In The Human Voice, Tilda Swinton Makes an Art of Loneliness

In the sixth season of HBO’s pro-consumerist heterosexual fantasia Sex and the City (1998–2004), its heroine, Carrie Bradshaw, visits an art gallery in Chelsea and is bored by a performance that parodies a work by Marina Abramović. The faux-Abramović is trapped on a high platform, kept in place by ladders made from kitchen knives, silent and solemn and serene. ‘There are depressed women all over the city doing the exactly same thing,’ Carrie notes, rolling her eyes. ‘Put a phone up on that platform and it’s just a typical Friday night waiting for some guy to call.’ If the ‘some guy’ in question had actually called, the resultant scene might have resembled Pedro Almodóvar’s latest film, The Human Voice (2020): a slight, chic short in which the actress Tilda Swinton conducts a twenty-or-so-minute conversation on the telephone with her ex-lover, rattling around a beautiful apartment that turns out to be a set built on a sound-stage. There are moments in which Swinton, carrying herself with the unnatural grace of a performance artist under observation, is silent and solemn and serene, and there are others in which she is desperate, incandescent, embarrassing, frightening and primed for vengeance. 

Knives do play a part in Almodóvar’s portrait of his leading lady’s nervous breakdown, as does a literal axe that ends up used not in the Chekovian third act, but in the first, before the telephone has even begun ringing. It is almost impossible for a director to show a woman purchasing an axe – as Swinton does here, or as Isabelle Huppert does in Paul Verhoeven’s genius rape comedy Elle (2016) – without making us think about a man being either castrated or killed. The violation in this instance is less bloody, but perhaps no less distressing: we are forced to watch the dismemberment of a crisp Balenciaga suit. ‘There was a time, for four straight years until three days ago,’ Swinton suggests in voiceover, fingering DVDs of Written on the Wind (1952) and All That Heaven Allows (1955), ‘when I waited for you.’ With these props, Almodóvar is signalling that we are not in fact about to see an art film, but a melodrama – Sirkian in its emotional intensity, a little camp in its juxtaposition of despair and haute couture. ‘In the future,’ she assures her absent lover, ‘I’m going to be a practical woman. And I have to keep occupied: that’s what my therapist says.’ To hear practicality invoked by this glamorous person, who is never named, is funny, incongruous, like hearing a contract killer talk about his passion for romantic comedies. Because we know she is an actress and she looks like Tilda Swinton, we assume that she must be Tilda Swinton or some version of her: broken-hearted; unhinged; self-aware enough to understand that actresses, in the eyes of the industry, age in dog years rather than human ones. (A dog, in fact, is her only co-star for about nine-tenths of the film.) ‘You won’t believe it, but [my agent] Fabien says women my age are fashionable again,’ she observes, drily. ‘I think it’s a fucking joke. I’m a ruin of what I once was.’  

That Swinton is in no way close to being a ruin is, of course, why Almodóvar’s film is more than a mere trifle: few actresses would be capable of holding the attention of an audience while doing nothing more than drinking, sleeping, popping pills and talking on the phone with quite such phosphorescent ease. ‘Clients love my pallor,’ she says wryly. ‘That mixture of madness and melancholy.’ Swinton’s periodic turns as a performance artist between 1995 and 2013 – sleeping in a glass box at various institutions, including MoMA, for an artwork called The Maybe – functioned in a similar way, hinging as they did on the desire to simply observe a star.  

Adapted ‘freely’ from the 1930 play of the same name by Jean Cocteau, The Human Voice is Almodóvar’s first collaboration with the actress, as well as his first foray into filmmaking outside his mother tongue, Spanish; he drew inspiration from the same source for his 1988 film Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, although that movie ended with a pregnancy and this one ends with an inferno. Near the end of her long conversation with the unseen man, Swinton’s character begins to circle the bleak truth at the centre of relationships in which men keep women waiting – and those women keep house, keep their alienating emotions to themselves, keep their weight down and their dye-jobs well maintained. In doing so, the waiting woman loses some elemental part of herself. ‘I wasn’t funny with you,’ she admits. ‘I was special, daring, submissive, thin.’ The relationship, like the apartment, is a simulacrum laid out on a sound stage. ‘I’m your master, now,’ she tells the sad-eyed dog, although she may as well be talking to herself.  

_{Main image: Tilda Swinton in Pedro Almodóvar's The Human Voice, 2021, film still. Courtesy: El Deseo D.A. S.L.U.; photograph: Iglesias Mas}