Viva Pedro!

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Almodóvar’s Pleasure Cruise

As they’ve matured and deepened over the years, Pedro Almodóvar’s films have also grown darker: within the noirish stylings of Broken Embraces and the quasi-horror of The Skin I Live In, his two most recent offerings, lie some of the blackest recesses of his filmography.

It has led some, not least the director himself, to ask what ever happened to the light-hearted Almodóvar? To all those crazy junkie nuns, desperate housewives and other creations who once made us laugh so much? To all those earlier, funnier ones?

And so we have I’m So Excited, heralded as his first straight-up comedy since Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown 25 years ago. From its 1980s videogame-tinged opening titles, camper-than-camp characters — led by a trio of bitching male flight attendants — and lip-synched interludes, it’s an unashamedly self-conscious attempt to lighten up and relive past glories. But that’s not to say it doesn’t have a serious side — or that it’s so easy to turn back the clock.

The setting is a Peninsula Airlines (tail-fin abbreviation “Pe”) flight to Mexico City where all is not well. A lapse by the ground crew — shown in a prologue featuring Pe herself, Penélope Cruz, and Antonio Banderas hamming it up adopting Andalusian accents in two quick cameos — means the landing gear is unable to open and the plane is now circling the skies above Toledo waiting to make an emergency landing. In economy class, they’ve all been sedated, but up front in business, the threat of imminent death is prompting an outpouring of manic behavior and public confessions.

That camp cabin crew trio, hilariously played by Javier Cámara, Carlos Areces and Raúl Arévalo, are the soul of a movie that seeks to celebrate pleasure in all its forms — mental, chemical, sexual… The actors seemingly instructed to steal every scene from each other (for my money, the lesser-known Areces, star of Alex de la Iglesias’ Sad Trumpet Ballad, wins by a late frisson), the threesome confront their potential demise by dancing, drinking and screwing, paving the way to a mid-air orgy as the passengers, dosed up on their mescaline-spiked Buck’s Fizz, pair up to join the mile-high club. . . read the rest

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Pedro: “I sought to celebrate the sexual”

“Comedy is more fragile than other genres,” he says. “For me as a director it demands a lot more precision than a torrid drama. Above all, I needed a very rigid script because, although it seems that everything is possible and even more so in a comedy as ridiculous and frenzied as this, the reality is that not everything fits.”

At 63, Almodóvar has, without a doubt, made his wildest comedy yet. “I’ve really enjoyed testing the fact that it worked the same as before. I’ve felt just as light-hearted about comedy and humor as 30 years ago. I didn’t have the feeling that time had passed, except for one thing. If I had been younger, I would have left in more things, and now I have been polishing everything, with the obsession of making it shorter, so that it didn’t run over 90 minutes. I didn’t give in to the wishes of the actors, who wanted us to leave everything in. You lose things physically over the years, but I have proved that my ability to improvise and create humor is identical to how it worked in the 80s. It was nice for me to revisit that terrain.”

Sex and death: an explosive cocktail, and even more so in the confines of an airplane. On board we find a virgin who really wants to stop being one; a bride and groom on their wedding night; a gay couple; another who lusts after a man who doesn’t reciprocate his feelings, but imagines sex with him; as well as someone else looking for new sensations. “In the middle of the fear and the uncertainty and the death, I’ve sought to celebrate the physical, the sexual. My intention was: ‘Guys, here, with these bodies, nobody can take our pleasure away from us,’ and so the whole film is a celebration of the erotic, of the senses. It is not a romantic celebration of love, but one of sexual pleasure as one of the greatest gifts that nature has given us.”

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