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Our desperate seeking might just be over with this year's Opening Night film, Gaudi Afternoon, directed by none other than the woman who first brought Madonna to the screen. This year, director Susan Seidelman (Desperately Seeking Susan) has a film set an ocean away from the streets of New York. Shot in Barcelona with a star-studded cast including the formidable Judy Davis, Oscar winner Marcia Gay Harden, Lili Taylor, and Juliette Lewis, Gaudi Afternoon also features one of Spain's finest comedic actors María Barranco (Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!).
Seidelman based the film on Barbara Wilson's mystery novel and calls it a "gender bending detective story about alternative families." Davis describes it as a "comedy about displaced people. " It is all of this and much, much more. With a diverse set of characters, Seidelman brings us a film that makes us look at ourselves in whole new ways.
Davis plays the edgy Cassandra, an itinerant translator who describes home as where she plugs in her laptop. We meet her as she struggles with the translation of a novel about a mother and a daughter. Distracted by her own relationship demons, her late rent, and the cacophony from her landlady Carmen's (María Barranco) household, Cassandra is at a crossroads.
Enter Frankie Stevens (Marcia Gay Harden) in an outfit from the gods. Frankie tries to enlist the cynical translator to play private eye. The femme fatale explains that it will be an easy and lucrative gig. In need of cash, Cassandra agrees. As she tries to find Frankie's disappeared husband, she quickly discovers that what appears to be real "just ain't necessalily so." The seductive April (Juliette Lewis) might not be a new age angel and Ben (the most fabulous Lili Taylor) might not be Ben, but a butch dyke. And, a drag cabaret might be the headquarters of an elaborate kidnapping scheme. As she wanders amid the Gothic architecture that looms over the modern streets of Gaudi's Barcelona, Cassandra is up to her eyes in intrigue and soon gets embroiled in a drama that offers her more than she had ever expected.
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