Almodóvar on the Verge of Cocteau's "La Voix humaine"

Jean Cocteau's one-act play, La Voix humaine [The Human Voice], consists entirely of a monologue by a woman engaged in a final phone conversation with her lover. Alone in her room, she desperately clings to the telephone as her only link to the man who has left her for someone else. Although this agonizing portrait of abandonment and despair bears little resemblance to Almodovar's multi-charactered comedic romp through the streets of Madrid in Mujeres al horde de un ataque de nervios [Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown], Cocteau's play has been named as the source of inspiration for that film. In various interviews Almodovar has explained that his original intention had been to adapt the play to the screen, but due to its brevity, he needed to expand the material to feature film length. This led him to devise a story of the forty-eight hours leading up to the phone call. In the process, said Almodovar, "Cocteau's La Voix humaine had utterly disappeared from the text-apart from its original concept, of course: a woman sitting next to a suitcase of memories waiting miserably for a phone call from the man she loves" (Strauss 80). Despite this seeming dismissal of Cocteau's work, however, Almodovar insists that the film "truly is a version of La Voix humaine" [es realmente una version de La Voix humaine] because the play "remains in a latent form" [permanece de una forma latente] (Vidal 258). Linda Hutcheon's A Theory of Parody provides insights into how that latent form operates within Almodovar's film. According to Hutcheon, the traditional view of parody as a ridiculing of artistic models through stylistic imitation does not account for the numerous reworkings of earlier texts by twentieth-century artists who do not use parody to deride their original sources. Consequently, Hutcheon proposes an expanded concept of parody as "an integrated structural modeling process of revising, replaying, inventing, and `trans-contextualizing' previous works of art" ( 11 ). In this definition parody continues to be "a form of imitation, but imitation characterized by ironic inversion, not always at the expense of the parodied text . . . [I]t is a stylistic confrontation, a modern recoding which establishes a difference at the heart of similarity.... Such parody intends no disrespect, while it does signal ironic difference" (6, 8, 10). Hutcheon stresses that "unlike what is more traditionally regarded as parody, the modern form does not always permit one of the texts to fare any better or any worse than the other.... The parodied text is often not at all under attack. It is often respected and used as a model" (31, 103). Almodovar engages in this sort of creative reworking in Mujeres. He trans-contextualizes material from Cocteau's drama by placing it within a comedy format. But his genre switching does not mock any aspect of La Voix humaine. On the contrary, Almodovar has stated his conviction that "if Cocteau had been able to see the film or read the script, he would have thought that it was absolutely faithful to his idea of the work and to the feelings of this abandoned woman" [si Cocteau la hubiera podido ver o leer el guion, habria pensado que era absolutamente fiel a la idea de la obra y de la soledad de esta mujer abandonada] (Vidal 258). Indeed, Almodovar never pokes fun at the suffering of his protagonist, Pepa. He fully respects her emotions, but he bases his comedy on an inversion of the trajectory that those same emotions take in La Voix humaine. Whereas Cocteau's unnamed woman becomes increasingly dependent upon her lover as the play progresses, Pepa gradually achieves what critics have called an "emancipation from machismo" and an "inner liberation from a phallocentric past," resulting in her ultimate rejection of Ivan's renewed interest in her in the penultimate scene (Jessup 299; D'Lugo 65). Although both Pepa and Cocteau's anonymous heroine are on the verge of a nervous breakdown at the beginning of their respective stories, that breakdown is ultimately realized by only one of them. …