SOFIA LOREN IN HUMAN VOICE

Iconic aria of a woman scorned enacted by an iconic actress

No Jean Cocteau work has inspired so much imitation as his play, La Voix humaine, a monologue of a woman talking on the telephone to her lover (never heard), who is leaving her to marry another woman. There is Francis Poulenc's opera, Gian Carlo Menotti's opera buffa The Telephone, and Roberto Rossellini's film version in the omnibus L'Amore, starring Anna Magnani. The original monodrama has been done by a string of actresses. It was written for Madame Berthe Bovy in 1930. Simone Signoret did it. YouTube's endless riches also include a filmed Italian version of the Cocteau play starring Anna Proclemer. It was also performed by Ingrid Bergman and Liv Ullman; Julia Migenes can be seen in a DVD recording of Poulenc's opera conducted by Georges Prêtre. Well, Edoardo Ponti's version can certainly compete with these, since it stars his mother, the great Italian actress Sofia Loren. Loren is unbelievably sentimental and touching in Ponti's abbreviated Italian version adapted by Erri De Luca, the more so since she is playing a fifty-year-old woman, when she herself is seventy-nine, which adds immeasurably to the sense of bravery and pathos as one contemplates her ravaged beauty and listens to her speaking in Neapolitan dialect (Erri De Luca was born in Naples).

Here, she jokes that her man, whom she calls "cheri," just like in the Cocteau original, sometimes can't follow her dialect. One would like to see and hear all the notable versions of the play and compare them. I have seen only Loren and Magnani and heard Signoret and Bovy. They are enough to show what a powerful vehicle this work is and how each great actress brings her all to it and gives it a different shape according to her personality.

In the original Cocteau play with Berthe Bovy, she is stretched out in a white nightgown "like an assassinated woman." The whole thing is opened up and re-conceived here, even though De Luca's abbreviated text stays close to the basic elements of the play. Here, though, Sofia Loren is upright, fully clothed. Her cook is in the kitchen preparing eggplant alla parmigiana for two. Is her mistress expecting to be reunited with her man? The man is briefly glimpsed in a series of fleeting flashbacks of happy moments out walking on a boardwalk and in a market, she in various wigs. He is played by Enrico Lo Verso (of Gianni Amelio's Stolen Children and Lamerica), in a grey beard and hat, but is never heard and barely seen. Lo Verso has a bigger role in Ponti's previous short film, The Nightshift Belongs to the Stars/Il turno di notte lo fanno le stelle.

The essence of the piece, in any of its versions, embodied wonderfully by Sofia Loren, is that the lady speaking to the lover who has abandoned her is trying, not so much to convince him to come back, but to pretend to herself that he is still with her, a pretense that, in the end, she cannot really sustain. It is a situation that of course risks descending into bathos, but great actresses like Magnani and Loren are too powerful for that to happen, though there is the danger, from time to time, that she seems to be talking to herself, since the concept requires the lover never to be heard; or at least this is the effect of Erri De Luca's shortened version, the effect perhaps augmented by Loren's age. More significance is added by Loren's having said that it was her watching Magnani do "The Human Voice" in Rossellini's short film when she was fourteen that made her want to become an actress.

As further evidence of the depth of this not-so-little film, the cinematography, which has a classic look, is the work of the excellent Mexican-born Rodrigo Prieto, who first became known for working with Iñárritu, but also lensed Brokeback Mountain and The Wolf of Wall Street.

Human Voice/Voce umana, 25 mins., debuted at Tribeca April 2014, and had a grand play at Cannes, where Sofia Loren returned to her old scenes of glory, spreading her wings on the red carpet, and snuggling up in a bank of cameramen in a red pants suit, still looking pretty fabulous. It had a DVD debut 28 May 2014 in Italy and there was a Davide di Donatello award for her. Screened as part of the San Francisco Film Society's New Italian Cinema series, Nov. 19-23, 2014. It shows November 19, 2014, 6:30 p.m. as part of an event , "An evening with Edoardi Ponti."

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.