We begin with Una voce umana (1948), the first episode of Roberto Rossellini's film L'amore. Starring an extraordinary Anna Magnani-who won the Silver Ribbon for Best Actress in a Leading Role for this role-Rossellini's version fits into the groove of Italian neorealism, giving Cocteau's text a deeply popular and authentic soul. Set in an essential domestic space, the film relies entirely on the expressive power of the actress, who gives voice and body to a woman torn by despair but still tenaciously clinging to lost love.

It continues with Voce umana (2014), directed by Edoardo Ponti and performed in Neapolitan by Sophia Loren, with textual adaptation by Erri De Luca. Presented at the Tribeca Film Festival and the Cannes Film Festival in 2014, this intense short marks the Oscar-winning actress's return to the set after many years and is an act of love for her career and the tradition of Italian cinema. In a silent, almost metaphysical Naples, Loren plays a mature woman facing abandonment with dignity, pain and memories. Ponti's intimate and measured direction gives back a painful and touching reading of the text, updating it gracefully.

Finally, the review presents Pedro Almodóvar's The Human Voice (2020), a bold and chromatically explosive version starring a magnetic Tilda Swinton. For his first English-language film, the Spanish director transports the monologue into a stylized and theatrical universe, laden with symbolism and saturated colors, giving the story an almost dreamlike dimension. The protagonist, in a space that is both apartment and film set, experiences her suffering poised between artifice and truth, between melodrama and lucid awareness. With this reinterpretation, Almodóvar transforms Cocteau's text into a reflection on identity, abandonment and the power of representation.

Three visions, three different poetics, united by the desire to investigate the feminine soul at the moment of maximum fragility, paying homage to a text that continues to speak powerfully and topically even to contemporary sensibilities.