CELESTIAL CLOCKWORK (Fina Torres, 1995)

I hate Oriane (1985), the glum melodrama by Venezuelan filmmaker Fina Torres, but I like the zany comedy that she made in France ten years later, Mécaniques célestes. Taken at a certain angle the film can be irritating, because the meeting between the Italian maker of operatic films (think Franco Zeffirelli) and the Venezuelan girl he is destined to make a star seems instead destined never to come about through an annoying series of interferences and bad coincidences that could easily have been thwarted or undone by one or the other character at a good many intervening points. My advice: just go along with that. If you do, you will have a more than merry time.
     Ariadna Gil, who resembles Annette Bening, is radiant and charming as Ana Mendoza, an intended bride who freezes at the altar in Caracas, rushes out the church, packs a small carry-on case and grabs her poster of Maria Callas. Next thing we know—and the cut is very funny—she is onboard an airplane bound for Paris. There, she becomes part of a group of female Venezuelan expatriates, one of whom, jealous and competitive, is determined to beat her, through nefarious means, for the lead in the film of Rossini’s Cinderella that is being shot there. But many more characters prove supportive of Ana and her quest for stardom, including Alcanie, an unothodox woman psychoanalyst, Ana’s irrascible Russian vocal coach, and a Bantu witch doctor who mixes Shakespearean love potions which generate funny results, including a close encounter of the sexual kind between Ana and Alcanie. A gay waiter gives Ana another wedding; he marries her because her two-month visa has expired. (There are four gay characters in the film; no tokenism on that front!)
     A lot of fun.