soaring obsessions
by Douglas Messerli
Pedro Almodóvar (screenwriter and
director) Los amantes pasajeros (I’m So Excited) / 2013
Almodóvar’s
tale has absolutely no plot, but consists of conversations among a group of
obsessed passengers (the original title can be understood as either “the
fleeting lovers” or “the passenger lovers,” although I’d like to translate it
is as “loving passengers”) in the business class cabin of an airliner which has
lost its landing gear and is, accordingly, forced to endlessly circle while
authorities seek a safe place for it to land. The economy class passengers have
all be given a muscle relaxant to put them to sleep. The two pilots (Antonio de
la Torre and Hugo Silva) and three business-class stewards (Raúl Arévo, Carlos
Areces, and Javier Cámara) are all gay—even though the co-pilot doesn’t at
first perceive, as the pilot describes him, that he is “a faggot,” and the
pilot, despite his having an affair with one of the stewards, defines himself
as bisexual. The crew’s obsession, predictably, is simply sex. While the
“loving passengers” have other obsessions: the banker Sr. Más (José Lujis
Torrijo) is clearly focused on money; the famed dominatrix, Norma Boss, seeks
power; the movie actor Ricardo Galán is attempting to escape his failed
relationships with two women or, to put it another, he is obsessed with
himself; Bruna (Lola Dueñas) is seeking acknowledgement and fame for her skills
as a psychic; the newly married couple (Laya Martin and Miguel Ángel Silvestre)
are seeking marital bliss, and Infante (José María Yazpik), a self-described
security advisor and hit-man, is seeking out death, even though he’d like to
get out of his business. The movie spends most of its energy revealing the
obsessions and their effects.
In Spain, where
the economy, much like Almodóvar’s airplane, is perpetually circling in order
to find a safe place to end its bumpy journey, this work probably has more
depth. I am sure that, in particular, the dominatrix’s purported files of
clients from the King on down to nearly everyone in government has far more
humorous resonance for the Spanish audience than it does in the US. But, even
then, this is not, in any sense of the imagination, a profound or even complex
work.
True, at moments
Almodóvar’s film sputters as if ready to go into a dive, but by and large, it
flies by as a campy, vamped-up soap-opera in the manner of…well, Almodóvar
himself, channeling someone like the great filmmaker of 1950s melodramas,
Douglas Sirk. At the center of this “slight comedy,” moreover, is an absolutely
charming and delightful drag-like rendition of the Pointer Sister’s energetic
“I’m So Excited” that is performed so hyper-kinetically perfect by the three
stewardi that I laughed through my joyful tears. Their entertainment, along
with the heavily spiked drinks they have just served up, suddenly send almost
every still-awake passenger and crew member into a state of passionate lust,
which reveals that underneath each of their obsessions what they really need is
just to be loved or, at the very least, get fucked. Incidentally, I found the
costumes and art direction to be near-brilliant.
If Almodóvar’s
message is a simple one—that life, in fact, is a kind of circling through space
where all we can do is to admit our failures, to love one another, and help one
another to get through the voyage—it, nonetheless, resonates with a certain
sentimental profoundness that is paralleled in all the character’s final
reconciliations with themselves and one another, a gentle love-fest that few
other motion pictures this year have been able to dish up.
Los Angeles,
July 15, 2013
Reprinted from Nth
Position [England] (August 2013).
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