The Movie Teller

Seen at the Toronto International Film Festival, this movie is both an homage to American Westerns and an exploration of the power of cinema / storytelling to transform a life. In Spanish with subtitles, the characters are drawn from life, and quite a difficult life at that. Set in the "driest place on earth", the community is not unhappy. There is lots of room for gentle comedy and young love. The camera turns away from actual violence, but not the story, which frankly addresses what goes on behind the scenes in the town set in a saltpetre desert for the young woman at the centre of the story. The movie was shot on location in an abandoned mining town, which only adds to the versimilitude.

A film that goes beyond its own sense of being, the beginning of a fabulous, beautiful story. For me, and only for me, it instantly loses the opportunity to be "the movie." I won't talk about its budget or its great technical qualities, nor about its cinematography. I won't talk about anything other than its beautiful story, the premise of a story turned into a script that becomes a marvel.

At the end I love the movie but there's a curious taste like the feeling that one have when a vague melody is running in our head but you can't remember the song, yes, just like that.

A promise, the premise of a promise... that's it.

The Movie Teller- 2023 La contadora de películas) My Rating. 7/10

The Movie Teller is a Chilean-Spanish-French international co-production, and follows a story where a girl's gift for recounting the events in Hollywood movies transforms her family's fortunes in rural 1960s Chile.

One of my favourite movies is Cinema Paradiso because always it takes me to my childhood when my Dad was a movie projectionist and I that's when I fell in love with cinema.

The Movie Teller has a few similarities in common with Cinema Paradiso mainly in María Margarita's story .

Alondra Valenzuela plays young Maria Margarita or Nina as she's known and Sara Becker plays her as a young woman both give charming performances.

Maria Margarita is the youngest of four siblings in a family that lives in a mining town in the Atacama desert in Chile during the 1960's era .

Their special day of the week is Sunday, when everyone goes to the movies to enjoy stories that transport them to other worlds.

The breadwinner and father of the family Medardo played by Antonio de la Torre suffers a horrendous work accident and is confined to a wheel chair.

The family discover Maria Margarita's great talent for telling the entire plot to her father of the weekly movie she sees at the cinema .

She soon becomes the only source of family income when villages pay for Maria's renditions of great Hollywood movies like The Apartment, Scarface, and Breakfast at Tiffany's.

No more plot line you get the picture just as Maria Margarita did .

My one problem however with this movie and perhaps it may have got lost in translation was the character of the mother Maria Magnolia , yes everyone is named MM . Bérénice Bejo gives a very good performance but her storyline and her character lost me . I just had no empathy with the decision she made that had such consequences for the entire family.

Directed by Lone Scherfig and written by Rafa Russo, Walter Salles and Isabel CoixetI enjoyed this movie , especially the vintage movie clips shown at the village cinema.

I was expecting to get a French movie, with Bérénice Bejo as the lead character. Instead...I've got a movie in Spanish, Chilean, if I would like to be more accurate. Also, the leading actresses were two young woman and child actresses: Sara Becker and Alondra Valenzuela.

It seems, from the first gaze on this movie's poster, that we are going to get a version of "Cinema Paradiso" or every other movie for movies lovers. We are getting exactly what we've expected, but somewhere along the way, something is getting lost on the way to real greatness.

It is a movie about a child and her family, that are all cinema lovers, back in the sixties, on a far away and remote mining small and pretty neglected town. The family depends the main providers and lives by his abilities to care and provide, while the mother raises and takes care for all other necessities.

This movie speaks about losing the childhood innocence, about an actual love for the experience of movies on the biggest screen around and also about the change in movies consumption. It is also dealing with family crisis and an actual adorable way to deal with each and every crisis, off course, with an enormous love to movies.

Somewhere along the way I've lost attention to the details of the movie. It started to repeat itself and didn't answer several questions that were raised along the way. It just stayed adorable, loving and admiring for one of my biggest desire - cinema. Sometimes...this is all you need from a movie to succeed.