It is at least curious that a short film has received so much media attention. Considered the younger brother of the audiovisual industry, The short film is a rare piece in the premieres that fill the screens of our cinemas every week.. If there was a time when it was part of the programming of commercial premieres, today it has been practically displaced, reduced his reign to that of festivals, big or small, and some loose programs from public television, always without too much diffusion, or with a little more attention within the offer of some of the video on demand platforms, only more or less stable mooring for its dissemination among a certain audience.
That's why I think we have to celebrate the premiere of this piece that concerns us., for what it is like as an event, not only in what refers to its author, as for what it may mean for the general public to put, even for a moment, your look at these formats, caladero, in general, of the new-future voices of national and international cinema, when not a space for experimentation that sometimes surpasses that of its older brothers. Given these conditions, It is at least curious that a director like Pedro Almodóvar does this exercise of restraint to put his talent into a short piece., and even more, as he himself said in an interview, at a time when television fiction pushes us in the opposite direction, that is to say, that of the great and long dramatic plots. things to go, for vice, against the general trend.
As everyone knows by now, The human voice It's an adaptation, free according to the director from La Mancha, from an original text by French Jean Cocteau. in the movie, we have a nameless woman waiting. Whom? To a man from whom you have just separated and from whom you long to receive one last call. When it occurs, the story truly begins. A story that tells us about all those things that fall by the wayside after an intense love relationship.. Some will remain kept in our hearts for the rest of our lives.. Others… well, we are not going to do a spoiler (I'm looking for the meaning of spoiler on Google and it recommends the term “gutting”; I like, very almodovariano).
There is no doubt that the author of titles like All about my mother He had a really good time making this little piece.. In The human voice we find all the formal tics of the usual Almodóvar: an apartment decorated in bright colors, Balenciaga dresses, the music of Alberto Iglesias and the photography of José Luis Alcaine. On stage, one more time, a woman who stands on the edge of the abyss, devoured by passion, ready for everything. Again, the rules of a plot that, by convention, we relate to the melodramatic genre, but what, at this point, They now belong almost exclusively to Almodóvar himself. They season the function that cocktail between kitsch and the purely traditional nature of so many of his films (memorable hardware store scene; I have thought about speaking in English to the hardware store in my neighborhood to see what happens.).
Among the least surprising aspects of this proposal is a plot that is too schematic in its development and that perhaps refers to a conflict that is slightly overlooked by our present.. And with this I do not mean that there is no one, after a breakup, do not go through the grieving process that the anonymous protagonist of this story goes through. It's just that, when this element is exposed to us as the core of the narrative, we remain as if waiting for something more that does not arrive, we know little. among the best, definitely, We find an Almodóvar who not only enjoys what he is doing, testing compositions, self-referencing games, shapes, colors and patterns, but he dares to play with the elements of the scene in a way, both narrative and dramatic, symbolic, metaphorical, offering a permanent dialogue between its protagonist and that setting that is no longer just a background, but one more character.
and in the center, We said, a woman. and what a woman, friends! Es Tilda Swinton, for the one who subscribes these lines, a weakness since that distant day when I first saw her in Orlando (Sally Potter, 1992). Swinton es, definitely, the soul of this little party. without her, Almodóvar's text would remain a mere bottomless litany. But Swinton knows how to take any sequence of words to another level, give life to what, otherwise, I would be dead. Your presence on the screen, besides, turns each frame into a small filigree. Swinton belongs so naturally to Almodóvar's cinema that one wonders how it is possible that this association had not occurred much earlier. Swinton (“La” Swinton, we would say then) It slides across the screen with such spontaneity that it breaks any rigidity to which the image frame sometimes seems to want to subject it.. Le falta a Swinton, maybe, that very Hispanic internal thing of outburst that is a trademark of Almodóvar's characters and that is a little missed here (What would Carmen Maura have done??). Swinton's Almodovarian woman is more Anglo-Saxon, Of course, less passionate, He lacks a bit of that characteristic temperament. Even so, one sees it and, poor mortal, He can't help but wonder who the idiot is that left that woman.. If there has to be everything. go see it. GERARDO LEON
