Copyright Variety
Few films at this year’s Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival will play with so many ideas, or are steeped with so many strands of modern culture, than “Emergency Exit,” the third fiction feature as a director of Lluís Miñarro, a producer of Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Palme d’Or winner. Also written by Miñarro, “Emergency Exit” features the final screen performance of Almodóvar star Marisa Paredes. Set on the Canary Island of Tenerife, “Emergency Exit” weighs in as a homage to ‘70s cinema, its Barcelona counter-culture and the films worshipped in that decade that were the makings of Miñarro as a filmmaker. The plot comes across as a road movie version of Luis Buñuel’s “The Exterminating Angel.” 14 disparate characters – an actress, her manager, a closeted priest, two divas, an archeologist, a housewife and an evangelist, among others – board a coach which once in motion they seem unable to leave. They can, however, talk, bicker, succumb to erotic fantasy, doze and dream. “Emergency Exit”also stars Arielle Dombasle and Myriam Mézières, who made their name with Eric Rohmer and Alain Tanner respectively, directors of iconic films in the ‘70s. The film sports a vintage air, including the coach itself. Dombasle, who plays one of the divas, turns up in a ‘60s Chrysler. A heady cocktail “Emergency Exit” personal anecdote, myth – such as Eros incarnate, embodied by Jhonathan Burdock – background shots of a mythologized Tenerife mountain-scape, surrealism, symbolism, Noami Kawase – like Paredes playing a kind of version of herself, and Miñarro’s hallmark playfulness and what he calls stylized kitsch, “Emergency Exit” also features Emma Suárez (“Julieta”) as a nurse), singer-actor Albert Plá as a filmmaker and Aida Folch as a character whom her precociously prescient daughter calls a “sad housewife.” Eddie Saeta, Miñarro’s label, produces with Tenerife’s El Viaje Films, whose “Dance of the Living” bowed at this September’s San Sebastián Festival, directed by El Viaje founder Jose Alayón. Variety first met Miñarro around 1994 at a dinner organized by Catalan Films on a Barcelona terrace overlooking the Mediterranean. He turned up with then Eddie Saeta partner Isabel Coixet, both stylishly dressed and speaking immaculate English. They explained that they were going to make a film in the U.S. At that time many filmmakers in Spain had plans to make a movie in the U.S. Few did. Coixet’s “Things I Never Told You” did come to fruition, however. Starring Lili Taylor and Andrew McCarthy and produced by Miñarro, it launched Coixet’s international career. Down the years, in as storied career, Miñarro has made a habit of associating with the good and great in European arthouse and beyond. He produced auteurs ranging from “The Honor of the Knights,” by Albert Serra, before his reknown, to the innovative and warm-hearted José Luis Guerín (“In The City of Sylvia,” 2007) and Lisandro Alonso’s “supremely accomplished” “Liverpool,” Variety wrote. In late 2008, Miñarro invited Variety to Manoel de Oliveira’s 100th birthday, which the Portuguese legend celebrated distributing cake with awe-inspiring energy on set of his latest film, “Eccentricities of a Blonde Girl,” a Miñarro co-production. He was behind “Still the Water” from Kawase, who plays in “Emergency Exit” – and it’s half accurate – an archeologist who also collects old lullabies, threatened by extinction. Over the last 15 years, however, Miñarro has developed a substantial career as a film director, his first fiction feature, 2014’s “Falling Star,” a critique of Spain’s historical immobilism and “Love Me Not,” released in 2019, a parable about the perversions of war. “Emergency Exit” takes on a broader subject, life itself, its through lines, absurdities, wondrousness and its end. Variety talked to Miñarro as he prepared to travel to Tallinn for the world premiere of “Emergency Exit,” playing Tallinn’s Rebels With a Cause section and also a highlight in the festival’s Catalan Focus. What was the inspiration for ‘Emergency Exit’? One is my own formation. I’m a product, you could say, of the ‘70s, of the Barcelona counterculture, from Lindsay Kemp to The Living Theatre and Julian Beck, who came to Barcelona for many things. There was a kind of anti-Franco underground in Barcelona. At this time, Gabriel García Márquez, Roberto Bolaño, Jorge Edwards and Mario Vargas Llosa also all lived in Barcelona and formed a circle which I was introduced to thanks to Ricardo Muñoz Suay, the co-producer of “Viridiana.” García Márquez and Vargas Llosa were real film buffs. I was lucky enough to know these people, absorbed the spirit of magic realism which I had close to me. For me it was important to rescue this period in “Emergency Exit.” The most immediate reference for the film is Buñuel’s “The Exterminating Angel”? There’s a clear reference, and the film is also a critique of the bourgeoisie. Also, the idea for the film came to me after the shoot of “Love Me Not” in Mexico in 2019, which is when I wrote a first draft. Two anecdotes in the film also came from Mexico. One inspired the salesman who talks with Naomi Kawase. In Oaxaca I met a man selling rusty nails and keys at the door of a market. I asked him if he had actually sold anything and he said, ’No, but this way I can at least say I’m a merchant.’ Also, on the same journey, a girl got onto my bus with little figures of baby Jesus. She gave them to Indigenous women. I asked her if she was giving the away and she said: ‘No, I’ll come back later to claim payment.’ I asked her when she was coming back and she said she had no idea. In “Emergency Exit,·” Paredes, Dombasle, Mezières and Kawase play versions of themselves…. Of course, I also fictionalize. With Naomi Kawase, we became friends after I produced “Still the Water” and I proposed that she acted in the film. The screenplay is written for her. I play off “The Mourning Forest,” which caught my attention when it came out. We made up the idea that the ashes of that film’s lead couldn’t be scattered on Mount Fuji so she takes them to Tenerife’s Teide. It’s true that she’s shooting clips of people singing lullabies. So some themes in the film are true, and others, logically, invented. Shots of the Teide and other mountains have an iconic sense – they’re not shot from the coach.… “Emergency Exit” is inspired by ‘70s cinema. Hitchcock used to use shots filmed in other places and then incorporated in his film’s via back projection. I like that artisanal feel. That ‘70s tone can be seen in the costumes in “Emergency Exit,” with the two divas dressed like Laudurée macarons, one in pale purple and the other in pistachio. The coach is a 1969 Pegasus. You see a Ford Edsel at the beginning of the film. Objects have what’s like a soul, like the funeral sword lilies on the seat or objects passed from one passenger to another. Like the razor-crucifix in “Falling Star,” which a manservant uses to shave his pubic hair, which is then used to shave the King. How do you explain your producing so many celebrated auteurs? Apichatpong Weerasethakul, for example? He was on the jury at Cannes. I was with Simon [Field] and we connected immediately. How oriental philosophy regards life after death has always attracted me. Simon and I were able to board the film and it won the Palme d’Or. “Emergency Exit” talks about death but not as something which is so transcendent as we live in the West, it has a more pantheistic, Asiatic, buddhist vision. And do you see a through-line in the films you’ve directed? Somebody said to me that my films are rather rock ‘n roll. Maybe they’re rock de luxe. They’re always elegant. I’m not interested in a narrative-driven cinema like 90% of the films made today where everything’s logical, everything has to be explained. My films come in from another angle. They work with another sense of space and time. There have style breaks, like in “Falling Star” when the King begins to dance be ause the Queen’s leaving and then you discover it’s a dream. Why? Because I like Jacques Tourneur, Michael Powell and “Black Narcissus.” So my films have a point of kitsch, but a stylised one. Yes, I’d accept that description.
