MELBOURNE INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL: Airplanes are dramatic animals, as E.B. White once wrote. In movies they most often provide the setting for high comedy (Flying High) or high suspense (Red Eye), and not much in between. There's nothing subtle about what a plane is or does. Yet commercial flight has made the outrageous commonplace, and at any moment thousands of passengers doze above the clouds, suspended, bored, flying. There's nothing subtle about I'm So Excited!, either. In Pedro Almodóvar's ecstatic return to his signature bawdy comedy, the commonplace - a flight from Madrid to Mexico - is made outrageous, and a literally heightened atmosphere returns a group of variously suspended characters to the world.
[Almodovar has] never met a stereotype he wouldn't tongue kiss in a mad embrace.
"Everything in this film is fiction and fantasy," claims an opening title, "and bears no relation to reality." And it could only be a dream world in which Penélope Cruz and Antonio Banderas work an airport tarmac in neon vests, as they do here in a playful cameo. Their bit of business on the runway has ill effects for Peninsula flight 2549, staffed by a trio of antic male flight attendants (Javier Cámara, Raúl Arévalo, and Carlos Areces), a deceptively straight-laced captain (Antonio de la Torre) and his buffoonish co-pilot (Hugo Silva). Having never met a stereotype he wouldn't tongue kiss in a mad embrace, Almodóvar makes his three stewards as gay as Christmas, Easter, and a French horn, respectively.
The plane's cabin is painted and upholstered in a mod palette, vibrant colours echoed by the steward's uniforms - bright, tight, and ready to frug. The men tend to first class; there are a few female attendants in coach, but they, like the rest of the economy passengers, are passed out cold. In the wake of technical difficulties - a jammed wheel has endangered the plane's landing - the captain has ordered most of the passengers drugged into slumber, for their safety. If you find that metaphor too crude, it's going to be a bumpy flight: Almodóvar makes direct contact with Spain's current social and financial crises only lightly, but every other element in this story gets hammered, stoned, blown, and sucked back with abandon.
So the one about giving "cockpit" a whole new meaning certainly applies; it also matches too much of the film's comic register, as constituted by a rapid fire of limp one liners, innuendo (in-yer-endo), and sight gags. The first class cabin comprises an assortment of the famous, the rich, the decadent, the depraved, and the eccentric. There is a movie star (Guillermo Toledo), a financier named Mr. Más (i.e. "Mr. More," played by José Luis Torrijo), a dominatrix (Cecilia Roth), an assassin (José María Yazpik), a pair of honeymooners (Miguel Ángel Silvestre and Laya Martí) and a virgin psychic (Lola Duenas). As the peril of the situation becomes apparent, barriers between the plane's various spaces and passengers break down in screwball style. The flight attendants make the first class passengers a round of Valencia cocktails spiked with mescaline and perform a campy lip synch to the Pointer Sisters song of the title; then nearly everyone joins the mile-high club--doing so twice with comatose passengers.
More than most directors, Almodóvar's films suffer from plot summary. When a friend distilled into plot points Almodóvar's haunting, outlandish last film, The Skin I Live In, I simply didn't believe him. The application of his hand, his eye, his heart, his guts--and all the other bodily metaphors we use, paradoxically, to suggest the soul--gives these scenarios not just life but a plausible reality. He may not give "screwball" a new meaning in I'm So Excited!, but Almodóvar's careful thoughts on comic rhythm and imperative inform the film's humming pace and occasionally inspired silliness. (With the exception of a detour into a passenger's tangled love life on the ground that doesn't quite work.)
Less integral, partly on purpose, are the film's dips into subtext. (In the film's press notes, Almodóvar stresses that he didn't want to make "a social comedy," favouring instead "a certain lightness.") Stuck in a holding pattern over Spain, the plane lacks an available airport for its emergency landing; despite its dire economic situation, the country is jammed with political and sporting events. Eventually they are forced to land at the abandoned La Mancha airport, a boondoggle based on the real-life Ciudad Real Airport, opened in 2008 and closed in 2012, ostensibly because it was built not to function but to generate money for investors. Ciudad Real, Almodóvar's hometown, suffered badly from the ordeal. In the film it is Mr. Más who bears responsibility for the airport fiasco; references to similar scandals pop up throughout I'm So Excited!
But in the end Almodóvar is more interested in his characters (indeed they comprise some of his favourite actors, giving the film a retrospective festivity), and their redemption, so that instead of adding bite or dimension to the story, allusions to Spain's current troubles feel less essential--and perhaps more frivolous--for being invoked. Even as the motley elite confront La Mancha airport's yawning emptiness, Almodóvar foregrounds their individual desires, intrigues, and dramas. This may be an apt choice, or a merely blithe one. But I'm not sure it can be both.
