With Falling Star [+leggi anche:
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intervista: Luis Miñarro ­
scheda film] and Love Me Not [+leggi anche:
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intervista: Lluís Miñarro
scheda film], Catalonian director Lluís Miñarro’s two previous features, it has become clear that he is fascinated by a profusion of historical, intellectual, artistic and visual references, which marks him out as an eclectic, anti-canonical, meta-narrative auteur. In Emergency Exit, which has just world-premiered in the experimental and risk-taking Rebels with a Cause section of the Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival, Miñarro pursues that passion, but within a minimalist, symbolic and even more stylised, theatre-like setting, complete with unity of time and place for the action, whether it unfolds in the imagination or in physical reality. Well-known actors play themselves, while others take on role archetypes in a colourful post-modern pastiche that, when it isn’t quite funny enough – and sadly, that’s the case here in some episodes – can feel somewhat dated.

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A retro, smooth-edged bus has gathered together all manner of extravagant beings: Myriam Mézières and Arielle Dombasle, two powdered, elegant French ladies who laugh off life’s little things; Marisa Paredes as herself (in her final performance), alongside her husband, bickering over trivial matters; director Naomi Kawase as a solitary anthropologist, gaze lost on the road; Catalonian cult singer-songwriter and actor Albert Pla as a withdrawn screenwriter, occasionally distracted by the gynaecologist played by Emma Suárez; Aida Folch as a mother traumatised by repressed incest; and Oriol Pla as a boorish, horny priest, tempted by the seductive, youthful Eros of Jhonattan Burjack, who thrusts his semi-naked, exuberant body right under the noses of all the passengers, reminding them of their unfulfilled sexual desires. This odd company travels with no known destination, and only the children dare to ask where they are headed, although they never get an answer. Absurd or unfiltered dialogues serve as their connective tissue, but despite the instant curiosity they spark, little of their content sticks in the memory. Like a succession of anecdotal sketches strung together through a heavily stylised mise-en-scène – pink skies, contrasting colours, window views like a photo mural – it stimulates the senses and grazes the surface of existential reflection, but doesn’t dare to dig deeper, as if fearing the abyss of nothingness towards which we are inevitably travelling... and as if it truly feared probing its own metaphor.

The parade of so many familiar faces, as in a mini Prêt-à-porter by Robert Altman, is redolent of a series of tributes, but for all the nods to the spirit of Remedios Varo and Cortázar mentioned in the director’s intent and in the synopsis, Emergency Exit harks back to the brash aesthetics of early Almodóvar and to the weak script of his later I’m So Excited! [+leggi anche:
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scheda film]. Only here, neither are the lovers truly lovers (they remain more in the realm of the daydream), nor is the comedy genuinely hilarious. In the end, we’re left with chewing gum (for the eyes) which, as we know, awakens the receptors but soon loses its flavour.

Emergency Exit is a Spanish production by Lluís Miñarro Producciones, co-produced with El Viaje Films.