Mécaniques célestes
Venezuela / France / Belgium,
1994, 86 min
Shown in 1996
CREDITS
- dir
-
Fina Torres
- prod
-
Fina Torres, Naoyuki Kibé, Oscar Benedetti
- scr
-
Fina Torres, Delacorta, Blanca Stepponi
- cam
-
Ricardo Aronovich
- editor
-
Christiane Lack, Catherine Trouillet
- cast
-
Ariadna Gil, Arielle Dombasle, Evelyne Didi, Alma Rosa Castellanos
-
COMMENTS
Fina Torres in person.
Fanciful footwork turns the Cinderella story into an immigrant fairy tale as Venezuela-born director Fina Torres applies her cinematic vision to her adopted city of Paris. In the Torres version, a young girl can still find happiness in all the wrong places, if she relies on the kindness of strangers. Ana is a wanna-be opera star who leaves her life in Caracas to seek fame in Paris. She follows her muse! Unfortunately, she quickly encounters the evil stepsister to end them all, Celeste, a diabolic video artist who dedicates herself to blocking Ana’s progress and seizing any valuable fame. Knowingly narcissistic music videos with the evil Celeste become a hilarious counterpoint to the sweet Umbrellas of Cherbourg visions dreamed up by the innocent Ana. Luckily, Ana’s friends come to the rescue: a gay waiter, a soon-to-be-lesbian psychiatrist and a Caribbean santero, whose potions supply key plot points when all else fails. Torres came to international attention when her debut feature, Oriana, won the Caméra d’or at Cannes in 1985. Here she shifts gears to create a sunny, quintessentially French, midsummer night’s dream of a film in which amour and disillusion change places as the plot veers from romantic comedy to slapstick, singing all the while.
—B. Ruby Rich, Sundance Film Festival
FACTOID #10
In 1960, Federico Fellini’s La Dolce Vita, which has inspired many women to jump into fountains, was pulled from the San Francisco International Film Festival’s program by the distributor and replaced with Roberto Rossellini’s Night over Rome.
