Sunday Movie - 1pm at Fènix Cafe (BCP Center) - "A Little Chaos" (U.K. - 2014)

[NewsLady]

Our films are is shown at The Fènix Cafe - which is a restaurant, so please, don't bring outside food and drinks to the event.  Rather, support our film series by patronizing the Cafe, and be sure to say hello to Joy Alexander, the owner of the Fenix Cafe, and Ana, her cook/waitress.  

As usual, food, drinks and popcorn will be available.  Early birds get the comfy sofas, but if you like, you can bring cushions for the hard restaurant chairs, or folding/camp chairs for more comfort. There is no admission charge, but we ask for voluntary donations to support the program and help pay for the video system. 

 

Below is a list of our films for May.  We will send out details each film the week before the screening. 

 

 

 

• May 21:  A Little Chaos  (2014 - U.K.)

 

• May 28: The Secret Life of Walter Mitty  (2013 - USA) 

 

 

David Van Harn 
Boquete Film Club Curator 

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"A Little Chaos" (U.K. - 2014)   Rated "R"    Link to trailer 

Starring Kate Winslet as Sabine De Barrahe "A Little Chaos" is a fictional romantic drama that follows Sabine, a talented landscape designer, who is building a garden at Versailles for King Louis XIV.  Sabine struggles with class barriers as she becomes romantically entangled with the court's renowned landscape artist.  A big change from the remote natural settings in Australia and Ireland that were the locations of our last two films, this one is a British vision of the decadent world of Louis XIV with over-the-top portrayals of one of the most garish periods in Western Civilization.  English language dialogue with English subtitles.

From the New York Times movie review:  "The silky growl and insinuating gaze of the British actor Alan Rickman make him a prime candidate to play a jaded aristocrat privy to every dirty secret within his purview, whether political or sexual. And in “A Little Chaos,” which Mr. Rickman directed, he portrays Louis XIV, the French king of kings, putting the finishing touches on Versailles, the royal chateau outside Paris where he moved his court, the better to exert control. The year is 1682."

Mr. Rickman has found in the Sun King a character worthy of his imperious, reptilian charisma. With a knowing gaze, raised eyebrow and narrowed eyes, he surveys his courtiers as they bow and scrape and jockey for royal favor. A hotbed of scheming vipers, Versailles is really a gilded prison for the titled gentry who have nothing better to do than gossip, backbite and fornicate. You imagine that sooner or later, under Louis’s watchful eye, everyone will have slept with everyone else.

Into this jungle of obscene privilege arrives Sabine De Barra (Kate Winslet), a sturdy, guileless everyday woman chosen by the king’s chief landscape architect, André Le Notre (Matthias Schoenaerts), to design the Rockwork Grove, an outdoor arena-like ballroom of tiered steps through which water gushes as an unseen orchestra plays behind the shrubbery. The movie makes much of Sabine’s unorthodox design sense. Where her employer believes in perfect order, Sabine, a modernist before her time, champions “a little chaos” to offset the uniform symmetry.

“A Little Chaos” never pretends to be a realistic historical drama. Sabine, a widowed gardener who lost her young daughter in an accident, is a blunt, strong-willed modern woman who seems radically out of place and out of time. Rather than trying to justify her modernity, the movie...accentuates the disparity between Sabine and her surroundings. She simply could not have existed in the 17th century.