The Human Voice (2020)
Written and Directed by: Pedro Almodovar
Based on a play by Jean Cocteau
Starring: Tilda Swinton
Streaming on Mubi.
It's a classic Almodovar film. Strong, bold colors all over. Pain and Glory had a lot of white and blue. This has a lot of red, and green. Solid mise-en-scene. Intense voice over. Story of an artist. Stories about complex emotions. Here, the story is about a woman who just gets to know that her partner is leaving her for good, without even a proper goodbye. He ends it over a phone call, and she gets mad about. She gets upset. She expresses her urge to kill him with an axe. She even swings the axe at a couple of his shirts. And she also tells him about the kind of mental imbalance and the void that has been created in her because of what he did to her. Abandonment can be horrifying. So is isolation and loneliness. Especially when it is someone who you trust. She decides to break free from it, and liberate herself.
Tilda Swinton is terrific in portraying that pain. The mental agony that she goes through, comes through the performance. It all pents up and she ends up burning the whole thing at the end to feel better. It's interesting as to how for some reason, people always get attracted to the wrong kind of people. For the person she is, she can choose to be with someone who actually values her. But she makes herself vulnerable by trusting this idiot. And it works both ways, of course.
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