Almodóvar gets two thumbs down
Pedro Almodóvar’s latest opus asks vexing question: where’s the cockpit?
When all is said and done, his new movie I’m So Excited is anything but thrilling, a precarious throwback to 1980s slapstick farce.
Over thirty years have elapsed since Spanish filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar made his commercial breakthrough with Pepi, Luci, Bom y otras chicas del montón (1980), his hard-to-beat testimony and oral-visual riff on Madrid’s post-punk era and its decadent debauchery after four decades of iron-fist régime.
When Almodóvar’s first indie efforts traversed the Atlantic and showed in BA at the Centro Cultural Iberoamericano on Florida Street, cinephiles packed the small auditorium because it was the one and only chance to watch the work of the latest enfant térrible to emerge from Spain after... Luis Buñuel? Although Almodóvar’s brand of pop artifacts were quite distant from the seemingly august (utterly cynical, in fact) Buñuel of El ángel exterminador (1962), Belle de jour (1967), or Tristana (1970), the young Almodóvar, still commercially unreleased in Argentina, had forged an intriguing, exciting reputation as the one director who could claim the right to be labelled cinema’s ultra-new provocateur.
Pepi, Luci, Bom... and Entre tinieblas (1983), minor blemishes and all, blew fresh air into an otherwise stagnant film scene. After all, democracy had been restored in Argentina almost at the same time as Almodóvar’s disturbing, outrageous and incensing type of cinema emerged in Spain. Almodóvar possessed the right type of bombastic narrative and politically-charged content Argentines were so much in need of.
As Almodóvar continued his unstoppable ascent to film stardom, crowned by the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film (Todo sobre mi madre, 1999), audiences rightly came to expect something uniquely Almodovarian with every new outing, and every time the director delivered thanks to his unflailing capacity for reinvention.
Starting with the movie poster itself — a delicious pop confectionery item — Almodóvar’s new film Los amantes pasajeros (I’m So Excited, 2013) harks back, in principle, to the Pepi... provocative comedy days and promises a wealth of intoxicating fun like only Almodóvar is able to serve fresh.
Los amantes pasajeros, however, makes good on none of these promises, rehashing old, formulaic gags to no effect and instilling the movie with a stale flavour, as if Almodovariana had suddenly gone sour. On a strictly semantic basis, Los amantes pasajeros is a reference to the two heads in the noun phrase: the amantes (lovers) alludes to brief, secretive sexual encounters; and pasajeros (passengers) stands for travellers but is also an adjective applicable to everything fleeting and short-lived in life. While Almodóvar’s previous opus, La piel que habito (The Skin I Live In, 2011) divided audiences and critics who either loved it unconditionally or hated it viscerally for its ludicrous take on the dark side of human nature, Los amantes pasajeros looks, at first, like a welcome return to side-splitting spoof with multiple layers of sociopolitical undertone.
Los amantes pasajeros is set on a plane bound for Mexico City, and propelling the action forward is a mechanical failure that forces an emergency landing — but there is no runway available near La Mancha, and the pilots and crew stage a simulacrum of normalcy. The economy class passengers are all sedated into profound sleep, and business flyers are treated to a farcical festival with pranks by the flight attendants: top that with alcohol, furious sex encounters and drugs, and the combination proves explosive. Whether in the cockpit or any of the two passenger compartments, it is easy to read, in this Almodóvar riff, that the aircraft stands, metaphorically, for the whole of a society immersed in a profound crisis, and that crawling your way into the wrong compartment is tantamount to murder... or the time of your life.
While Almodóvar is perfectly capable of turning a trite story into delicious, insightful social commentary, this is not the case with the flawed and disappointing Los amantes pasajeros. As is the case in factory assembly lines, Los amantes pasajeros too seems to have been built mechanically, laying the groundwork and setting the stage for what’s to come. Which, by the way, is the one and only scene with Antonio Banderas and Penélope Cruz as two goofy airport workers. It’s the crisis, then, which has, in real life, affected the financial side of Almodóvar’s new movie — both Banderas and Cruz, as the true international stars they have become, are way too expensive for a small-budget romp. In keeping with the title, Los amantes pasajeros marks Banderas’ and Cruz’s seventh and fifth collaboration, respectively, with Almodóvar, in ensemble cast or as leading man or lady. This time, however, Almodóvar has to make do — belittling as the comment may sound — with Javier Cámara, Carlos Areces, Lola Dueñas, Cecilia Roth, Paz Vega and others.
True, at some point Javier Cámara (Hable con ella, La mala educación) and Cecilia Roth (Todo sobre mi madre) played the leads in Almodóvar’s biggest draws, but Los amantes pasajeros finds them trapped in the suffocating ambience of a plane bound for nowhere and in disposable roles that repeat, to the point of fastidiousness, the type of archetypal characters lesser actors forcibly play. Cámara plays Joserra, a gay flight attendant (all three flight attendants are, isn’t this another clichéd assumption?) who joins the ranks of alcohol-fuelled pranksters some goofie farcical movies brim with. Roth, otherwise brilliant (like in her moving turn as the mother who suffers an irreparable loss in the masterful Todo sobre mi madre) can get no more stupid and bitchy as Norma Boss, an unscrupulous, high-flying madame.
When it comes to topicality and temporality, Los amantes pasajeros may be related not only to Spain’s socioeconomic crisis, but also to a technology-obsessed world in which anyone may be the subject of a WikiLeaks-type security-hole exposé prompted by “cybercriminals” like Edward Snowden. In Los amantes pasajeros, indeed, all hell breaks loose when, due to a technological glitch, everyone on the plane learns that the aircraft is flying in circles, that no runway is available, that they — factically and metaphorically — are going nowhere.
Just like Los amantes pasajeros, the movie, if you’ll pardon the analogy.
