Almodóvar’s first foray into pure comedy for a long long time, I’m So Excited! is pure camp farce. A plane full of uptight passengers (which, please take note, in one shot look uncannily like a cinema audience!) find themselves stranded in the air after their landing gear jams, exposing the cracks and flaws in their characters as a team of metrosexual flight crew do their best to alleviate the tension and keep things calm while they find somewhere safe to attempt a crash landing.
Almodóvar returns to his transgressive roots of Pepe Luci and Bom with this bawdy lewd and typically beautifully made chamber piece. The film positively revels in presenting a celebration of human sexuality in all its idiosyncratic glory.
Adding into its heady mix, drug and alcohol addiction, a hitman, a financial fraudster, a father en-route to reunite with his dominatrix daughter, and a forty year old virgin seizing the chance to have sex for the first time with a sleeping passenger, we’re in zany territory.
After the darkness of The Skin I Live In this feels like Almodóvar coming up for air and his joyful playfulness is infectious. A pure delight from possibly World Cinema’s most financially and critically successful director working today. Oh, and he even manages to find cameos for long-time collaborators Penélope Cruz and Antonio Banderas in a very funny opening scene…