Daily Archives: Saturday, September 12, 2015

  • I’m So Excited!

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Los amantes pasajeros

    Pedro Almodóvar (2013)

    Pedro Almodóvar’s latest has attracted some bad press – I can’t help thinking the English language title has made matters worse.  It’s one thing to make a comedy that includes three extravagantly gay flight attendants miming and grinding to the Pointer Sisters’ dance standard; another to suggest by the choice of title that this is the heart of the movie.   Los amantes pasajeros is admittedly difficult to translate:  ‘Lovers on a Plane’ has a different kind of unhelpful connotation and, in any case, doesn’t get the double sense of airborne and transient that’s in the word pasajeros – nor does ‘Fleeting Lovers’ or ‘Fugitive Lovers’.  Perhaps ‘Lovers on the Fly’?  Sight and Sound, rather surprisingly, thought well of the film:  their reviewer suggested that it wasn’t a comedy at all but a deeply serious metaphor for the failing Spanish economy.  The action on the seemingly doomed plane – a crucial piece of landing gear is missing because the two airport workers responsible for checking it were, at the time, debating whether one of them had got the other pregnant – is concentrated on the business class passengers.  Those travelling in economy class are unconscious, drugged while the pilots try to work out how to get the plane to land.   In fact, the landing gear of I’m So Excited! is in good shape, even though the film is underpowered for most of its running time.  The start is weak and the film doesn’t begin to catch fire until Almodóvar moves outside the plane to a woman’s attempts to commit suicide by jumping from a viaduct.   She is connected to one of the plane passengers but the sudden change of focus reminded me of a seemingly random development in an earlier, stronger Almodóvar film which then took the story in an interesting new direction.  (I still can’t bring to mind which film this was.)  In I’m So Excited! the action in the new landscape soon loses momentum, however:  its purpose is merely to tie in to the main story up in the air.

    To be honest, I was disappointed that the camp flight attendants – Javier Cámara, Carlos Areces and Raúl Arévalo – had only the one number, especially as they tell the bemused passengers that the Pointer Sisters is only a part of their repertoire.  Their performance of ‘I’m So Excited!’ is exuberantly terrific. Arévalo is particularly good:  as Ulloa, the most sexually voracious character on board, he suggests a pent-up energy whenever he appears and its expression in the dance is dazzling.   (Arévalo has a slight resemblance to Sean Penn – not particularly to Sean Penn as Harvey Milk.  Carlos Areces looks like a not too distant relation of Peter Kay.)  The flight attendants’ bit draws attention to the fact that much of I’m So Excited! seems to be just that – bits.   I’m not sure that Almodóvar himself was sure he had enough material here to sustain a feature.  The crew’s various sexual orientations and permutations are an amusing idea; so are the airport workers (cameos from Antonio Banderas and Penelope Cruz) with other things on their minds.  The vibrant opening titles, one of the most reliable elements in Almodóvar’s work, are elating.   The details of Fajas (Areces)’s multi-faith portable shrine are lovely and funny.  But there’s no real traction between any of these things and the characters.

    The second half of the film gets more interesting.  The ubiquitous, drug-fuelled lovemaking, among people who think they haven’t got much time left, is touching as well as amusing.  What is the point of doing anything else?   (This works as an insight into human existence generally as much as into the Spanish economic crisis specifically.)   The deserted airport and the noises of the plane on its final descent are an alarming combination:  they keep you guessing as to whether this will be a happy landing.  In the end, everybody leaves the aircraft unscathed:  this may be partly a reflection of Almodóvar’s essentially benign attitude towards the people in his movies but it also makes sense if the plane journey is a metaphor:  eventually, things have to continue in the world that the journey represented.  That nearly every male character turns out to be at least bisexual is a very familiar gay fantasy – but I liked how thoroughly Almodóvar realised it, culminating in what’s confirmed after the emergency landing.

    Even if the characters take some time to make an impression, the cast is impeccable:  it also includes Antonio de la Torre (the captain), Hugo Silva (the co-pilot), Lola Dueñas (a clairvoyant virgin), Cecilia Roth (a celebrity dominatrix), José Luis Torrijo (a businessman and one of the dominatrix’s clients), José Maria Yazpik (a hitman), Guillermo Toledo (a philandering actor), Miguel Angel Silvestre (a bridegroom) and Laya Marti (his bride).  Something has been lost in recent Almodóvar films, in which serious and comic elements haven’t been satisfyingly blent.  Some of the jokes in I’m So Excited! are so bad you assume they’re deliberately bad but I wasn’t sure that all the ropy dialogue was meant to be ropy.  Even so, if this movie were the work of a new director it would be a sensation.  It’s fair enough for critics to express disappointment with a film-maker of Almodóvar’s reputation but unfair to ignore the fact that this minor piece is still better than most of the new films around.

    7 May 2013

  • Le Donk & Scor-Zay-Zee

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Shane Meadows (2009)

    Shane Meadows, who shot this film in five days, shows everyone else what it’s possible to do with a mockumentary.   Le Donk is a rock roadie and Scor-zay-zee, a young rap artist, is his latest discovery.  Le Donk, who’s been around without getting anywhere, is looking to change the habits of a lifetime by succeeding – in getting Scor-zay-zee his big break at an Arctic Monkeys concert in Manchester.  (The action moves there, over the course of the picture, from Meadows’s usual territory in the East Midlands.)  Le Donk, played by Paddy Considine, is a fictional character – he first appeared in shorts made by Meadows about ten years ago.  Scor-zay-zee, aka Dean Palinczuk, is a real person, an up-and-coming (white) rapper in Nottingham.  If you didn’t recognise Considine and Olivia Colman (as Le Donk’s ex-partner Olivia) you’d never guess who was playing a character and who himself/herself.  If you do recognise them, you realise how good they are, which makes this brilliant film even better.

    The fusion of real and pretend is so rich:  Meadows and Considine get across, for example, Le Donk’s feelings both for the rituals of roadie life and of feeling excluded from it (a particular occupational hazard for a roadie who can put backs up like this one).  There are minor pleasures in spoof details, like the ludicrously precise timings to give us our bearings (the first sequence is introduced as ‘Thursday 9:48 am’).   But physically putting himself in the picture – we see him filming and arguing the toss with Le Donk– enables Meadows to go beyond simple parody and to pick up on what you always suspect are the fraudulent qualities of fly-on-the-wall documentaries that don’t acknowledge the presence of the fly.  When Le Donk first goes back to see Olivia, heavily pregnant with their child but now living happily with a new partner, things turn unpleasant.   Le Donk suggests (to Meadows) that he ‘re-make’ a cup of tea and that Olivia and he then have another crack at the conversation that follows this act of goodwill.

    The credits describe the piece as ‘devised’ rather than written by Meadows and Considine.  The freshness of the dialogue certainly makes it sound improvised but the film is very cleverly constructed.  Le Donk’s appetite for ingratiating self-promotion is instinctive.  He’s also canny enough to realise how that instinct can converge with making things happen that will show him in a better light and liven up the documentary being made about him.  Late on the night before the Arctic Monkeys gig at which Scor-zay-zee has been given a short opening spot, Le Donk gets a call on his mobile that Olivia has gone into labour.  It seems like bad timing but he soon works things out.  He confesses to being a selfish, untalented bastard and tells Scor-zay-zee to go ahead without him.  Le Donk speeds down the motorway with the film crew in the back of his camper to see Olivia and their newborn (played by Olivia Colman’s real-life baby).  He mentions the gig to her – he’d like to be there but he knows his duty as an ex and father.  She’s more than happy (as he expected) to give him his marching orders so that he’s able to get back to Manchester for the big day.   He’s done the right thing and got what he wanted.  So too has the Shane-Meadows-within-the-film (and the real Shane Meadows, for that matter).

    Paddy Considine, who created Le Donk originally, is really wonderful.  Completely engaged with the character, he’s also beautifully candid about what an egocentric, mouthy blowhard Le Donk is – and clear too that Le Donk sees himself as much more sinned against than sinning.  Considine makes the selfishness charismatic: at the start, Meadows tells Le Donk he wants to make a film about him because he’s an interesting person and, for all his faults, he is interesting.  Considine also shows you why most women can’t stand Le Donk but how the odd one finds him charming.   Although Le Donk boasts that his protégé has already lost several stone under his tutelage, Dean Palinczuk is obese going on spherical.   Early on, he also suggests someone with learning difficulties and, since Le Donk doesn’t let him get a word in edgeways, it takes some time to see him differently.   Once Scor-zay-zee starts rapping, it’s great that he’s so good.   Olivia Colman’s sweet-natured warmth is perfect – and not just because it’s right for a new mother.  Olivia’s maternal capacity goes some way to making you believe how she got hooked up in the first place with the infantile chauvinist Le Donk – whom she addresses a couple of times by his real name, Nicholas.  (Like an unglamorous Pierrot le fou, he tells her not to call him that.)  Colman effortlessly combines naturalism and wit – so do Seamus O’Neill, as Le Donk’s nervously unkempt lodger, and Richard Graham (Meadows’s editor on Somers Town), as Olivia’s new partner.

    I laughed more during the 70 minutes of this film than in all the new pictures I’ve seen over the last year put together – and the funny moments are always enhanced by being so thoroughly rooted in truthfulness.  A couple of examples:  the sequence in which Scor-zay-zee explains his (real-life) conversion to Islam and starts chanting and Le Donk, bored by what he’s hearing and annoyed that the camera’s not on him, suggests to Meadows it’s time to cut; and the brilliant conversation between the pair in the back of the camper, on the eve of their big day.  Man of the world Le Donk recounts, in a tone of reverent self-regard, one of the highlights of his amorous career – an evening at a Berni Inn that led to a night of passion.  Scor-zay-zee – presumably as part of a beauty treatment to ensure he looks his best for tomorrow – wears, instead of the baseball cap that’s rarely left his head until now, a towel-turban.  Resembling a lobotomised fortune-teller, he makes exquisitely minimal responses until the moment when he strings enough words together to ask a reasonable but crude question and inadvertently, and to Le Donk’s intense annoyance, breaks the romantic spell.

    When the Arctic Monkeys – as themselves – agree to give Scor-zay-zee his spot in the show, Le Donk is stunned.  A large part of it is envy but there’s an element of simple incredulity too – the limelight is a place Le Donk has never been before.  He’s therefore doubly determined not to miss out on the moment.  When the pair performs to the huge open-air audience for the Monkeys (Le Donk calls them the Arctical Monkeys), Considine stays in character – but your awareness that it’s the actor, as well as Le Donk, who’s excited and having the time of his life on stage makes it all the more elating to watch.  He and Dean Palinczuk are a great double act and the choice of names in Le Donk’s accompaniment to Scor-zay-zee’s rap is an inspired mixture of the random and the locally poignant:  ‘Calm down, Deirdre Barlow … calm down, Stephen Hawking … calm down, Harold Shipman …’

    15 October 2009

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