I'm So Excited

Pedro Almodovar’s new frolic, I’m So Excited, is more accurately titled in its original Spanish, Passengers Lovers. It’s a cocktail with three heady genre ingredients.

The first is the disaster film, subspecies Airplane. Ground crew lovers Antonio Banderas and Penelope Cruz unwittingly cause a luggage cart accident which leads to the locking of the landing gear on an international flight. The plane circles above Toledo (the Spanish one) before finding a runway for an emergency landing. Typically, the terror leads to the passengers and crew finding a new level of self-awareness and honesty. 

The second is the Ship of Fools genre, where the cross-section of society meet and endure along the Road of Life. Specifically Almodovar’s characters are a funhouse reflection of the characters in John Ford’s Stagecoach (1939). Almodovar like Ford liked to deploy the same troupe of actors and both are similarly (?) concerned with the nature of manhood. 

Mr Mas is the supposedly respectable banker fleeing his defrauding of the new airport at La Mancha. Norma, a famous porn star and dominatrix, echoes the Claire Trevor whore. As the latter settles into marriage to The Ringo Kid (Johnny Wayne), Norma walks off with the securities advisor who is actually the hitman one of Norma’s clients’ wives hired to kill her. With her profession’s obligatory heart of gold Norma arranges Mas’s reunion with his runaway dominatrix daughter and reveals that she really hasn’t made those graphic videos to blackmail her highest profile clients. To see his daughter again Mas will face the police. Ford’s whiskey drummer is here the less meek newlywed who pulls a wealth of mescaline from his -- southern state. To enliven things Almodovar adds Bruna, a mature virgin with ESP, and Ricardo, an actor whose public phone calls involve his most recent ex, the suicidal Alba, and Ruthie, her wiser predecessor. Determined to fulfill her vision of losing her virginity, Bruna rapes a comatose young man in Economy, Nasser, with whom she goes off at the end.

The third element is the swizzle stick Almodovar, whose camp black comedy inspires every scene. The flight crew in Business class and cockpit are in varying degrees of openness gay. The stewards’ exuberant highlight is a Berkeleyan dance and mime to the Poynter Sisters, intended to distract the passengers from their danger. The “Peninsula” airlline points to the film’s camp phallicism. (On the wing the logo shrinks to Pe, Cruz’s nickname, recalling the start of the problem.)The pilots turn on “the crossfeed selector” while discussing the implications of their fellatio.

The main action takes place in Business because the Economy passengers and stewardesses have all been doped unconscious. The result is an exposure of corruption and hypocrisy at the upper end of the social ladder, properly to discomfit the affluent.  The plane is named Chavela Blanca, which may connote a white knight like Cervantes’s dreamer, as it miraculously lands at -- the abandoned, spectral La Mancha.

Almodovar begins with the statement that his film is pure fantasy. But like Dali’s surrealism, it begins with meticulously detailed images of the material preparation for takeoff. A hypnotic spiraling axle launches the main business. The film ends with a dream-like realism in its movement through the ghost airport, where the empty floors shimmer like a desert at noon. The line of unused trolleys recall the pre-title image of cartoon suitcases moving along without people. 

If the narrative is a fantasy then it’s Almodovar’s dream of a society in which people can live out their personal ecstasies -- whether in drugs, sexuality or that dangerous taboo, open, honest conversation -- without fear or furtiveness. At the end the characters float down into a field of white foam -- a cloudy heaven on tarmac -- and find their happiness, however unconventional. The pilot learns his wife and mistress know of and accept his affair with his male steward. Odd couples pair off. Ruthie has the character not to resume her affair with Ricardo. Like Ford, Almodovar wants to save his outcasts from “the blessings of civilization.”