◎ Secretary of the round head
In the past year, the global film industry has entered a cold winter, theaters have closed, and production has come to a standstill. The cancellation of the Cannes Film Festival, the hub of European cinema for the first time in decades, casts a shadow over art cinema. In the past year, there has been little global film production, let alone exciting masterpieces, and in this desperate situation, the latest work of Spanish film master Pedro Almodóvar, "The Voice of Mankind", is a sobering medicine. The half-hour short, the first English-language film of his directorial career, was screened at the Venice Film Festival last year, in which british actress Tilda Swinton played her sole role and dedicated her textbook acting skills.
Almodóvar's version of "The Human Voice," based on the famous French director and screenwriter Jean Cocteau's theatrical work of the same name, tells the story of a woman who learns on the phone that her five-year lover will marry another woman the next day, and falls into extreme anxiety and fear. In 1930, "The Voice of Mankind" was first performed at the Comémidie de France, and in the following decades, the work was continuously adapted to the theatrical stages of various countries or adapted into films.
From Ingrid Bergman to Sophia Rowland
Among the film adaptations, the most famous include the 1966 ABC television version directed by Golden Bear director Ted Kotcheff and starring Oscar actress Ingrid Bergman, and the 2014 Italian version directed by Eduardo Ponty and starring Cannes actress Sophia Roland. It can be seen from Cass that because the play is a one-man show, and the characters in the play have a variety of emotions and extremely high requirements for actors, they often dare to challenge the most powerful and famous actresses.
Not only the acting skills, but also the emotional experience of the actors themselves often play a very important role in the playing. Ingrid Bergman, for example, was impressed by Italian director Roberto Rossellini after watching Rome, the Undefended City in the 1940s, and soon after abandoning her husband to elope with Rossellini, a move that also led conservative Hollywood to abandon Bergman, and it wasn't until seven years later that Bergman finally got the chance to make a comeback on the big screen in the United States. However, just when Bergman's acting career in the United States was recovering, Rossellini broke out into a scandal, and the two's romantic relationship was terminated soon after. The 66th edition of "The Voice of Mankind" was filmed after Bergman's comeback, and it is obvious that many of Bergman's own experiences can be seen.
Sophia Roland's version is also of similar quality: in fact, director Eduardo Ponty is the son of her husband Carlo Ponti, and Sophia Rowland and carlo Ponty, who was married at the time, also experienced a long and difficult run before officially entering the marriage hall, and there is no shortage of Hollywood male stars like Gary Grant who admire him and have a spark of love with him. A heart-rending line often reflects a sad past of the actor himself, and it is this emotional truth that makes the above two versions of "The Voice of Mankind" enough to hit the audience and produce empathy.
The "negative person" who has been blurred
If in both versions, women's position in emotional relationships is absolutely inferior— they can't save a "negative man" no matter how much they plead, then Almodóvar's version constitutes an extremely powerful rebuttal and subversion of this traditional power relationship and value. This can be seen in the casting - the protagonist Tilda Swinton is neutral in itself, and can even be said to be one of the most neutral actors today; it is difficult to judge the gender of the lover on the other end of the phone specifically, and the only gender hint for the lover in the film may come from the suit placed on the bed, but the style is also difficult to determine whether it is menswear. In contrast, the other two versions either hint at a specific era background or simply give a photograph of a man torn to shreds by the heroine. The deliberate blurring of the protagonist's gender and sexuality gives Almodóvar's version of The Voice of Man a distinctly queer nature, while also making the work more abstract, arguably the only work in the three versions that can elevate the "voice of women" to the "voice of mankind".
Not only is it deliberately playing down the gender, Almodóvar's version also creates a very different female figure from the previous two versions. In fact, the woman played by Swinton is gritty and brave. Although Almodóvar's version of "The Voice of Mankind" also allows the heroine to spend a lot of time retaining her lover, reflecting the fragility and sentimentality of people in emotional relationships (in this regard, Almodóvar's adaptation of Jean Cocteau's original work is extremely limited), at the end of the short film, Swinton's fire ignites the entire residential set, and the "fire of love" is both a symbol of strong emotion and the destruction and end of a relationship.
Swinton then strides out of the darkness into the real world and talks to her lover's dog, saying that she will become its owner in the future, and admonishing the puppy to get used to life without its previous owner. Such a passage that establishes subjectivity is a completely different expression from the woman presented at the end of the first two versions of the woman who spends a long night alone in an empty room, grieving and heartbroken. Not only that, but there is also an image in the film that has never appeared in other versions - an axe. As a symbol of strength, the axe shows a decisive, two-cut posture, and also reflects the increasingly strong call for feminism and same-sex equality in this era.
From the core, the latest version of "The Voice of Mankind" is undoubtedly "Almodobalization", and visually, this version undoubtedly has Almodóvar's consistent style and characteristics, whether it is a home interior or some props, it is red and yellow warm colors, giving people a strong visual impact. In one shot, Almodóvar gives a large close-up of a bunch of red and yellow pills, which of course are not found in several other versions, and this emphasis is not so much an emphasis on the plot of self-destruction as it is about the stark image. From here, we can glimpse the authorship of Almodóvar's version of The Voice of Man, and we can also feel the high degree of visualization of his work.
Three solutions to a telephone line
In fact, there are many thorny problems that the dramatic work "The Voice of Man" has to solve in the process of imaging, one of which is the difficult telephone line, which is very restrictive to the actor's play, the role can not move freely, so it also restricts the director's scene scheduling, and it is easy to make the work lose its sense of movement.
It is very interesting that the three versions take three completely different solutions in this regard. Eduardo Ponty's version uses a large number of empty and flashback shots to create a nostalgic and soothing atmosphere to balance the mediocrity and blankness of scheduling; the more conventional panning lens to show the scene of life, and to show the relationship between people and space with a panoramic lens, under the wide angle, sophia Roland, who is 80 years old at the time, looks extremely lonely. Although Ted Kotchev's version is also constrained by telephone lines, the scene scheduling is higher than the Italian version, and it is very clever to gradually transform the spatial restrictions into a "tie" and "bondage" meaning. Kotchev also "fixed" the protagonist's facial close-up in a standard frame and edited frequently, creating an uneasy atmosphere with various unconventional camera positions such as ups and downs, in order to show the ups and downs of the heroine's emotions. Despite being a short film for television, Kotchev did his best under the technical conditions of the time, producing a high-calibre film (and the longest of the three versions).
Nevertheless, Almodóvar's version of The Voice of Man is still the boldest of these, and the extreme emotional intensity and intensity commonly found in his films are also highly matched by his wide-ranging scene scheduling. In the film, Almodovar puts Tilda Swindon on an AirPods wireless Bluetooth headset, and the space restrictions brought by the telephone line are completely removed. Swinton can wander throughout the room, the contrast between man and space is stronger, and the emotional catharsis is more effective; at the same time, the characters who remove the telephone line are more likely to talk to themselves, and the state of loneliness is further strengthened and highlighted.
More crucially, Almodóvar is not afraid to expose the studio to the audience, to let the actors wander inside and out of the set, and to go crazy about the emptiness outside the balcony; he uses the camera as a probe to go deep into the set, using the lens to "fold" out a complete, transparent theater space that traditional theater cannot reach. In short, throughout the set and the dark theater environment that spreads around it, everything is illusory, only the emotion is real; the "voice" conveyed by the actors is once again free from the concrete space, and abstracted into a wider space-time and art form through hypothesis.
Of course, the reason why Almodóvar chose to adapt "The Voice of Mankind" at this moment is because the lonely state of this kind of person in the film is in line with the isolated living situation of human beings under the epidemic. After all, no matter how brilliant and bright the colors in the set, on the outside of it is still a larger concrete shroud, and the darkness comes uninvited, and depression cannot be shaken off. As a fire spreads at the end, the film's set is reduced to ashes, and the drama and text become false in Swinton's footsteps into the light, and humanity eventually has to plunge into real life, to move forward bravely in the painful memory of love. This is Almodóvar's most powerful appeal in the year of the epidemic, and this version of "The Voice of Mankind" is also a work that makes people feel powerful and energetic in form and content after a work such as "Pain and Glory" that writes about the helplessness of life.