The plane is in the air, and the coach passengers have been sedated for the duration of the flight. This is a wacky Pedro Almodóvar touch—especially the way the flight crew accepts this as standard procedure—and it fits the movie’s overall feeling of not quite existing within the known universe. (Actually, putting passengers to sleep during a long flight is not a terrible idea, even if the plane isn’t experiencing mechanical difficulties.) But this trip has gone wrong. The flight crew is panicked over the stuck landing gear and worried about keeping the first-class passengers distracted. On both points, there’s a great deal of tequila involved.
I’m So Excited has been touted as a return to Almodóvar’s zany early work such as Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, and in some ways that’s true. It’s crammed with explicit sex jokes, suggested sex acts, and a brazen attitude toward hedonism at 30,000 feet. The members of the crew are tangled in illicit relationships; the conscious passengers are a roster of eccentrics and rogues. We lack only a guitar-playing nun and a teen needing a kidney transplant.