The Human Voice

A woman will not leave the flat she has been abandoned in. Her lover has been gone three days and his suitcases are still there. Finally the phone rings. The thirty-minute film is almost entirely that call; the other side is never heard. The subject is not the break-up but the conversation itself. She tries to sound calm on the phone and every sentence gives away that this is a performance. The gesture at the end is a choice absent from the original play and changes the whole meaning. The form displays its own artifice: the flat is built inside a studio and the camera occasionally steps outside to show that there are no walls. The colours are Almodóvar's usual palette of red, mustard and blue. The source is Jean Cocteau's one-woman play of 1930, previously filmed by Rossellini with Anna Magnani. This is Almodóvar's first work in English, and it screened at the Venice film festival in 2020. He has said he deliberately changed the play's ending. Tilda Swinton carries it alone. Who it is for: viewers who like solo performance and Almodóvar's use of colour. Who it is not for: anyone expecting a feature; this is thirty minutes and a sketch rather than a story.