MOVIE SYNOPSIS: A technical failure has endangered the lives of the people on board Peninsula Flight 2549. The pilots are striving, along with their colleagues in the Control Center, to find a solution. The flight attendants and the chief steward are atypical, baroque characters who, in the face of danger, try to forget their own personal problems and devote themselves body and soul to the task of making the flight as enjoyable as possible for the passengers, while they wait for a solution. Life in the clouds is as complicated as it is at ground level, and for the same reasons, which could be summarized in two: sex and death.
So feeling a bit frazzled?
Has the weight of responsibility pressing down upon you til you’re an existential pancake on the road of life?
I hear ya.
And more importantly, Pedro Almodovar, the world renowned Spanish director of films such as Broken Embraces (2009), Talk To Her (2002) and All About My Mother (1999) hears you.
Loud and clear.
He know, oh he knows, you need some candy-coated, fairy-floss covered, glitter-sprinkled ermine-trimmed silliness and all with an upbeat disco soundtrack … and behold he has delivered!
His new film, Los Amantes Pasajeros or I’m So Excited, (it literally translates as “the fleeting lovers” or “the passenger lovers”) about some highly unorthodox flight attendants and their distinctly non-regulation approach to dealing with passengers in a crisis situation, and which stars Penelope Cruz, Antonio Banderas, Paz Vega, Blanca Suarez, Cecilia Roth, Javier Camara among others, is in his words “a very light, light comedy”. (cineuropa.org)
Lest you wonder what the man who brought us searingly dramatic looks at the human condition such as Matador (1986) and The Skin I Live In (2011) is up to playing in some lightweight fields, Almodovar started off his career with comedies in the 1980s and many of his films have contained melodrama, absurdity or irreverent humour to some degree.
And he is also more than happy to make use of music and pop culture references in his films.
It seems like I’m So Excited is making liberal use of all these ingredients in a gloriously silly homage of sorts to the aviation disaster movies of the 1970s.
So in preparation for the film’s landing at your local cinema in June this year, please ensure your sense of humour is not in the “locked and uptight position” and that you have your ability to laugh firmly fastened in fall-on-the-floor-clutching-your-sides-laughing mode.
And get ready to take off – or emergency land more appropriately given the film’s plot – into all manner of disco-soundtracked aerial silliness.