An ensemble comedy that takes place mostly on a plane, Pedro Almodovar's 19th feature-length effort "I'm So Excited" ("Los Amantes Pasajeros" which translates more literally into "The Passenger's Love"), looks as if it's going to harken back to his early days of camp, kitsch and outrageous humor. At any rate, it definitely appears that it's going to pop with the director's usual riot of color. While the film was originally said to be set against a plane accident with various characters fearing for the lives and confessing their inner secrets, few other details have been provided since.
Almodovar's production company El Deseo has revealed some first look photos from the film, including set pictures, along with a diary-like entry about the film from the director himself that fleshes out some of the comedy's details, including the claustrophic nature of shooting in one location.
Almodovar writes (though mind the somewhat wonky Google translation): The "passengers love" tells the story of a group of people trapped in a single set, and disconnected from the outside. Writing the script began as a whim and ended up comedian as an ensemble comedy, moral, oral and unreal, or unrealistic. I tried to leave reality aside, but sometimes reality is strained without you noticing. I have had no conscious film reference during pregnancy, is more present theater, even television, and my claustrophobia, than film. I am of such directors to which television influences them but not see it. I am appalled and yet I love the new narrative television. In any case, the word is the main character. I have always confessed that my vocation was to become a great novelist, and I exercised while waiting for when the time came I wrote a lot of scripts, but over time I've become a great novelist, not even a novelist, I guess in recent scripts is where most perceived nostalgia for fictional narrative, but I wrote "Lovers passengers" from another nostalgia, theater. My films owe much to the theater, are filled with scenes of two monologues indisimulados sometimes. In this [film] there are more characters than usual but less space than ever.There have been several films about a group trapped, you can not leave where you are, (and the TV is full of competition and survival claustrophobic) from Luis Bunuel's "The Exterminating Angel," to "Buried" by Rodrigo Cortez where everything happens in the smallest space imaginable, a coffin.
The article also reveals that cinematographer Jose Luis Alcaine ("Volver," "The Skin I Live In") will once again lens the picture making it his sixth collaboration with the Spanish auteur. While Almodovar's last few pictures have been rather widely-heralded pictures thanks to international stars like Penélope Cruz and Antonio Banderas, "I'm So Excited" will be more of a Spanish homegrown effort and argubably could be described as a greatest hits package of some of Almodovar's greatest Spanish character actors.
The film stars Javier Cámara ("Talk to Her") Cecilia Roth ("All About My Mother"), Lola Dueñas ("Volver"), Raul Arévalo, Carlos Areces, Antonio de la Torre, Hugo Silva, Willy Toledo, Miguel Ángel Silvestre ("Volver"), Blanca Suárez ("The Skin I Live In"), José Luis Torrijo, José María Yazpik, Laya Martí and it will contain special collaborations from Penélope Cruz, Antonio Banderas and Paz Vega. Sony Pictures Classics has slated the picture for a summer 2013 release, and we assume Almodóvar will premiere the film at Cannes before that. [via Flix]
