “The Human Voice” for director Roberto Rossellini in 1948’s “L’Amore,” or Ingrid Bergman’s interpretation for TV in 1966, will spot traces of their DNA — raging and brittly vulnerable, respectively — in Swinton’s performance. Yet she’s made the woman less of a victim, more in command of her own considerable pain. One can only hope a full-scale collaboration between actor and director is ahead.

As for Almodóvar and his regular collaborators, “The Human Voice” largely operates as a tribute to their joint oeuvre: Bar some discordant electronic intrusions, Alberto Iglesias’ rich orchestral score is in fact a sampled collage of themes from “Talk to Her,” “Bad Education,” and others, while cinematographer José Luis Alcaine dials up signature, saturated paprika reds and cobalt blues to a near-parodic, eye-searing degree. Most ingeniously of all, longtime production designer Antxon Gómez has constructed a quintessential Almodóvar interior — even dressed with props and furniture from past films — only to situate it in a hangar-like film studio, exposing its seams and one-dimensional artifice. A gigantic, luminous chroma key screen hangs askew in the backdrop of one scene, like an angrily torn curtain.

Forty years into his career, Almodóvar is happy to expose outright the naked theatricality that has always been part and parcel of his filmmaking: the mannered, layered stylistic contrivances that, in his greatest films, have arrived at a plainer human truth. “The Human Voice,” in all its delicious absurdity and kitsch extravagance, ties into the concerns of emotional abandonment and disrupted communication that have long run through his more ostensibly serious works. It’s a spry little change of pace and form that points to fresh future possibilities while glancing back on where he’s been, enfolding a multitude of his pet themes and influences — down to such briefly glimpsed cultural fetish objects as a book of Alice Munro stories, or even a DVD of Pablo Larraín’s “Jackie” — into one broken embrace.

Reviewed at Venice Film Festival (noncompeting), Sept. 3, 2020. Running time: 30 MIN.

• Production: (Spain) An El Deseo D.A. production. (International sales: FilmNation Entertainment, New York City.) Producers: Agustín Almodóvar, Esther García.
• Crew: Director, screenplay: Pedro Almodóvar, adapted from the play by Jean Cocteau. Camera: José Luis Alcaine. Editor: Teresa Font. Music: Alberto Iglesias.
• With: Tilda Swinton .

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Review: In his tasty new short ‘The Human Voice,’ Pedro Almodóvar revisits without repeating

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The Times is committed to reviewing theatrical film releases during the COVID-19 pandemic . Because moviegoing carries risks during this time, we remind readers to follow health and safety guidelines as outlined by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and local health officials .

Steeped in the artist’s quintessential modes and fascinations, Pedro Almodóvar‘s first English-language work, “The Human Voice,” is an electrifying half-hour short film starring chameleonic British star Tilda Swinton. For his latest, albeit condensed, escapade of magnetic women at the end of their rope, the Spanish master reconfigured Jean Cocteau’s one-actor play of the same title as the foundation for a meta-concoction.

Clad in showstopping couture (including a velvety dress and a turtleneck, both in the director’s requisite red), the statuesque Swinton plays an actress praised for her “madness and melancholy.” Stumbling through a romantic rupture, she commands the entire piece alone — save for her dog companion and a cameo by the director’s brother and longtime producer Agustín Almodóvar — on a call with an estranged lover saying goodbye.

Her monologue is enrapturing, a verbal labyrinth mapping the lies, arrangements and broken promises comprising the secretive relationship. Devoid of the extravagant disguises that her more fanciful roles so often demand, Swinton manifests, with magnificently nuanced modulation, an emotional tangle; at times, it is raw with a cathartic force, while enmeshed with meekly conciliatory moments of codependence. Wielding a hatchet with violent purpose or begging for a final rendezvous, Swinton’s every scorching word cuts deep.

In this modern reinterpretation of the 1930 classic, the phone no longer has a cord, thus the character’s cell phone AirPods allow for mobility in line with the needs of a cinematic rendition. The camera ballets around Almodóvar’s muse du jour or frames her within eyeshot of an imposing artwork, “Venus and Cupid” by groundbreaking Italian painter Artemisia Gentileschi . Although he produced the short in the early days of the pandemic, the auteur worked with his A-team, including director of photography José Luis Alcaine, who’s shot nearly every entry in his catalog, and composer Alberto Iglesias.

A soundstage with an impeccable apartment at its center — a realm so unmistakably the director’s in its production design and color palette — entraps the performer’s dramatic explosion. It’s a set within a set housing an actress playing an actress. It feels like looking behind the curtain only to discover there are layers to it.

Almodóvar is not trying to hide the seams of the artifice in “The Human Voice” but rather show them as if to briefly step outside of the aesthetic margins he’s drawn for himself over the years — to look at his creation from outside, like an out-of-body exercise or a bird’s-eye view examination. Of course, that sense of a rustic or less manicured mise-en-scène is only a mirage. Total control of everything onscreen, perhaps more than ever, remains his.

That he engages with the space and material in such manner responds to the underlying theme of utilitarianism that percolates in the mind of Swinton’s character. Tools and hardware become symbols for the things that are pragmatic and logical, as opposed to the matters of the heart that don’t answer to reason. She wants to be a “practical woman,” in love and life, but can’t, and so destruction becomes escape.

Watching her rituals of loneliness and eventual penchant for a rebirth from the ashes, as well as key corners within the location, like a balcony adorned with flowers — that in this case leads only to the warehouse-like floor — there’s an immediate tongue–in-cheek call to the filmmaker’s signature handling of troubled liaisons.

Almodóvar’s breakthrough 1988 feature “Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown,” which fittingly will screen with the short in some markets (not Los Angeles), resonates strongly here in tone and outcome. That early movie also departed from the same Cocteau text, so inevitably there’s plenty of Carmen Maura’s Pepa Marcos in Swinton’s passionate thespian. Notes of “Law of Desire,” another movie of his where the original “The Human Voice” makes an appearance, also are present in the fluid treatment of fiction and reality.

Undoubtedly, Almodóvar is one of few visionaries who can succeed at enthralling through self-referential nods. With this 30-minute visual morsel he further evolves the nesting dolls of stories he’s built around the same French monodrama. For an artist so set in his stylistic and thematic ways, it’s always riveting to see how he maneuvers his tropes.

Watching a new Almodóvar confection is like tasting a sumptuously familiar dish not just reheated but revamped via the introduction of new ingredients that elevate what we already adore about it. He revisits without repeating. In the interim between 2019’s masterfully personal “Pain and Glory” and his upcoming new full-length effort, it’s glorious to receive a concentrated shot of Almodóvar’s genius worth every minute in acting gold.

‘The Human Voice’

Rated: R, for some drug content and nude images Running time: 30 minutes Playing: Starts March 12, Vineland Drive-in, City of Industry; and in New York City and Miami where theaters are open

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Pedro Almodóvar’s English-Language Debut The Human Voice Is a Perfect Half-Hour of Film

Tilda Swinton buys an ax toward the start of The Human Voice , a new short film from Pedro Almodóvar that packs the punch of a dozen features. That trip to the hardware store represents the only instance in which her character has left her apartment for three days, though she lies about this on the phone with the lover who recently left her, telling him that she’s been out to the theater and eating voraciously in restaurants with friends. The truth is that she’s been waiting alone for him to come collect the things she’s packed in suitcases by the door, giving her a chance to see him one last time. Her unnamed character is an actor, and the purgatory in which she’s been stranded has left her feeling even more dramatic than usual — hence the ax, which she turns out to have gotten for the sake of a gesture. One of her lover’s suits has been laid out on the bed they used to share, like the shed skin of an animal that’s grown and moved on, and she takes her newly purchased tool to it in a fit of rage. It’s a grand action that no one else is around to witness beside their dog, who’s been similarly abandoned — and, of course, those of us watching, who make up her real audience.

The Human Voice is all about the muddied lines between the fabricated and the genuine, and about how much a performance can be divorced from the sincere feelings that might be undergirding it. The film, which runs for 30 minutes and marks Almodóvar’s English-language debut, is the third from the Spanish director to take inspiration from Jean Cocteau’s 1930 monodrama The Human Voice , and the most direct, though as the credits note, it’s still “freely based” on the play. Almodóvar highlights the artificiality of the production from the start, with Swinton in a Balenciaga ball gown wandering morosely around a soundstage that’s soon revealed to contain the apartment in which her unnamed character lives. It’s a gorgeously appointed place, all rich colors and inviting textures and enviable furnishings, the kind of creation that looks like it’s right out of an Almodóvar film, with periodic shots from above or of the plywood exterior to remind us that that’s precisely what it is.

This theatricality, with the nature of the set made clear and the audience acknowledged by a fourth wall–breaking glance in the opening sequences, matches up with the behavior of Swinton’s character, and Swinton, as angular and wry and fearless as ever, leans into it. She engages in a sort of suicide attempt halfway through, dressing up in a sumptuous red knit set and a full face of makeup before downing a careful handful of pills and curling up next to the suit she’d previously attacked. When she’s awakened by a call from the man who’s leaving her, and whose voice we never hear, she informs him that she knew the drug combination wouldn’t kill her, and that it was another of those gestures for herself and for the viewer. He, after all, doesn’t appear to intend to show up himself. “I was hoping someone would find me,” she tells him. “I wanted you to find me pretty — dead but pretty. It was just an idea. I’ve done nothing these days but wait.”

The Human Voice often gets described as a gift and a rebuke to actors, a play consisting entirely of a woman alone on stage, talking on the phone to the man who’s left her to marry someone else, and alternately cajoling, castigating, reassuring, manipulating, and losing control over the course of their conversation. It’s ripe material, though it’s not exactly flattering. But Almodóvar has always been fonder of melodramatic impulses, and his interpretation has more empathy to offer his protagonist, even as she experiences her own solitary meltdown. In Almodóvar’s vision, the ax, the drugs, and the final incendiary act are all of a kind, all outlandish gestures with a core of emotional catharsis to them. He is willing to allow the character’s behavior to be seen as a journey toward closure, rather than just some desperate attempts to hold on to a relationship that’s already gone. There’s a stubborn dignity to the way that the character acts out, even as she falls apart. The film luxuriates in her suffering, not out of some sense of sadism, but out of a sense that there’s a magnificence to all big emotions, even the ones that accompany pain. Sometimes, you need to burn everything to the ground to start over — or to see Tilda Swinton do it in a pair of gold lamé pants, which is frankly just as good.

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‘The Human Voice’: Tilda Swinton, Pedro Almodóvar and Pure Cinephile Bliss

• By David Fear

There she is, stepping out from behind a screen and seen in glorious close-up: the vibrant red dress, the half-shadowed face, the untamed tangle of ginger hair. (We stan an icon.) For the next half-hour, you’ll see Tilda Swinton ‘s spurned woman — she is merely referred to as “Woman” — shop for axes at a hardware store in Madrid, attack an empty suit on a bed, try on several gorgeous outfits, beg and plead for a lover’s return over the phone, hang out with a dog named Dash and set an exquisitely decorated apartment on fire. Or maybe you will watch her do all of this for the next 90 minutes if, like me, you end up watching this three times back to back.

The Human Voice is many things. It is an adaptation of a Jean Cocteau play first performed in 1930, designed as a monologue of a person gone mad with grief. It is a showcase for the 60-year-old actor, a highlight in a career that includes winning an Oscar, doing two movies with Bong Joon-Ho and transforming into David Bowie. It is her first project with Spanish filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar, and if there is a God in heaven, not her last. It is a lush short film and an exercise in extreme formalism that leaves you with the sensation you’ve just sat through a perfume commercial run amuck. And, even though it retains the basic theatrical conceit of a lone character having a one-sided conversation, it is pure cinema, because how could Almodóvar and Swinton do anything but turn this into pure cinema?

Shot during the pandemic in July, premiered at the Venice International Film Festival in August, quietly waltzed through the virtual-cinema circuit earlier this year and available to see on HBO Max as of April 30th , Voice is the culmination of the legendary moviemaker’s long obsession with Cocteau’s snippet of a stage work. He’s paid homage to the play in several of his films, notably Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, which — in a beautiful example of self-referential feedback looping, is itself given hat-tips in several spots here. But this also doubles as a guided tour of the Almodóvar’s artistic memory banks, complete with cine-fetishes and footnotes and a signature elegance-meets-extravagance aesthetic. His holy trinity of Hitchcock, Sirk and Wilder can be detected in the shifting tones, as well a faint odor of camp fumes. So much depends on upon a red pantsuit, paired with leopard-skin stilettos beside a green bedspread…and for good measure, Artemisia Gentileschi’s “Venus and Cupid” feature prominently in the background.

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Great attention is paid to a table full of DVDs and books, a stocked medicine cabinet, a meticulously organized kitchen drawer. Every random item and its placement feels like a clue. (Eat your heart out, Wes Anderson.) The decor-porn vibe is offset only by the fact that it’s clearly a set, its naked bones exposed by an overhead shot, constructed on a soundstage that Swinton swishes in and out of at will. And while the texture of this short would be unthinkable without José Luis Alcaine’s cinematography, María Clara Notari’s art direction, Antxón Gómez’s production design, Vincent Diaz’s set design, Sonia Grande’s costumes and the mere existence of Cristóbal Balenciaga, this is a work that feels sprung from one creator’s skull. Coming off the semiautobiographical masterpiece 2019 Pain and Glory, Pedro has kept that film’s personal aspects but upped the playfulness you associate with his run of 1980s movies.

As for Swinton, the high priestess of auteuristic collaborativeness (a partial roll call includes not just the aforementioned Anderson and Bong but Derek Jarman, Joanna Hogg, Joel and Ethan Coen, Jim Jarmusch, Lynne Ramsay and Luca Guadagnino; next up is Apichatapong Weerasethakul) fits into her creative partner’s vision like a hand in a Gucci glove. She shares his love of grand gestures and melodrama, and a penchant for high style and archness (her character, an actor, speaks of how casting agents “love my pallor…my mixture of melancholy and madness”). What is surprising is that Almodóvar has taken a star now associated with an almost alien sense of otherwordliness — of sheer cosmic Tildaness — and brought her back to Earth. His reputation for bringing the best out of female performers and his use of close-ups precede him, but there are moments where he simply trains his camera on Swinton’s partially profiled mug and you feel you’re only really seeing her for the first time. Sometimes, all you need is the human voice and the human face to crack open a piece of art.

And, if this short is to be believed, a very human sense of hope: For a chamber piece that plays out more or less in a single apartment, it’s not a coincidence that it ends with the sight of someone walking through an open door and toward the outside world. In a mere half hour, this dynamic duo has given you an experience leagues richer than a full season of features. That you can now segue from, say, Mortal Kombat directly into this suggests that yes, nature may indeed be healing. It’s the most rewarding 30 minutes you may have all year.

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‘The Human Voice’ Film Review: Pedro Almodóvar and Tilda Swinton Speak Heartache Fluently

This adaptation of Cocteau’s play is a pandemic production, and Almodóvar’s English-language debut, but it’s pure Pedro

This review of “The Human Voice” was first published after its premiere at the New York Film Festival on Sept. 24, 2020.

Cinema history will doubtlessly note “The Human Voice” as notable for being the English-language debut of Spanish auteur Pedro Almodóvar — and for its status as a pandemic-driven production — but it’s absolute Almodóvar through and through, from its production design and aesthetic shout-outs to its deep understanding of longing and heartbreak, viewed through the eyes (and the voice) of a hypnotic female lead.

There’s perhaps no actress on Earth more suited to shepherd the director’s first go-round in English than Tilda Swinton, and she’s an ideal creative partner. Her work finds that balance between understated empathy and grand theatricality that marks so many of the great performances in Almodóvar’s work, and as a physical being, she’s practically an architectural presence, much like one of his earlier muses, Rossy de Palma. (Not to mention Swinton’s prior track record as a muse to queer auteurs Derek Jarman, who launched her film career, and Luca Guadagnino.)

Almodóvar, of course, has a history with Jean Cocteau’s “The Human Voice” (which the director is, per the credits, “freely” adapting here). In the 1980s, Almodóvar had hoped to turn Carmen Maura’s acclaimed stage performance of the one-act play into a movie, but he wanted to expand the material to feature length. In doing so, he kept the basic premise — a woman waits for her lover to call and bid her farewell — but eventually chopped and channeled it into the farcical “Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown,” his international breakthrough. (He also included a scene of Maura’s character performing the play in “Law of Desire,” which gets its title from “The Human Voice.”)

Three decades later, he returns to Cocteau, and the results are mesmerizing; the film runs a brisk 27 minutes, but contains more characterization, style, and emotion than most features. Swinton takes on the role of Cocteau’s nameless heroine, at her wit’s end; her lover has been gone for three days, his bags are packed, and he hasn’t called, he hasn’t called, he hasn’t called.

She purchases a hatchet (from the director’s brother and producer, Agustín Almodóvar, who wraps up the ax like a bouquet of flowers), she downs a handful of sleeping pills (some of the screen’s most photogenic downers this side of “Valley of the Dolls”), and then, finally, he calls, and the woman finally gets the confrontation that she has both demanded and feared.

Swinton wrings so much from Cocteau’s words, taking us from woman-scorned rage to a kind of ecstastic masochism and back again, moving her way through another great Almodóvar apartment art-directed by Antxón Gómez when she’s not wandering around the soundstage that surrounds the set. It’s a pandemic-friendly way to keep Swinton from having to walk the streets of Madrid, yes, but it’s also a Brechtian strategy that recalls the aggressively fake city skyline in “Women on the Verge.”

Besides the various Almodóvar relatives that pop up in the hardware-store scene, Swinton does get to act opposite another performer — the uncredited canine who plays her lover’s equally forlorn dog. It’s a great animal performance, full of longing; not many co-stars can hold the screen with Swinton without getting outshined, but this one definitely can.

For all the ways in which “The Human Voice” is different from the rest of Almodóvar’s work, it fits in perfectly well, from the deep reds (in the apartment and in Swinton’s Balenciaga dress) to the cultural referencing: Swinton tidies up a stack of DVDs (two of which are Criterion Collection Blu-rays from one of the director’s inspirations, Douglas Sirk) and novels (including Capote’s “Music for Chameleons,” which comes up in “All About My Mother,” and Lucia Berlin’s “A Manual for Cleaning Women,” which Almodóvar plans to adapt).

Short subjects tend to fall between the cracks in the United States — Sony Pictures Classics, who will be distributing “The Human Voice,” hopes to be an exception to that rule — but this small package stands alongside the exemplary feature-length work in one of this generation’s foremost filmographies. Cocteau might never have imagined ear buds when he wrote his play, but every bit of emotional ache from the original maintains its power in the smartphone era.

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The Human Voice Reviews

Almodóvar and his cinematographer have a superb handling of space and rhythm. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Dec 9, 2021

A cause célèbre.

Full Review | Sep 14, 2021

...this is a must-see for anyone who loves glamour and refined actressing.

Full Review | Sep 10, 2021

[Almodóvar breaks] the fourth wall in the only way that a filmmaker can do it: showing the stage to remember that this is all a gimmick, a fiction. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Aug 23, 2021

Almodovar and Swinton maintain -on the one hand- the director's usual stamp in his vindication of female resilience and dignity, and -on the other- the ductility and expressiveness of an interpreter who always shines. [Full Review in Spanish]

Full Review | Original Score: 4.5/5 | Jun 22, 2021

As the latest from Almodóvar, it's a warm slice of contained melodrama with a welcome message: even in trying times, life is what you make it.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Jun 17, 2021

Almodóvar's latest is something of a meta-film, its theatrical artifice working in tandem with its emphasis on the human instinct for performance.

Full Review | Jun 6, 2021

...empty, compelling fun. Swinton's dialogues are pronouncements, padded by the dog's mewling...

Full Review | Jun 2, 2021

The face and voice of Tilda Swinton is a luminous appendage. So dazzling is the film and so scintillating its sole actor that you can never have enough of either.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Jun 1, 2021

Swinton's performance is just absolutely riveting...

Full Review | May 24, 2021

Almodóvar brilliantly creates another female-focused world that's a curiosity of maddening, theatrical, melodramatic, verging-on-camp questions...

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | May 24, 2021

Almodovar's film is nuanced and canny. Even the credits - spelled out in carpenter's tools - declare it to be a well-crafted confection.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | May 21, 2021

The scenes are beautifully curated, almost like they have come from the kitsch stylings of a Wes Anderson film, but with all the Hollywood glamour of the 1930s.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | May 19, 2021

The film is slight - a cinematic amuse-bouche of grand gestures and Balenciaga stilettos - hanging together principally through the persona of Swinton, who is alternately passionate, highly strung, daring and submissive.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | May 17, 2021

The end result is slight but never trite.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | May 14, 2021

An elegant jeu d'ésprit from Almódovar, with a bleak hint that moving on from the present malaise will mean some kind of wholesale destruction.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | May 13, 2021

Swinton is the centrepiece - the human voice of this witty, teasing movie and the human pulse as well.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | May 12, 2021

Brief as it is, Almodóvar manages to infuse the story of the woman and her dog, abandoned by the man they both love, with a palpable sense of significance.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4 | May 5, 2021

The monodrama never quite gets substantial, but it is a fun watch - namely dues to Swinton's indelible countenance.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4 | Apr 2, 2021

Almodóvar's sense of cinema design - the décor simulates a luxe apartment and lays it bare as a soundstage illusion - is acutely keyed to Swinton's performance here, which projects mercurial emotion with Swiss watch precision.

Full Review | Apr 1, 2021

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Pedro Almodóvar’s English-language debut is a bold summation of his career

Tilda Swinton stars in The Human Voice, a 30-minute Jean Cocteau adaptation

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Polygon is reporting from the remote edition of the annual New York Film Festival, bringing you first looks at the upcoming movies headed to theaters, streaming services, and awards season. This review came from a New York Film Festival screening.

Anyone familiar with the work of Spanish filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar should easily recognize The Human Voice as his latest film. The 30-minute film is packed full of his directorial trademarks: bold colors, a focus on passion, and a tone that veers between hilarious and heartbreaking, in this case carried off by Tilda Swinton. For those unfamiliar with Almodóvar, it’s a perfect crash-course introduction.

The Human Voice — Almodóvar’s English-language debut, based on Jean Cocteau’s play of the same name — begins with Swinton’s nameless character purchasing an axe at a hardware store, but it’s otherwise a monologue. While at home, Swinton receives a call. She picks it up through her AirPods and paces around her apartment as she converses with an inaudible voice on the other end of the line. The caller, it turns out, is her ex-lover, who has yet to come collect his things from their apartment, even though they split up several days ago.

As the conversation continues, Swinton goes through every emotion imaginable, but with a sense of desperation underlying them all. She’s clearly struggling to let go and accept the end of their relationship, or to properly parse how she feels toward her ex, now that he refuses to say goodbye to her in person. Swinton calculates her character’s ups and downs so perfectly that it doesn’t matter that she’s delivering her lines to thin air. The other end of the conversation is easy to imagine, based on how she reacts to it, whether it’s with a forced laugh or a rush of annoyance.

Her emotions are amplified by the film’s design. Swinton’s character is seen rummaging through Blu-rays of movies including Phantom Thread and Kill Bill , both of which intertwine love and death. The colorful lavishness of the apartment she prowls through — bright greens and reds, swaths of mustard-yellow — make everything feel more melodramatic. Even when the camera moves far enough to reveal that the apartment is a set built in the middle of a giant studio, Swinton’s performance is so sharp, and every aspect of what Almodóvar puts on screen is so carefully thought-out and deliberate, that the artifice doesn’t detract from the emotions at play.

As per its source material, The Human Voice is a very theatrical work, but this isn’t the first time Almodóvar has drawn from this Cocteau play. One of the characters in his 1987 film Law of Desire was written as starring in the play, and his 1988 film Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown , while not an adaptation, took Cocteau’s text as a starting point. The Human Voice is the most straightforward adaptation, and in its unmistakable Almodóvar-esque execution, it feels like a distillation of the director’s four decades of work thus far.

The short is also a feat of pandemic filmmaking — Almodóvar and his team shot the film over two weeks in July. Perhaps that accounts for some of the sense of filmic trickery, specifically with regards to the set, but the choice to reveal the apartment as fake only plays into how striking The Human Voice is. Even separated from the context of current affairs, the separation Swinton’s character feels from the rest of the world is cutting, given how trapped she feels in her apartment.

An extended monologue might not sound like a sustainable concept for a film, but The Human Voice is no longer or shorter than it needs to be. Just as it seems like the film’s gimmick might be overstaying its welcome, Almodóvar introduces a last dramatic flourish before bringing the proceedings to a close. It’s a delight no matter how you slice it; for fans, it’s a reminder of what makes Almodóvar such a great director, and for neophytes, it’s an unforgettable introduction.

The Human Voice does not yet have a release date.

The Human Voice review: Pedro Almodóvar goes short and free

With just Tilda Swinton on a sound stage, a handful of props and the words of Jean Cocteau’s play, Almodóvar encapsulates his work to date and leans in to new possibilities.

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• Reviewed from the 2020 Venice Film Festival . See also  Venice 2020: the best of times amid the worst of times and  Six of the best at Venice 2020

▶︎ The Human Voice screens in the BFI London Film Festival Shorts programme with an introduction and Q&A with Pedro Almodóvar and Tilda Swinton on 17 October 2020.

Like machinery driving a dramatic artefact of clockwork precision, wrenches, bolts and tools of all shapes and sizes slide onto the screen for the credits of Pedro Almodóvar ’s latest creation, a half-hour free adaptation of Jean Cocteau’s play The Human Voice starring Tilda Swinton .

Right from the start, this Human Voice strikes familiar chords with Almodóvar’s work: its vibrant colour palette; Alberto Iglesias ’s music; a cameo from producer brother Agustín Almodóvar ; even those credits, composed from items fit for an haute-couture hardware catalogue. Then there’s the protagonist: a heartbroken woman caged in a red dress. We find Swinton’s character on an empty sound stage, contemplating the void that her absent lover has left.

Almodóvar had already used The Human Voice (famously adapted by Roberto Rossellini in his 1948 anthology film L’Amore , starring Anna Magnani) as a source of inspiration for earlier films like Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (1988), with Carmen Maura playing an abandoned woman – a role echoing the one she had previously played in a stage version of Cocteau’s play that featured in The Law of Desire (1987).

In Almodóvar’s new take on the play, Tilda Swinton actually speaks the phrase “the law of desire” – which fans will also recognise as inspiring the name of the director’s production company El Deseo . In the new film, Swinton’s character inhabits an apartment revealed as a film set – the fourth wall, and indeed the ceiling, removed in an overhead shot.

Her props: DVD s including Douglas Sirk’s Written on the Wind and All That Heaven Allows (one of Almodóvar’s classic references), books by authors including Lucia Berlin and Alice Munro (who inspired his 2016 film Julieta ), a handful of sleeping pills, an axe to chop the empty suit of her lover, and Air Pods for the last phone conversation with the man who left her behind. She paces, as trapped and lost as the dog that follows her about, the animal seemingly as distraught as she at the loss of this invisible man whom we never hear.

It’s Swinton’s voice that reigns in this perfectly tailored space, carved with the delicacy of a Fabergé egg – her human imperfection filling the stage with life, not its imitation. Swinton offers a magnificent, fine-tuned performance as a melodrama heroine ready to take her grief in hand, triumphant in her desolation, finally ready to move on and rise – and not just metaphorically – like a phoenix from the ashes of her lost passion.

As much as it is Almodóvar’s filmography in a nutshell, The Human Voice is also a promise of new beginnings, exploring the short format and shooting in English (his upcoming projects even include plans for a western). Maybe that’s why, at the film’s end, he frames the open door of the film set, letting us, and his heroine, out onto a wide world of new possibility.

Further reading

“the human voice came about as a caprice”: pedro almodóvar on his spellbinding lockdown project.

By Mar Diestro-Dópido

Pedro Almodóvar’s lockdown diary pt 1: The long journey to the night

By Pedro Almodóvar

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‘The Human Voice’ Review: We’re All Tilda Swinton in Almodóvar’s Bracing Short — Just Not as Stylish

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A freshly minted English-language Almodóvar melodrama starring Tilda Swinton , “ The Human Voice ” would be one of the hottest tickets at the Venice Film Festival if it weren’t for the small point that it is just 30 minutes long. Still, it’s not size that counts, but what you do with it, and Almódovar does so much in half an hour that it is bound to be rated as one of the Festival’s highlights, anyway. This is the pure, distilled essence of both the veteran director and the actress. For anyone who is smitten by Almódovar and Swinton’s instantly recognisable styles, the film is basically porn. Feast your eyes on those mustard-coloured kitchen cabinets! Bow down before those leopard-print stilettos! Any more than 30 minutes might have been too much to take.

“Freely adapted” from the play by Jean Cocteau, the film begins, after a brief, surreal prologue, with Swinton browsing in a hardware store. (Check out that suitcase-sized black handbag! Place your order for that blue double-breasted trouser suit!) She selects a top-of-the-range hatchet which the worried-looking shopkeeper wraps in brown paper, and then she marches out, pet dog by her side. It’s safe to assume that she isn’t planning to chop up any firewood.

For the rest of the film, Swinton is alone with her dog in her unmistakably Almodóvar-ian apartment, as created by his longstanding production designer, Antxón Gómez, so you have plenty of time to drool over the sculptural bookcases, the kitsch ornaments, the Alberto Vargas pin-ups, the apposite DVDs (“All That Heaven Allows,” “Kill Bill”), and the way the orange towels match the tiles in the bathroom. The ingenious twist is that we are also shown the studio soundstage in which the apartment has been constructed. Sometimes we peer down from above, so we can see that the adjoining rooms have no ceilings. Sometimes Swinton drifts off the set and into the bare industrial space beyond, so we can see the grids of wooden panels which are the reverse of those tastefully decorated walls. Perhaps our own cherished homes are as ersatz and temporary as those in the film. But despite the regular reminders that we are watching an elaborate fiction, the illusion snaps back into place whenever Swinton is in the apartment, and her situation seems as real as ever.

It’s apparent, as she prowls around, that she has murder or suicide in mind — probably both. But after she has swallowed a handful of pills — shiny, colour co-ordinated pills, naturally — her phone rings, she pops in her Blutooth earbuds, and has a long conversation with her absent lover. He, it seems, is sufficiently famous for her to mention selling his love letters to the tabloids. She is an actress-model who boasts, with a self-referential twinkle, that she is still in demand at her age. “Clients love my pallor,” she says. “That mixture of madness and melancholy.” After four happy if tumultuous years together, he has walked out on her, and is calling to arrange when he can collect his designer luggage. But because his voice is never heard, the conversation becomes a monologue in which she struggles to explain to him and herself what the relationship means to her and whether she is ready to let it go.

It’s a sharp if slightly caricatured portrait of despair and loneliness — and, indeed, madness and melancholy. Alberto Iglesias’s insistent mystery-thriller score whips up the anxiety, but Swinton has no problem holding the attention on her own with a declamatory, theatrical performance which nonetheless conveys just how desolate she is. Her own human voice is high and lilting. She strains to be positive, but she sounds like a ghost.

Short monologues have their limits, though. You can’t help but wish that “The Human Voice” was longer, with more characters, more Spanish locations, and more of the director’s trademark twists. But the restricted setting is what makes the film so timely and so touching. Almodóvar and his team shot it in two weeks in July, in the middle of the pandemic. Swinton signed up back in February, so it can’t have been planned as a response to the current crisis, but it is poignant now to see someone trapped by herself, trying to make a connection over the phone, and claiming that she has been out to dinner before admitting that she has barely been past her front door.

It’s resonant, too, that for her, the world outside her apartment literally doesn’t exist. We are all Tilda — just not as stylish. When Almodóvar offers her a kind of escape, the effect is so bracingly liberating that it’s tempting to cheer. Mind you, if you’ve got to self-isolate somewhere, you might as well self-isolate in an apartment like that.

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The Human Voice review – Tilda Swinton on the verge in Almodóvar’s tale of despair

Swinton plays a woman abandoned by her lover in a short, affecting drama that echoes the uncertainties of lockdown

F or the times of lockdown, Pedro Almódovar ’s new short film is perhaps the most viable and relevant type of film production: a tale of someone isolated, regretful, anxious, unable to tell whether current arrangements are contingent or permanent, retreating into gestures of self-immolating despair. This theatrical piece is loosely based on Jean Cocteau’s 1930 stage play of the same name. It was adapted by Rossellini in the 40s, and also proved to be a jumping-off point for Almódovar’s own Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown. Tilda Swinton plays a woman who is on the verge of something similar. Or maybe the verge is now long behind her. She is living in what appears to be an apartment in Spain, vividly and richly presented in soupy reds and oranges that pop on the screen, with a hint of retro – decor that could exist only in an Almódovar picture. The play has this woman speaking on the telephone, in anguish, to the lover who has just left her – and that’s what Swinton does, too, only with cordless earphones, while his bags are packed ready to go in the hall, and his dog, miserable and confused to be abandoned as well, leaps trustingly along behind her as she strides restlessly about the flat or down to a hardware store to buy an axe. She needs it for a bit of futile pseudo-violence, whose only effect can be to make her feel worse. Almódovar deconstructs both the woman’s state of mind – and perhaps his own emotional rhetoric as well – by at first keeping his camera well within this apartment and then by moving above it, revealing it to be a ceiling-less set constructed within the cavernous sound stage we see at the beginning of the film, some of whose kitchen drawers don’t open, and some of whose shelf adornments are fake. Like the woman’s life together with this departed man, this apartment is a phoney.

The woman is beautiful, elegant, evidently a star of stage and screen, or a model – at any rate, she is talking wryly about how her mature looks are now fashionable again: producers now want her at the moment that her lover feels the opposite. She speaks in a kind of muted, hyper-cerebralised depression and rage, but seems only to want a real, face-to-face goodbye – isn’t it the least he can do? We might assume that she is the injured party and that he has strayed. But at one moment she concedes that you might call her an “adventuress”. So perhaps things aren’t all that clear. Swinton’s delivery has a theatrical style – it very much feels as if we could be watching a stage show – and there is something frozenly despairing about it; it is the voice of someone who is unwilling to relinquish her dignity or rationality and just give in to an aria of sadness. Even taking pills doesn’t completely allow her to let go – and there is something incidentally very sweet about the dog waking her up by slurpingly licking her ear. But she jiu-jitsus her loneliness and desertion into the raw material for performance and for self-expression.

An elegant jeu d’ésprit from Almódovar, with a bleak hint that moving on from the present malaise will mean some kind of wholesale destruction.

• Tilda Swinton
• Pedro Almodóvar
• Short films
• Film adaptations
• Jean Cocteau

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‘The Human Voice’ Film Review: Pedro Almodóvar and Tilda Swinton Speak Heartache Fluently

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This review of “ The Human Voice ” was first published after its premiere at the New York Film Festival on Sept. 24, 2020.

Cinema history will doubtlessly note “The Human Voice” as notable for being the English-language debut of Spanish auteur Pedro Almodóvar — and for its status as a pandemic-driven production — but it’s absolute Almodóvar through and through, from its production design and aesthetic shout-outs to its deep understanding of longing and heartbreak, viewed through the eyes (and the voice) of a hypnotic female lead.

There’s perhaps no actress on Earth more suited to shepherd the director’s first go-round in English than Tilda Swinton , and she’s an ideal creative partner. Her work finds that balance between understated empathy and grand theatricality that marks so many of the great performances in Almodóvar’s work, and as a physical being, she’s practically an architectural presence, much like one of his earlier muses, Rossy de Palma. (Not to mention Swinton’s prior track record as a muse to queer auteurs Derek Jarman, who launched her film career, and Luca Guadagnino.)

Almodóvar, of course, has a history with Jean Cocteau’s “The Human Voice” (which the director is, per the credits, “freely” adapting here). In the 1980s, Almodóvar had hoped to turn Carmen Maura’s acclaimed stage performance of the one-act play into a movie, but he wanted to expand the material to feature length. In doing so, he kept the basic premise — a woman waits for her lover to call and bid her farewell — but eventually chopped and channeled it into the farcical “Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown,” his international breakthrough. (He also included a scene of Maura’s character performing the play in “Law of Desire,” which gets its title from “The Human Voice.”)

Also Read: A Guide to Oscars' Shortlisted Live-Action Shorts - With Tilda Swinton, Oscar Isaac and Joey Bada$$

Three decades later, he returns to Cocteau, and the results are mesmerizing; the film runs a brisk 27 minutes, but contains more characterization, style, and emotion than most features. Swinton takes on the role of Cocteau’s nameless heroine, at her wit’s end; her lover has been gone for three days, his bags are packed, and he hasn’t called, he hasn’t called, he hasn’t called.

She purchases a hatchet (from the director’s brother and producer, Agustín Almodóvar, who wraps up the ax like a bouquet of flowers), she downs a handful of sleeping pills (some of the screen’s most photogenic downers this side of “Valley of the Dolls”), and then, finally, he calls, and the woman finally gets the confrontation that she has both demanded and feared.

Also Read: Pedro Almodóvar on the Real-Life Fears and Aches Behind 'Pain and Glory'

Swinton wrings so much from Cocteau’s words, taking us from woman-scorned rage to a kind of ecstastic masochism and back again, moving her way through another great Almodóvar apartment art-directed by Antxón Gómez when she’s not wandering around the soundstage that surrounds the set. It’s a pandemic-friendly way to keep Swinton from having to walk the streets of Madrid, yes, but it’s also a Brechtian strategy that recalls the aggressively fake city skyline in “Women on the Verge.”

Besides the various Almodóvar relatives that pop up in the hardware-store scene, Swinton does get to act opposite another performer — the uncredited canine who plays her lover’s equally forlorn dog. It’s a great animal performance, full of longing; not many co-stars can hold the screen with Swinton without getting outshined, but this one definitely can.

Watch Video: Watch Tilda Swinton and Ben Whishaw Have a Slap Fight in Armando Iannucci's Take on 'David Copperfield'

For all the ways in which “The Human Voice” is different from the rest of Almodóvar’s work, it fits in perfectly well, from the deep reds (in the apartment and in Swinton’s Balenciaga dress) to the cultural referencing: Swinton tidies up a stack of DVDs (two of which are Criterion Collection Blu-rays from one of the director’s inspirations, Douglas Sirk) and novels (including Capote’s “Music for Chameleons,” which comes up in “All About My Mother,” and Lucia Berlin’s “A Manual for Cleaning Women,” which Almodóvar plans to adapt).

Short subjects tend to fall between the cracks in the United States — Sony Pictures Classics, who will be distributing “The Human Voice,” hopes to be an exception to that rule — but this small package stands alongside the exemplary feature-length work in one of this generation’s foremost filmographies. Cocteau might never have imagined ear buds when he wrote his play, but every bit of emotional ache from the original maintains its power in the smartphone era.

Read original story ‘The Human Voice’ Film Review: Pedro Almodóvar and Tilda Swinton Speak Heartache Fluently At TheWrap

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The Human Voice movie review: Pedro Almodóvar digs into his creative past in a vibrant experimental short

The Human Voice is an enticing one-woman show, featuring a nuanced and devastating performance by Tilda Swinton.

Language: English

Pedro Almodóvar’s The Human Voice , his first English-language film, is an entrancing oddity. It stars Tilda Swinton in the leading (and for the most party, only) role, in a vibrant experimental work that spans a mere 30-minutes, but feels like a lifetime of heartache and fiery liberation packed into a single sitting.

It also feels like a rumination on Almodóvar’s whole career.

The film is based on the 1930 play La Voix humaine by Jean Cocteau, which he devised as a way to let his lead actress Madame Berthe Bovy cut loose. Like its source material, Almodóvar’s version is laser-focused on his leading lady and her extended phone call with her lover — a man we neither see nor hear — as their long-term relationship finally crumbles, and she’s left to deal with the emotional aftermath amidst his packed suitcases.

Following a brief transaction in the outside world, where Swinton’s unnamed character purchases an axe, the film unfolds largely in the lavish apartment she shares with her well-to-do beau (and their dog Dash, her only companion). This apartment also happens to be built on a soundstage. We see its pristine interiors, but we’re also allowed to step outside and gaze at the unvarnished wooden panels holding up its walls. While a tribute to the story’s theatrical origins, this absurdist architecture is also a perfect metaphor for her relationship: flashy but flimsy, an artificial veneer with invisible boundaries, housing objects of desire and comfort that reveal themselves to be fraudulent with the slightest touch.

Swinton uses the above mentioned axe to chop up a suit belong to her lover, after she lays it out on their bed, as if it were a real person. Trapped within a world of artifice, and spiritually tethered to a man who won’t give her the time of day, her only outlet seems to be lashing out at phantoms. When Swinton finally begins to move past that pain, in a moment of destruction and self-destruction, the film becomes cathartic in a manner both truthful and uniquely personal — and what a performance it is.

When the phone call she’s been waiting for finally arrives, Swinton dances around the topics of her longing, her depression and her self-medication. Her voice is calm, comforting, even apologetic, like she’s walking on egg-shells. But her face tells a different story, with an anguish she turns inward until it can no longer be contained.

With his frequent collaborators in tow — like cinematographer José Luis Alcaine and composer Alberto Iglesias — Almodóvar designs a methodical and exacting Technicolor maze, anchored by heavy meditative strings.

At its center is one of the finest performances Almodóvar has helped bring to the screen.

On paper, it sounds like the kind of film you could shoot in a day, but The Human Voice was shot over the course of 12. Each camera setup and movement is meticulous, as if it were reverse-engineered from some rehearsal session in which Swinton were given total freedom of movement and expression. It’s like the film was built around her performance, and designed expressly to emphasise each outburst of emotion and each withheld nuance. Few theatrical adaptations have felt this distinctly cinematic.

This isn’t the first time cinema has drawn from the La Voix humaine well. The play was also adapted by Italian master Roberto Rossellini in 1948 (as La voce umana , which makes up the first half of his film L’Amore ), and it isn’t the first time Almodóvar has adapted it in some form either. The Spanish virtuoso’s 1988 comedy Mujeres al borde de un ataque de nervios ( Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown ) uses Cocteau’s aria as its starting point, as actress Pepa Marco (Carmen Maura) begins taking sleeping pills to cope, as she waits for a phone call from her lover Iván (Fernando Guillén).

If The Human Voice seems overly familiar, that’s part of the point. In recent years, Almodóvar’s work has seemed fixated on the past; 2019 New Yorkl Film Festival darling Dolor y gloria ( Pain and Glory ) saw the director cast Antonio Banderas as Salvador Mallo, a fictitious version of himself. The film not only explores Mallo’s childhood and burgeoning sexuality via flashback, but its main story involves lovers reunited after years apart and, most notably, Mallo’s reunion with an actor with whom he’d had a creative falling-out several decades ago. It’s likely that this scenario is based, in some part, on Almodóvar’s real-world rift with Carmen Maura, who not only starred in Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown , but in La ley del deseo ( Law of Desire ) the previous year, in which she played a transgender actress cast in a production of Cocteau’s La Voix humaine.

In Pain and Glory , Mallo mends his shared wounds with actor Alberto Crespo (Asier Etxeandia) after admitting that he didn’t understand Crespo’s creative impulses at the time, though he’s since grown to appreciate them with experience. In revisiting a role he’s had Maura play not once, but twice, Almodóvar now seems to force himself toward a similar understanding. By creating stories so directly tied to his past, his recent work can’t help but feel like apologia writ-large.

Like in Pain and Glory , the apartment in The Human Voice feels like a re-creation of Almodóvar’s own lavish home . It’s hard not to see Swinton’s character as a projection of the director himself, as she picks at the scabs of her relationship and finally expresses long-festering regrets. Swinton’s character dresses ornately as a matter of routine, but the razzmatazz of her outfits and her home are something the camera looks past, as if piercing the veil she’s been hiding behind.

Each time the frame moves from a comfortable long or medium shot into a jarring close-up — sometimes on a dolly, but sometimes through a sudden cut by editor Teresa Font — Swinton’s doubts and uncertainties take center stage. The artifice of everything around her becomes exposed, like a raw nerve, from the deep reds of her Balenciaga gown to the lush greens of her walls, both reflections of the way Law and Desire was designed 33 years ago.

It’s as if Almodóvar were stripping away the flashy exteriors of his own work, and his own lifestyle, to get to the root of a pain that still lingers through time.

This review was first published when The Human Voice was screened at the New York Film Festival 2020. It is being republished in view of the Indian premiere on BookMyShow Stream.

Rating: ****

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Flickering Myth

Geek Culture | Movies, TV, Comic Books & Video Games

Movie Review – The Human Voice (2020)

October 19, 2020 by admin

The Human Voice , 2020.

Directed by Pedro Almodovar. Starring Tilda Swinton.

A woman waits for a phonecall from her ex-lover of 5 years, after he has recently left her.

In 1930, Jean Cocteau’s monologue The Human Voice premiered at the Comedie-Francaise. The piece at that time would have seemed dazzlingly experimental – an audience for the first time seeing half of a conversation, only hearing the input of the unnamed woman on stage alone. In a modern English language update, director Pedro Almodovar retains the unique nature of the piece, common though it may be for us to see characters on the phone in films. The hampering wired handset is traded for Bluetooth headphones, with the ever excellent Tilda Swinton stepping into the role. Perhaps not so much of an experiment into the limits of the medium as Cocteau’s original piece may have seemed, Almodovar’s screen version is nevertheless a fascinating short watch.

This adaptation of The Human Voice feels somehow effortlessly perfect, given who is at the helm. Almodovar’s work regularly features exploration of the plight of wronged or emotionally struggling women. His 1999 film All About My Mother harks back to a slew of old Hollywood masterpieces that saw female characters weather tragedy and hardship, or make incredible sacrifices for the betterment of the lives of their loved ones, films like Kitty Foyle , Stella Dallas and Mildred Pierce . Indeed, Almodovar’s early career masterpiece, Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown , actually takes Cocteau’s play as its inciting stimulus. With each film in his oeuvre, even up to the most recent Pain and Glory , Almodovar takes nostalgic themes and fits them to the modern day. His effort here is no different: despite the inherent theatricality of the speech, the director keenly demonstrates the necessity for this piece to be released at this very moment in time, and to be done so on screen.

In typical Almodovar fashion, the disparate pieces come together to form something astounding. The production is vibrantly coloured, screaming of the passion of the tortured protagonist. Playing the unnamed role, Swinton is superb. Known for her subtly of expression (the actor won an Oscar for playing a quiet control freak in 2007’s Michael Clayton ), as well as larger than life character acting (see The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe , The Grand Budapest Hotel , or Snowpiercer ), Swinton is perfectly cast in a character that demands exactly this range of talent. The result is undeniably melodramatic, but in Swinton’s delivery it is passionate and affecting, rather than over the top.

The woman in this short is wounded and love struck, and most of all she is desperate. In the hands of another director and actor, a less acutely sensitive pair perhaps, this character could seem weak. She could have become detestable through pity, unidentifiable for much of the audience for whom the modern woman is not defined by a relationship with a modern man. But here, the character is honest, left with no options but to fight for their love. In this respect, the writing contains little subtext, the performance few layers. The piece lives through the logical and compelling thought journey Swinton’s character rockets through, imbued as it is with relatable love sickness.

Few directors could successfully translate this theatricality to screen and manage to bestow such importance, and such feeling, into 30 minutes. In producing his first English language piece of work, Pedro Almodovar proves, once again, his status as one of the greatest living directors.

Flickering Myth Rating  – Film: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ / Movie: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★

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The human voice review.

Spanish filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar makes his English-language debut with "The Human Voice," a 30-minute short, starring Tilda Swinton. The movie was set for production in early 2020, but the pandemic - like everything else - caused the shooting to be delayed. By mere happenstance, "The Human Voice" became a snapshot of this difficult moment in time.

Almodóvar's film is based on a play by Jean Cocteau, which allows for minimal sets, perfect for stringent pandemic-era protocols. The movie stars Tilda Swinton, credited as Woman, who goes into a store and purchases a hatchet. The Woman seems frantic and on a mission, but Almodóvar keeps making us wonder what she could be up to. She goes back to her elegant apartment, frantically moves about it, before swallowing a handful of pills. She is methodical in her intake, knowing exactly how much to take, as to not cause any severe outcomes.

Outside of the interactions at the hardware store, the movie is entirely held by Swinton and her dog. It's the kind of limited filmmaking we might see an uptick in as productions try to scale back amidst restrictions instituted to keep sets safe. The movie tackles themes of isolation and loneliness, which could be effective normally, but are exacerbated by our current times.

Swinton has always been an entrancing performer and Almodóvar knows exactly how to capture her in the contained setting. A lot of the conversation she has over the phone are shot in close-up, which allows Swinton's theatrical performance to register with an audience. Like most movies by Almodóvar, "The Human Voice" is exquisitely crafted, with each frame filled with dark greens and reds. Just from a production standpoint, "The Human Voice" is addicting to watch.

To learn more about the character, and only having Swinton front-and-center, causes the movie to feel like her phone call, at times, is her reading a character description at us. The 30-minute runtime depends on Almodóvar to fit a lot into the story and he succeeds with the gorgeous "The Human Voice."

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It makes perfect sense that a writer/director who adores heightened emotion would be drawn to the Western. At first, one might argue that the genre is more about subdued masculinity than the typical  Pedro Almodóvar brand of filmmaking, but there’s also a deep undercurrent of melodrama and enhanced stakes that are inherent to this genre. Furtive glances, breathless proclamations, intense close-ups—Almodóvar fits here (although he’s such an immense talent, one could argue he fits everywhere). And when one factors in the fact that Almodóvar was once attached to “ Brokeback Mountain ,” the existence of “Strange Way of Life” makes even more sense. He has proclaimed that he was attracted to the physicality of Annie Proulx’s novel but felt that he couldn’t capture that in a Hollywood production and that the Oscar-winning film missed that aspect of the storytelling, despite a deep admiration for what Ang Lee was able to accomplish. He has called his own two-hander Western “Strange Way of Life” an “answer” to that film, and it’s a pretty good one.

Without spoiling anything, the final scene of this 31-minute film really clarifies its purpose: the story of a man who couldn’t envision a domestic life with another man, even if that man might be his soulmate. “Strange Way of Life” exudes the confidence we’ve come to expect from Almodóvar, even if it ultimately feels like this is the first act of a richer, more complex feature film. However, there’s something beautiful about this short's brevity, a sense that we can fill in what happens next or how this could have been fleshed out to be a longer piece.

That imaginary feature probably starts 25 years before Silva ( Pedro Pascal ) rides back into the town where Jake ( Ethan Hawke ) is now the Sheriff. From the minute they’re reunited, there’s the sense that these two very different men once weren’t so different. While Silva remains open and vulnerable, Jake is bitter and hardened by life, as if Silva’s exit from his life took all chances of happiness with him. It’s revealed that not only were Silva and Jake once lovers, but Silva hasn’t returned merely to rekindle the affair. Silva’s son Joe ( George Steane ) is wanted for murder by Sheriff Jake, leading to a conflict wherein Jake may have to choose between getting his suspect or taking this one last chance for happiness. And what’s Silva’s real intention? Is he bedding Jake again so he doesn’t bring the hammer of the law down on Joe?

“Strange Way of Life” was produced by Saint Laurent Productions, which gives some of this piece, especially a flashback to a young Joe and Silva getting frisky under some spilling wine barrels, the sense that this is a fashion advertisement as much as it is a movie. However, Pascal and Hawke counter the vibrant colors that one would expect with “Almodóvar and Saint Laurent.” They ground the short with an appropriately surly performance from Hawke and a gentle one from Pascal. It also helps to have a notable pedigree alongside Almodóvar that includes luscious cinematography from José Luis Alcaine (“ Volver ,” “ The Skin I Live In ”) and a beautiful score from another regular collaborator, the great Alberto Iglesias .

“Strange Way of Life” is being given a limited theatrical release with Almodóvar’s 2020 short “The Human Voice,” which stars Tilda Swinton . That marked Almodóvar’s first English-language production, and it's almost like he’s been warming up for the potential of a full film in English with “The Human Voice” and now “Strange Way of Life.” Almodóvar has been a master for generations now, and has reached a point where everything he does is worth a look. Whatever the language, genre, or run-time, Almodóvar brings cinema to life.

In theaters Friday.

Brian Tallerico

Brian Tallerico is the Managing Editor of RogerEbert.com, and also covers television, film, Blu-ray, and video games. He is also a writer for Vulture, The Playlist, The New York Times, and GQ, and the President of the Chicago Film Critics Association.

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Scarlett Johansson says she is 'shocked, angered' over new ChatGPT voice

Bobby Allyn

When OpenAI announced its latest ChatGPT last week, the AI voice it used in its demo was quickly compared to Scarlett Johansson's voice in the 2013 sci-fi film "Her," but now the company says it is pulling the voice. Leon Bennett/Getty Images hide caption

When OpenAI announced its latest ChatGPT last week, the AI voice it used in its demo was quickly compared to Scarlett Johansson's voice in the 2013 sci-fi film "Her," but now the company says it is pulling the voice.

Lawyers for Scarlett Johansson are demanding that OpenAI disclose how it developed an AI personal assistant voice that the actress says sounds uncannily similar to her own.

Johansson's legal team has sent OpenAI two letters asking the company to detail the process by which it developed a voice the tech company dubbed "Sky," Johansson's publicist told NPR in a revelation that has not been previously reported.

After OpenAI held a live demonstration of the voice last week, many observers compared it to Johansson's voice in the the 2013 Spike Jonze romantic sci-fi film "Her," which centers on a man who falls in love with the female voice of his computer's operating system.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, who has said the 2013 Spike Jonze film is his favorite movie, invited comparisons by posting the word "Her" on X after the company announced the new ChatGPT version. But later, OpenAI executives denied any connection between Johansson and the new voice assistant.

Then the company suddenly dropped the voice.

In a post on X just before midnight Pacific time Sunday, OpenAI said the voice would be halted as it addresses "questions about how we chose the voices in ChatGPT." A company spokeswoman would not provide further detail.

Turns out, Altman had been courting the Hollywood star for months, and she now feels betrayed.

Johansson said that nine months ago Altman approached her proposing that she allow her voice to be licensed for the new ChatGPT voice assistant. He thought it would be "comforting to people" who are uneasy with AI technology.

"After much consideration and for personal reasons, I declined the offer," Johansson wrote.

Just two days before the new ChatGPT was unveiled, Altman again reached out to Johansson's team, urging the actress to reconsider, she said.

But before she and Altman could connect, the company publicly announced its new, splashy product, complete with a voice that she says appears to have copied her likeness.

To Johansson, it was a personal affront.

"I was shocked, angered and in disbelief that Mr. Altman would pursue a voice that sounded so eerily similar to mine that my closest friends and news outlets could not tell the difference," she said.

She also found it alarming, she said, at a moment when the internet is awash in disinformation.

"In a time when we are all grappling with deepfakes and the protection of our own likeness, our own work, our own identities, I believe these are questions that deserve absolute clarity," Johansson said.

OpenAI's Altman denied there is any connection between Johansson and its Sky voice.

"We cast the voice actor behind Sky's voice before any outreach to Ms. Johansson. Out of respect for Ms. Johansson, we have paused using Sky's voice in our products. We are sorry to Ms. Johansson that we didn't communicate better," Altman wrote in a statement to NPR.

Johansson used the incident to draw attention to the lack of legal safeguards around the use of creative work to power leading AI tools.

"I look forward to resolution in the form of transparency and the passage of appropriate legislation to help ensure that individual rights are protected," she said.

OpenAI says voice of another actress was used to develop 'Sky'

In a blog post late Sunday, OpenAI said the AI voice in question, known as "Sky," was developed from the voice of another actress whose identity the company said it is not revealing to protect her privacy.

OpenAI releases latest ChatGPT — it can talk, laugh and even sing like a human

"We believe that AI voices should not deliberately mimic a celebrity's distinctive voice — Sky's voice is not an imitation of Scarlett Johansson but belongs to a different professional actress using her own natural speaking voice," the company wrote.

The new model, known as GPT-4o, transforms the chatbot into a voice assistant that can interpret facial expressions, detect emotion and even sing on command.

The new voice assistant will be publicly available in the coming weeks. During a live-demo last week, it struck a knowing, flirtatious tone with some of OpenAI's employees, leading some to wonder whether the coquettish demeanor was an intentional ploy to keep people engaged with the AI system.

The Google engineer who sees company's AI as 'sentient' thinks a chatbot has a soul

In an interview with NPR last week, OpenAI chief technology officer Mira Murati said the company did not pattern any ChatGPT voices on Johansson's sultry computer voice in the movie.

"It says more about our imagination, our storytelling as a society than about the technology itself," Murati said. "The way we developed this technology is not based on the movie or a sci-fi story. We're trying to build these machines that can think and have robust understandings of the world."

"I don't know about the voice. I actually had to go and listen to Scarlett Johansson's voice," she said.

Asked about ChatGPT's flirtatious banter, Murati said the model merely responds to what people provide to it.

"It will react to how you're interacting with it," she said. "It's not preset. It's based on inputs."

In its Sunday night blog post, OpenAI said that chatbot was developed with five voices that were produced after working closely with voice and screen actors.

"Looking ahead, you can expect even more options as we plan to introduce additional voices in ChatGPT to better match the diverse interests and preferences of users," the company wrote in the post.

A day after OpenAI's announcement, Google held its annual developer conference where it unveiled its own personal AI assistant, also voiced by a female, known as Project Astra. While similar, Google's version appeared far less quippy and playful and more matter of fact.

Together, experts say, the products provide a glimpse into the next generation of cutting-edge AI technology — and also raise questions about the risks that follow as more and more people adopt the tools.

First there were AI chatbots. Now AI assistants can order Ubers and book vacations

Visar Berisha, an Arizona State University professor who studies AI speech technology, said it is hard to predict how advanced AI voice assistants that speak with human-like personalities will change society.

"Communication by voice is really intimate, really impactful. It allows the AI to express subtleties, things that are perceived as sincere, urgent, joy, concern," he said. "And all of these serve to foster a deeper connection between the user and machine. You can see how these interactions can potentially become addictive."

It's possible, Berisha said, that people will start forming emotional connections to AI systems, much like the plot of "Her" — a movie that does not end happily for the protagonist.

"When I first saw that movie it seemed like science fiction," Berisha said. "It doesn't seem like that now."

• scarlett johansson
• voice assistant

In emotional documentary befitting its star, I Am: Celine Dion mourns for singer’s once-mighty voice

• I Am: Celine Dion
• Directed by Irene Taylor
• Starring Celine Dion, Bear (her dog)
• Classification PG; 102 minutes
• Opens in TIFF Lightbox June 18; premieres on Amazon Prime Video, June 25

For the Toronto premiere of the new Celine Dion documentary on Monday, tissue boxes promoting the film were placed in the TIFF Lightbox washrooms. The Kleenex would come in handy.

I Am: Celine Dion , which launches on Prime Video on June 25 after a short theatrical run in select venues, is an affecting pageant of intense emotional moments chronicling the Quebec singer’s struggle with stiff person syndrome, a rare neurological disorder that causes muscle spasms and, in Dion’s case, significantly impairs her singing.

We learn that Dion had suffered from undiagnosed symptoms for a long time, treating them with high doses of Valium. Though her condition is not fatal, the inability to perform at a high level – her last concert was nearly five years ago – is killing her.

“I need my instrument,” she says.

Directed by Irene Taylor (most known for 2016′s harrowing HBO doc Beware the Slenderman ), the film is billed as a “love letter” to Dion’s fans. The superstar expresses profound regret for cancelling concerts and tearfully says she misses her fans and pledges to come back.

“If I can’t run, I’ll walk. If I can’t walk, I’ll crawl. And I won’t stop – I won’t stop.”

Please stop the melodrama, Celine. The My Heart Will Go On energy is too much at times. At its worst, the film is an homage to Dion’s presented indomitability. At its best, it serves as a compelling portrait of a powerhouse performer’s lifeblood love of stage and audience.

There is no attempt at bio doc. Dion’s late husband and manager, René Angélil, for example, is not a major part of the story. Dion’s sleepy, well-fed dog, Bear, on the other hand, is immediately a front runner for a Best Pooch in a Supporting Role award.

Anyone expecting a concert film will be disappointed. There are archival clips aplenty, but never full songs. Instead, the music snippets are often used as segues. We see Dion singing the Ike and Tina Turner hit River Deep – Mountain High : “When I was a little girl …” It leads to a vintage interview of Dion the ingenue.

“My dream is to be an international star,” the teenaged phenom says, “and to be able to sing all my life.” Many of Dion’s dreams came true, but not that one. Now 56 years old, she may never regain the ability to belt as piercingly and theatrically as she once did.

Directed by Irene Taylor, the film is billed as a 'love letter' to Celine Dion’s fans. Prime Video

Unquestionably, this is a sad film, with or without the footage of Dion on a stretcher, her body locked rigid in muscle spasm.

Still, there’s a funny bit from the video for Ashes , a passionate song from the 2018 superhero comedy Deadpool 2 . Canadian actor Ryan Reynolds tells Dion to bring her energy level down from an 11 to a five: “Just phone it in.” Of course Dion can no more phone it in than Reynolds can talk without smirking.

“Listen,” she tells him, pointing to her throat, “this thing only goes to 11.”

The chanteuse is the film’s lone voice, 11 or otherwise – no one else is interviewed, not even a doctor to explain the syndrome that caused the suspension of her career. If I were to suggest that an often emotional Dion was performing for the camera, it wouldn’t necessarily be a criticism of her or the film. She is a creature of the power ballad; there is no five on her dial.

We get a peek behind the curtains (and behind the gates of Dion’s Las Vegas mansion). Everything she has, she has more than most, including more shoes than an Imelda Marcos yard sale.

There is an attempt to present Dion as the people’s superstar by showing her feeding the dog and vacuuming the sofa. (Vacuuming the sofa?) And even though we see what looks to be a butler serving one of her sons a milkshake on a waiter’s tray, Dion doesn’t come off as a diva.

This is an artist whose singing is a source of self-joy, identity and direction. “My voice is the conductor of my life,” she explains. Without her nuclear croon, she wonders who she is and what she can do.

Dion sees herself as an apple tree. To the concertgoers who came to see her, she gave shiny fruit. And now? “I don’t want them to wait in line if I don’t have apples for them.”

There have been others in Dion’s situation. Consider Joni Mitchell and Gordon Lightfoot, icons who returned to the stage in diminished form after serious illnesses. Their fans came back to see them – not for the apples, but for the tree.

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Despicable Me 4

Gru, Lucy, Margo, Edith, and Agnes welcome a new member to the family, Gru Jr., who is intent on tormenting his dad. Gru faces a new nemesis in Maxime Le Mal and his girlfriend Valentina, an... Read all Gru, Lucy, Margo, Edith, and Agnes welcome a new member to the family, Gru Jr., who is intent on tormenting his dad. Gru faces a new nemesis in Maxime Le Mal and his girlfriend Valentina, and the family is forced to go on the run. Gru, Lucy, Margo, Edith, and Agnes welcome a new member to the family, Gru Jr., who is intent on tormenting his dad. Gru faces a new nemesis in Maxime Le Mal and his girlfriend Valentina, and the family is forced to go on the run.

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‘ultraman: rising’ review: a famous japanese franchise gets a heartwarming american reboot.

The Netflix animated feature, directed by Shannon Tindle and co-directed by John Aoshima, offers a new take on a classic Japanese series created in the 1960s.

By Jordan Mintzer

Jordan Mintzer

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For millions of Japanese viewers as well as countless fans across the globe, the Ultraman franchise, pitting a giant superhero against giant kaiju creatures of all shapes and breeds, has been a popular staple since it was first launched as a TV series in the 1960s.

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The experience is not unlike discovering Star Wars for the first time by watching the 2015 J.J. Abrams movie, whose Jedis and Storm Troopers won’t ring much of a bell if you haven’t seen the earlier ones. Still, the the team behind this endearing if familiar Ultraman reboot does a good job at ushering us into a whole new world of heroes and villains, while trying to make the rehashed material feel meaningful.

Much of that material won’t seem new, especially for anyone who’s already seen a Godzilla flick, or one of the Pacific Rim movies, or Big Hero 6 . But writer-director Shannon Tindle and co-writer Marc Haimes, who wrote the script for Kubo and the Two Strings , do their best to enhance it: Not only do they add a brand new subplot involving the baseball career of Kenji “Ken” Sato aka Ultraman (voiced by Christopher Sean), but they introduce a real emotional arc about the hero’s traumatic past, as well as an extremely cute fatherhood narrative where Ultraman is suddenly forced to raise an orphaned child.

That child, Emi (Julia Harriman), is no ordinary baby but a pint-sized kaiju dragon, which means she’s about the size of a garbage truck. Pink and cuddly, and with the ability to destroy a state-of-the-art mansion in one temper tantrum, Emi is picked up by Ultraman after a duel with Gigatron, one of many creatures the hero battles as a professional monster-fighter — a job he does while also holding down a career as a professional baller.

If the Spider-Man motto is “with great power comes great responsibility,” the Ultraman motto, at least as the American reboot attempts to explain it, is about using “power to bring balance.” It’s a very Zen-like approach to the superhero métier that’s illustrated by Ken trying to juggle two taxing jobs while also raising the adorable but untamable Emi, who gets more and more unwieldy as he grows older, projectile vomiting and pooping with extreme kaiju force.

While the original Ultraman shows were memorable for their epic live-action battles between monster and man (well, a massive man powered by alien forces and supreme technology), Ultraman: Rising will likely touch viewers, especially ages 10 and under, for its story of a young man trying to be a good dad while also reconnecting with his own estranged father, in what ultimate becomes a parable about responsible parenting.

That doesn’t mean Tindle, who co-directed the film with John Aoshima ( Maya and the Three , DuckTales ), doesn’t deliver the goods when it comes to the genre’s requisite city fights, including an epic attack above the Tokyo Dome while Ken is standing at home plate. The filmmakers also offer up a decent new villain in the form of Dr. Onda (Keone Young), an evil scientist who heads up the KDF (Kaiju Defense Forces) and who was traumatized by his family’s death during a monster attack. Fatherhood, yet again.

Either way, the fight is likely to keep going as long as there are giant monsters roaming about and brave superheroes to stand up to them — and IP that can regenerate itself for decades to come.  

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