Los amantes pasajeros: An Update on Almodóvar’s Trans-Border Cinema

Marvin D'Lugo

doi:10.22475/rebeca.v4n1.340

Abstract

Los amantes pasajeros (2013) comes at a difficult moment in Almodóvar’s career, when his cinema appears disengaged from his local Spanish audience and when critics and viewers abroad have responded tepidly to his more recent films. In an effort to repair these audience links, the film mobilizes a dense textual layering and allusions that incorporate into a contemporary comedy Spanish nostalgic tropes from Almodóvar’s past, almost as if the authorial Almodóvar were spoofing an Almodóvar comedy. Characters and dialogue evoke the effervescent years of sexual freedom of the early post-Franco transition, the very years of the filmmaker’s meteoric rise to celebrity. Along with this local address, one of the film’s central aesthetic and cultural premises is the borderless contiguity between Spain and Mexico, the latter serving as a synecdoche for Latin America. Through intertextual associations, the film emphasizes the notion of Almodóvar’s cinema as a trans-border Hispanic phenomenon. It is, in fact, this deterritorialized pan-Latino audience to which his production company, El Deseo and Almodóvar have addressed their attention over the past decade. Los amantes pasajeros thus represents a crucial but illuminating self-referential pause in Almodóvar’s development, a film that underscores the return of his cinema to his Spanish roots in an immediately recognizable way, and which also reminds audiences of the ways his films have moved from their origin as a local Spanish phenomenon to an authentic transnational, trans- border object.

Highlights

Alienated Memories In March of 2013, on the occasion of the domestic release of Los amantes pasajeros/I’m So Excited! (2013), Pedro Almodóvar penned a commentary for the Sunday supplement of the Spanish conservative newspaper, La Razón, titled “La comedia según Almodóvar.”
Los amantes comes at a difficult moment in Almodóvar’s career. He appears to critics in Spain as having become disengaged from his local audience (Martínez 2011: 50) while audiences abroad have responded tepidly to his more recent films
What is clear throughout the recent cycle—and made explicit in Los amantes—is that as an aesthetic strategy the community’s collective memory is measured by the limits of the auteur’s personal history, both public and private

Summary

Alienated Memories

In March of 2013, on the occasion of the domestic release of Los amantes pasajeros/I’m So Excited! (2013), Pedro Almodóvar penned a commentary for the Sunday supplement of the Spanish conservative newspaper, La Razón, titled “La comedia según Almodóvar.” Two months later a slightly modified version of the same article appeared in an English translation in the British film journal Sight and Sound, titled “The Rhythm of Comedy.” While clearly intended to promote his most recent film at home and abroad, their content suggested, as well, an attempt to position the film and himself within the broad contexts of Hollywood screwball comedies, dating back to the 1930s, and, for Spanish audiences in particular, to recall his long-established links to the Spanish black comedies of Luis García Berlanga, Marco Ferreri and Fernando Fernán Gómez of the 1950s and 1960s (Almodóvar 1998: 50-51). Metaphorically invests another body—the corpus of early Almodóvar comedies—as the embodiment of the spirit of the sexual liberation that was one of the public features of the transition into plot and aesthetic design of Los amantes pasajeros We may see this reflexive authorial self-definition, on display throughout Los amantes, but it may be best crystalized near the end of the film when Norma Boss (Cecilia Roth), comfortably seated in the Business-Class cabin of a soon-to-be aborted flight from Madrid to Mexico City, is sipping drug-laced “Agua de Valencia,” and explaining to the cabin crew and fellow passengers how she came to be a high-priced and influential Madame in Madrid in the early 1980s. While following in the pattern of those earlier films, Los amantes involved a slightly different strategy in which Almodóvar’s highly-theatricalized protagonists are employed in the Spanish Mediterranean tradition as a way to talk about social problems with humor (Almodóvar “Rhythm” 2013: 39) They are all consciously engaged in escaping the difficult environment of contemporary Spain and their respective journeys to Mexico are cast self-consciously as a “fuga,” a flight of escape. The narrative will work opaquely to trigger the cinematic memory machine in a variety of culturally different audiences on which the film operates both to play out the local Spanish material and to connect it with international markets

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