QUICK AND DIRTY: LIVE FROM TALLINN
Outside a building in the early dawn, a 1969 Pegaso bus suddenly materialises, driven by a man (Ton Gras) whose face is out of shot, but whose arms bear tattoos which realistically render the skeleton underneath. As 14 passengers and a goat arrive to get on board, there begins a long, irrational journey in Lluís Miñarro’s road movie Emergency Exit – a catabatic trip through memory, desire and fantasy before reaching its final destination.
“Do you know where we’re going?”, the Daughter (newcomer Laia Brugarolas) asks her mother the Housewife (Aida Folch), who ignores the question. Later, the Vendor (Gonzalo Cunill) will similarly ask: “do you know where we are?”, to which the Evangelist (Lu Colomina) will reply, “No, do you?”. In a sense, the answer ought to be simple: they are on Tenerife, in the Canary Islands, and indeed at one point they expressly make a stop at the base of Tenerife’s Mt Teide. Yet this journey takes several days and nights – far too long for this relatively small island- and along the way, the landscapes through which they pass, presented in stylised rear projection, represent a surreal selection of locations including woodlands, jungle, rocky deserts, floral paradises, Japanese-style painted backdrops, and even a snowy sierra.
The Priest (Oriol Plà) is also puzzled by that mountain range, commenting: “it looks like the Pyrenees, but they’re far away”. His words will lead, free associatively, to a discussion of the perineum as an erotic zone and biological nexus crucial – as the gynaecologist (Emma Suárez) points out – to childbirth, and also believed by some to be the seat of the soul. Indeed there is much talk of spirits and souls, of heaven and hell. For while these characters might not know where they are, it seems clear that they are – indeed like all of us – in a transitional space on their way from life to death. “Of course the idea was that the characters were dead”, says the filmmaker (Albert Plà) in voiceover, about the piecemeal screenplay of “seemingly absurd ideas” that he is currently compiling and that reflects the very film in which this entire ensemble is appearing. Later a Gomeran will appear at the window of the passing bus and observe, in subtitled whistling: “you all seem to be dead!” (La Gomera is a Spanish island best remembered for their whistling language).
The association of this bus ride with a final journey is embodied by the presence of Marisa Paredes as the actress. As she reminisces about her past, and her work with filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar, Paredes is essentially playing herself, and even looks through actual photos of herself in her glory days with other actors and directors while wondering where the years and the passion have gone – and fantasises cumming one last time with “the cute guy” (Johna Burjack), dressed only in underwear, boots and fur coat, who seems to be the object of everybody’s desire. This was in fact to be Paredes’ final on-screen appearance before her death in December 2024, and is, in a post-credits scene, dedicated to her memory.
“You’ll never see four filmmakers together,” the filmmaker tells the gynaecologist – yet this bus accommodates more than four of them, as Plà himself as the filmmaker, and the actors playing Ascensión (Myriam Mézières), Brigitte (Arielle Dombasle), the Manager (Francesc Orella) and the anthropologist (Naomi Kawase), are all directors in their own rights, here travelling with one another in the same vehicle. For this bardo-like bus is transport for magical realism, bringing different languages and strange bedfellows together, and making fragmentary episodes of their interactions.
The problem, though, is that Emergency Exit never really goes anywhere. When the gynaecologist declares, “how interesting this whole film thing is!”, the filmmaker replies with a self-conscious corrective: “don’t be so sure, ok?”. The rewards of Miñarro’s film, co-written with Àngels Oliva, are less to do with the conventional thrills of plot and exciting enticements of narrative, than with a spiritual journey. This is a constantly mobile yet strangely static movie, beyond our petty politics and appetitive impulses to the place where we all ultimately end up. The result is abstract, metacinematic arthouse fare, and quite possibly the only film ever to have been credited as “blessed by Lama Thubten Wancheng”.
Emergency Exit just premiered in the Rebels with a Cause section of the 29th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival.
