When I saw Pedro Almodóvar’s All About My Mother, not his first drama but the first one I saw, I kept waiting for the laughs. Almodóvar has since become better known for outré melodramas than zany farces, but the opening title of this one announces frothy fun. It’s “fiction and fantasy and bears no relation to reality.” Yes, it’s comedic, but without the tricky structure of something like Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, the 1988 breakthrough that the director calls his last “pure comedy” before this. Instead, Almodóvar literally tosses a bunch of characters in the air — they’re on a plane bound for Mexico but currently flying over Toledo (the one in Spain, not Ohio) — and watches them until they land.
First-class passengers and third-rate staffers are the characters, the business-class folks having literally been put to sleep along with the stewardesses. (The old-fashioned term seems appropriate for a film set in a wonderful world without the need for modern security.) This leaves a trio of gay male flight attendants, a bisexual pilot, and a tequila-swilling copilot as the guides on a trip with an extremely campy vibe, and yes, the title Pointer Sisters song gets a choreographed, lip-synched performance mid-film. A famous actor and actress, a thieving banker, newlyweds, a forty-ish virgin, and a mysterious guy who looks like Frank Zappa join the fun, which involves legal and illegal substances, a phone (the only one that works) that broadcasts both sides of the conversation, and more.
If this kind of whimsy, definitely bearing no relation to reality, sounds amusing, it probably will be.
IMDb link
viewed 8/1/13 7:00 pm at Ritz East and reviewed 8/1/13
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