(from the Tribeca Film Festival screening)
"57,000 Kilometers Between Us" is definitely a French film. This is evident 2 minutes in when a family going to visit Grandma is met at the door by the svelte septuagenarian in full chorus line costume, and she serenades her son, daughter-in-law, and three grandchildren with an impromptu song she's been rehearsing.
But unfortunately, that's the highlight of the film. The plot, in brief a man videotapes his normal family life and puts the clips on line so people watch them and comment about how normal they are. But of his three daughters, the eldest is his wife's from a former marriage with a (now post-op) transsexual who we meet along with his/her friends, also transvestites. And the other two are Asian girls who must be adopted, but this is never mentioned. The transsexual lives with a French/German Muslim who seems to like the lady boy thing. And the young girl, the child of the video-obsessed man's wife and the transvestite, spends most of her days online playing something resembling a World of Warcraft interactive game, primarily with a boy of her approximate age who does not reveal to her that he is communicating with her from a hyperbaric chamber of a hospital room where he is sequestered and dying of cancer.
Oh, French cinema! Vous êtes très ésotérique! It's great when your stereotypes prove to be 100% true it makes it so much less of an effort to think.
But there is very little emotion in the movie anyone can relate to. There's a lot of passion, but no empathy. There's a lot of warped sexuality, but it doesn't amount to anything. There's precious little by means of music on the soundtrack, which just has the effect of making the film seem hollow (or, perhaps, in its defense, just not American). Literally 80% of the crowd leaves before the lights come up, even though the director is there for a Q & A if you offered me $50 to ask a question to her, I wouldn't even be able to come up with one that's how unimpressive this film was. Not even a smattering of applause at the film's end, very rare for a festival screening.
"57,000 Kilometers Between Us" is definitely a French film. This is evident 2 minutes in when a family going to visit Grandma is met at the door by the svelte septuagenarian in full chorus line costume, and she serenades her son, daughter-in-law, and three grandchildren with an impromptu song she's been rehearsing.
But unfortunately, that's the highlight of the film. The plot, in brief a man videotapes his normal family life and puts the clips on line so people watch them and comment about how normal they are. But of his three daughters, the eldest is his wife's from a former marriage with a (now post-op) transsexual who we meet along with his/her friends, also transvestites. And the other two are Asian girls who must be adopted, but this is never mentioned. The transsexual lives with a French/German Muslim who seems to like the lady boy thing. And the young girl, the child of the video-obsessed man's wife and the transvestite, spends most of her days online playing something resembling a World of Warcraft interactive game, primarily with a boy of her approximate age who does not reveal to her that he is communicating with her from a hyperbaric chamber of a hospital room where he is sequestered and dying of cancer.
Oh, French cinema! Vous êtes très ésotérique! It's great when your stereotypes prove to be 100% true it makes it so much less of an effort to think.
But there is very little emotion in the movie anyone can relate to. There's a lot of passion, but no empathy. There's a lot of warped sexuality, but it doesn't amount to anything. There's precious little by means of music on the soundtrack, which just has the effect of making the film seem hollow (or, perhaps, in its defense, just not American). Literally 80% of the crowd leaves before the lights come up, even though the director is there for a Q & A if you offered me $50 to ask a question to her, I wouldn't even be able to come up with one that's how unimpressive this film was. Not even a smattering of applause at the film's end, very rare for a festival screening.