Vancouver International Film Festival: Dolores

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Cost: $17.00
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VIFF 2016 launches a bold restructuring of its traditional film and industry programming. In its 35th year, VIFF expands the frame to create multi-experiential streams that include some of the best cinema from around the world fused with related talks and events in a unique Film+ model. Our new model expands the frame, giving audiences and creators a chance to discover, discuss and connect more.


Dolores
Panorama | Contemporary World Cinema | Style in Film

In an unnamed area of Germany in the 1950s, middle-aged Georg (Udo Schenk) lives with his whiny, chain-smoking brother and makes precision models for discerning clients. He is an artist, a perfectionist. One day, famous movie star Dolores Moor (Franziska Petri) gets a flat tire outside Georg’s house and they meet. Smitten by his craftsmanship, she commissions him to make a model of her sprawling modernist mansion. And so he moves in with her, the better to do his work. Soon Georg is obsessed as much with Dolores as he is with perfection, and when it becomes obvious that he has extraordinary powers, he starts doing some very nasty things in pursuit of the lovely movie star…

Michael Rösel’s gorgeously designed tongue-in-cheek cross between mad-scientist movies and melodramas of the 50s is a helluva lot of very stylish fun. Based on a graphic novel by François Schuiten and Benoit Peeters (text) and Anne Baltus (drawings), it has a heightened and very precisely rendered reality, thanks to brilliant production design from Christian Strang. There are echoes of Sirk, Almodóvar (The Skin I Live In comes to mind) and, especially, Hitchcock’s Vertigo, the last of which is evoked both explicitly, as Georg tries to make Dolores’ assistant into a Dolores copy, and implicitly, in the Bernard Herrmann-like score. Occasionally very funny—chilling, too—this is a well-acted, thoroughly entertaining postmodern gem.
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