Films & Schedules - B

This quirky tale pits a scamming hustler and his wrestler sidekick against the inhabitants of a small Uruguayan town.

A combination of quirky dark drama and deadpan satire plays out in this stylish tale of a washed-up wrestler and a smooth conman in a sleepy village in South America. “Prince” Orsini, an impresario, arrives in a small town with his protégé, a one-time German wrestling champion named Jacob Van Oppen. Orsini’s scheme is to use Jacob’s status to lure locals into duels with him, promising a large cash sum to anybody who can pin him in three minutes. In reality, the matches are fixed to protect Jacob’s reputation—and Orsini’s income. The pair’s plan is threatened when an opponent is too drunk to wrestle, and femme fatale Adriana, eying the non-existent $1,000 prize, offers up her muscular husband as the replacement opponent. Jacob, nursing sore muscles, a nasty cough, and an even nastier alcohol habit, is in trouble. “Brechner’s ambitious debut is something like a retro The Wrestler by way of the Coen brothers.”—Variety.

First Feature Film.

This year’s Uruguayan submission for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar.

110 Minutes    

Interests: New Directors, Oscar Submissions, Narrative Feature, Spanish Language, Latino.

In this retelling of the tale of the wife-killing Bluebeard, Breillat reminds us all that the best fairytales are dark around the edges. The film intercuts between the stories of two pairs of sisters. The first is set in the 1950s and features a young girl who loves torturing her older sister with dramatic readings of the story of Bluebeard. In the second, set during the Renaissance, a young girl becomes engaged to Lord Bluebeard, despite the suspicious disappearances of his previous wives.

Following the death of their father, Anne and Marie-Catherine are cast from boarding school and sent back to their mother. With no money for dowry, younger sister Marie-Catherine agrees to wed the wealthy but notorious aristocrat Lord Bluebeard, whose previous wives have all suspiciously disappeared. Will Marie-Catherine be next? Both surprisingly straightforward and slyly subversive, Breillat’s telling of Charles Perrault’s lurid 18th-century fable teases out the class and gender conflicts present in the original, reminding us that the best fairy tales are tinged with perverse darkness. Using parallel storylines, Breillat intercuts the fairy tale itself with childhood scenes set in a safe, bourgeois home in the 1950s, where a young girl frightens her older sister, and herself, with repeated readings of the titillating Freudian tale.

Selected Filmography: 36 Fillette (87), Romance (99), Fat Girl (00), Sex Is Comedy (02), The Last Mistress (06).

Sponsored by TV5MONDE and with support from the Cultural Services of the French Embassy.

80 Minutes     Digital    

Interests: Narrative Feature, French Language, Literature.