The Same Species

Even while working with the British director Derek Jarman, Tilda Swinton was aware of his Spanish counterpart Pedro Almodóvar (1949), who with his independent films celebrated the political and sexual freedom for the LGBTIQ community in Madrid that became possible after the death of the dictator Franco.

Almodóvar is seen as the most successful, internationally recognised Spanish filmmaker of his generation. In 2001 he was inducted as an honorary foreign member into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His best-known films include Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (1988), The Skin I Live In (2011) and, more recently, his English-language feature debut The Room Next Door (2024), in which Tilda Swinton plays one of the two lead roles.

Swinton has long been a big fan of Almodóvar, but had to wait until 2020 for him to decide to make his first film in English. This is The Human Voice (2020), an adaptation of Jean Cocteau’s monologue La voix humaine, with Swinton playing the lead. The film, which screens this evening, is made up of contradictions: the costumes are glitzy and marvellous, the house is a studio mock-up; the woman at its heart does everything she can to maintain the appearance of control over herself and her relationship, while she is in fact falling apart.

Like the protagonists of the film on which Almodóvar and Swinton once again collaborated, The Room Next Door, she tells us a story about how we can deal with love, pain and loss.