Out 24 June/Last update

The other new releases of the week are:
Czech Dream, Evil, A Lot Like Love, In My Father’s Den and Kung Fu Hustle

Please see Where/When link for details of venues and times.

Repertory watch/Mosaique festival + Riverside Studios

The answer blows in the wind: Cazales in Le Grand Voyage

Opening briefly as part of the mini festival Mosaique at the French Institute (see links, Alliance Française), Ismaël Ferroukhi's Le Grande Voyage is a road movie that updates the generation-gap dilemma to contemporary Europe where tradition and modernity often clash. It tells the story of Reda (Nicolas Cazales), a young man living in the south of France, who finds himself forced to drive his father to Mecca a few weeks before his college entrance exams. From the start, the journey is difficult. Reda and his father have nothing in common. Conversation is reduced to the strict minimum. Reda wants to experience the trip in his own way but his father demands respect for himself and expects his son to understand the meaning of his pilgrimage. As they drive through different countries and meet various people, Reda and his father observe each other warily, facing the challenge of creating a relationship when communication seems impossible.///
Further west, the Riverside Studios shows the classic screwball comedy Bringing Up Baby, the jewel on the crown of the genre (Sunday 26 June). Still at the Riverside, Richard Linklater's companion films Before Sunrise and Before Sunset show as a double bill. The Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke -starred romantic, existentialist mini-series are as good as they get these days and if you missed the chance to see them the first time round, now is the time (Thursday 30 June).

Out 24 June/Terremolinos 73

Action: Cámara shoots to fame in Terremolinos 73

The influence of Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar on other productions made in his native country is not ready to abate yet, as the new film Torremolinos 73 seem to indicate. The star of the film, Javier Cámara, is also an Almodóvar collaborator (Talk to Her, Bad Education), which makes the link even stronger. But Torremolinos 73, like another recent Spanish comedy, Only Human, is much less demanding stuff than Almodóvar’s films.

Director Pablo Berger takes the audience back to 1970s Spain, when it was under the repressive grip of the Franco dictatorship. Cámara plays a down-on-his-luck encyclopaedia salesman whose peachy wife Carmen (Candela Pena, previously seen in Take My Eyes) badly wants to get pregnant.

Luckily, the honcho of Montoya Publishers, Alfredo's employers, suggests Alfredo and Carmen make Super-8 erotic films for the Scandinavian market, an idea that was rejected by older encyclopaedia sales force, but which Alfredo and Carmen welcome (another colleague, who turns out to have a thing for horses, also embarks on the project).

Since he knows nothing about films, Alfredo gets trained by a Swedish man who says he used to work for Ingmar Bergman while Carmen is given lessons in seduction by a Swedish woman who looks like a cross between Farrah Fawcett and the Abba girls.

As chance would have it, Alfredo and Carmen's naive style strikes a chord with Scandinavian audiences and they become household names in the kinky north, to the point when they get followed around by a fan during a trip to a department store. Berger never worries too much about showing how the success happened, focusing instead on the relationship between wife and husband and their fertility problem. It leaves something of a gap in a film that is narrative-driven, but the art direction and the generous succession of gags served up by Berger make up for any temporal discrepancies.

Terremolinos 73 is a retro-fest of hairdos and 1970s prints, as if John Waters had gone on holiday in Spain with Almodóvar as his guide. Berger also uses the Bergman references as a resource of connoisseur jokes - he even brings in Dogme 95 actors Thomas Larsen and Bjarne Henriksen (of Festen fame) to appear in the feature film that Alfredo ends up writing and directing and which is used as the 'film-within-the-film' resolution.

Of course, like Waters, comedy is used a license for rudeness and exaggeration of stereotypes (the Danish film crew swims naked in the sea; one of them is gay etc). But it works, because Berger finds the right balance between irony and sincerity. Cámara proves once again that he's one of the best actors currently working in Spain and Pena is one to watch out for.