Crazy in love
If yesterday was feelgood day, filmwise, today has been crazy-venting-female-day.
In Schwesterherz (Twisted Sister), Heike Makatsch plays Anna, a high rolling music industry drone hitting burn out. While her life appears to be highly successful, she in fact hates her job and everything about her life, projecting her self loathing onto all around her: her mother, her feckless boyfriend and the younger, innocent sister Marie (Anna Maria Muhe, the spitting image of Hayden Panettiere, the cheerleader in Heroes) who she’s treating to a holiday.
Over the space of a couple of days, the power balance between them shifts as Marie’s wide-eyed admiration turns to pity for her damaged older sister who’s losing her grip on her career and her relationship.
It builds to a devastating confrontation and a superb fade-to-black transition that captures Anna’s dislocated state in the most simple but powerful way.
On a much lighter note, Julie Delpy’s comedy, Two Days in Paris, also features a lead female who may well be utterly crazy, but this time it’s all played for laughs. And they never stop coming.
There’s a great moment when Adam Goldberg protests that he’s not in some French farce, when everyone watching this film knows he is.
He’s the hapless American boyfriend being dragged around Paris by his French girlfriend, never quite knowing what everyone’s talking about, why she’s always getting into violent arguments with strangers, and slowly realising that she may have slept with half the city’s male population.
Goldberg and Delpy riff off each other brilliantly and there’s a real feeling of two comedians improvising expertly with each other and the array of oddballs they encounter, the oddest of whom are Marion’s parents (played by Delpy’s real life actor parents).
It’s a super sharp screwball that isn’t afraid to get serious now and then, although you’re never far away from a laugh out loud moment.
A great film to end this festival on.
