At just thirty minutes long (the length of a TV episode), Tilda Swinton commands every second of the small screen in Pedro Almodóvar’s beautifully staged and winkingly meta new short film, The Human Voice.
With Tilda Swinton as the film’s singular character, The Human Voice (which was also selected to play at last year’s Venice Film Festival) is a devilishly playful bit of pop-art filmmaking that sees the director combine his source material’s wonderfully satiric silliness and makes it a meta viewing experience that comments on both film production and how we communicate as humans.
In The Human Voice, Swinton plays an actress unhinged, at first silent and vacant as she sulks about her decadent and deadening modern apartment, but then firey and alive at the sound of her iPhone ringing, her lover on the other end of the line.
Over the course of their on-off conversation (of which we only hear Swinton’s side of throughout the entirety of the film) she switches from depressed and pilling boozer, to desperately needy partner, to rage-filled and scorned woman of the world all in a moment’s time.
It’s a high task to have to create the entirety of a world when you’re acting alone, but if there’s anyone in Hollywood who can do the job, it’s Ms. Swinton, whose talents and stamina make the film captivating. What she does so effortlessly–communicating an entire story and relationship of a fictionalized, passionately troubled couple–is accomplished all by way of using a singular element: her voice.
And she does this with gymnastic range, pitching up her voice to harken back to old Hollywood romantic starlets, and then down-shifting gears into a lower register to convey darker colors. Her voice work on display here is as vital and deadly as any of Almodóvar’s beautifully composed hardware and tools that are so artfully composed within the background.
The Human Voice does communicate a narrative story (kind of), but just as Almodóvar makes a point of regularly reminding us that the apartment is in fact a set within a soundstage, and the actor alone within it all, the film should really be watched and appreciated for what it is: an exercise in filmmaking where the audience gets the rare chance to deconstruct, study, and understand all the parts that go into the art of filmmaking, which feels so special to get during a crossroads in film production when everything was flipped on its head. Personally, I think it’s something worth shouting for.
30 minutes. ‘The Human Voice’ is now playing in Los Angeles at the Vineland Drive-In Theater.
