The Spanish auteur’s joyous half-hour film The Human Voice, now on Mubi, makes you wish that more top directors would occasionally keep it brief
Just as the Cannes film festival wrapped up last week, the Venice film festival – only six weeks away – stepped in to steal the spotlight, announcing to much excitement that it will open with Parallel Mothers, the new, Penelope Cruz-starring feature by Pedro Almodóvar. Almodóvar fans can consider themselves quite spoilt these days: only last year, Spain’s leading film-maker unveiled a different film at Venice, which last week landed on Mubi for your streaming pleasure.
The Human Voice is different from previous Almodóvar works, however. It’s his first film in English, for starters, and pairs him with Tilda Swinton, an
Actor currently leading the bingo game among her peers for who can rack up the most (and most esoteric) major auteur collaborations in the course of her career. It’s fun to imagine the likes of Isabelle Huppert and Juliette Binoche fuming that Swinton – who just popped up in Cannes in new films by Wes Anderson, Joanna Hogg and Apichatpong Weerasethakul – beat them to Almodóvar too.