Celestial Clockwork

This is one goofy movie, with energy to spare. A Venezuelan bride (Ariadna Gil) abandons her groom at the altar to fly to Paris in hopes of becoming an opera singer and falls in with a colorful and eccentric crowd, including a flashy and devious video artist (Arielle Dombasle), a Russian music teacher (Michel Debrane), an unorthodox psychiatrist (Evelyne Didi), and a gay clairvoyant (Frederic Longbois). Writer-director Fina Torres, a Venezuelan based in Paris since the early 70s, gives this 1994 French-Venezuelan-Belgian-Spanish feminist comedy with stylish MTV-like interludes a Latin exuberance that at times recalls Darnell Martin’s I Like It Like That. Nothing cuts very deep, and at times the film seems to be all over the place (Torres worked with five others on the script); but the surface glitteraided by Ricardo Aronovich’s cinematographykeeps it fetching. (JR)

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