CELESTIAL CLOCKWORK Movie Review

Mecaniques Celestes

A highly favorable but curiously defensive review of Celestial Clockwork—written by an otherwise invaluable and brilliantly perceptive critic—maintains that the film was approached with “suspicion” in cinema circles here because it was made by an unknown director. Had it been made by Almodóvar, the critic believes, the picture would have been widely acclaimed. Oh come on. Critics and public embraced Cinema Paradiso without ever having heard of Giuseppe Tornatore, and I doubt that Il Postino was so widely accepted because the public had been salivating for the new Michael Radford film. I doubt that most people (and probably a few critics) even remember the name of Il Postino's director. The fact is that I found myself quite captivated during the first ten minutes or so of Fina Torres's colorful Celestial Clockwork—a modern-day remake of Cinderella—but soon I found that the movie's exhausting, frantic pace wasn't able to distract me from the one-note, plodding, episodic plot developments. Ariadna Gil is the woman who abandons her fiancee at the altar, jets off to Paris with hopes of becoming the next Maria Callas. There she encounters the rest of the fairy-tale cast, including an evil and jealous rival (the stunning Arielle Dombasle of Pauline at the Beach), a gay waiter, a lesbian psychiatrist, a witch doctor, and other assorted wacky characters who work so hard at being free spirits that they're just the opposite—and are trapped by the cliches of their conception. The title is a warning: this piece of aggressively feel-good, mechanical, by-the-numbers whimsy is indeed possessed of all the soul and spontaneity of clockwork.

NEXT STOP … Orpheus, Donkey Skin, Cinderfella

1994 85m/C FR Ariadna Gil, Arielle Dombasle, Evelyne Didi, Frederic Longbois, Lluis Homar, Michel Debrane; D: Fina Torres; W: Fina Torres; C: Ricardo Aronovich; M: Michel Musseau, Francois Farrugia.VHS EVE