by Douglas Messerli
Pedro Almodóvar (writer 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; while
Bruna (Lola Dueñas) is seeking acknowledgement and fame for her skills as a
clairvoyant; and the new 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.
Nonetheless, it seems pointless to “trash” the movie as did the usually
fine and sympathetic critic Manhola Dargis, writing in The New York Times: “the journey generally drags because the
spinning characters, with their tired jokes and familiar melodramas, soon feel
so mechanical, like the automated parts in an Almodóvar machine”; or, even
worse, Michael O’Sullivan’s ungenerous comments in The Washington Post: "I’m
So Excited misfires on so many levels—tiresome plot; crude, juvenile humor;
broad, stagy acting and absurd characters; claustrophobic setting; and dull art
direction—that it’s hard to imagine it was all accidental.”

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 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 (August 2013).
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