La femme de chambre du Titanic

I've renewed my interest in Titanic over the past year or so and happened across this movie. I thought it was an OK movie after I saw it about two months ago but since then there's been an aspect that I can't get around.

I can go for how the townspeople were entranced by Horty's stories. They knew him, after all. But once he took the performance on the road and was charging admission to complete strangers, things changed; the least of which is that since they didn't know Horty, I don't think they'd relate to him the way the townspeople in the tavern did.

Imagine you were one of his audience members, seeing his show in the weeks following the disaster.

To imagine yourself as a member of the audience at that time, imagine that it's November 2001 and you're going to the show of someone claiming to be a survivor of the World Trade Center. You sit there and listen to the speaker go on and on about his torrid love affair with the coffee shop girl on the 80th floor sky lobby. Wouldn't he -- and you, for that matter -- be more interested in what it was like to survive the disaster? And after we've seen the pictures of the poor souls plunging from the buildings, and keeping in mind that the 9/11 lost are as dead as those on Titanic, wouldn't you think that having a set with the side of the building and an actress pantomiming the death plunge, much as Zoe was mimicking the drowning Marie, be in incredibly poor taste? That aspect of his production alone would make me consider Horty to be a shameless opportunist, regardless of what he actually said.

Perhaps one of the most intriguing stories to board the Titanic craze is this exquisite tale of a foundry worker and a chambermaid. Never actually setting foot on the famed vessel itself, the action centers on a night in a Southampton hotel the night before the ill-fated vessel left England for the first and last time. That night, roomless title maid Marie who works for the line not the hotel) knocks on the door of handsome Horty, who has won a contest at the French foundry where he works and is rewarded with a trip to see the eventful sailing. Because Horty's boss has eyes for his lovely wife Zoe, she remains at home, leaving Marie and Horty to their own devices.

Horty returns home having been faithful, but is unsure if his wife has done the same. From then on, Horty's barroom revelations of his encounter with Titanic and maid become more and more embroidered. Both to anger Zoe and to please his audience, Horty's stories become nothing short of hallucinatory. After the liner's sinking, Horty's fate is sealed as a virtual one man show, relating what is now nearly all fiction, including his presence on the ship the night it went down.

But the fickle hand of fate that took the Titanic to a watery grave has just as unexpected plans for Horty and Zoe, who now "plays" Marie in a full-length stage production of Horty's story. The final act of this impressive motion picture is just as dramatic and humbling in it's way as the story of the liner itself.

Director J.J. Bigas Luna peppers this French language feature with water imagery, forshadowing the Titanic's fate and a crucial plot point for Marie and Horty. A letterbox video release is terrific except for that the subtitles are a bit small. See it on a bigscreen TV. Although, there's no sinking to gape at, the human drama is also of titanic size.

I love this film; it dares to let the audience be soaked in wonderfully melodramatic and lustfully vulgar scenes. Feelings and drama make the film rattle, and when, in addition to this, the humor is so frequent, this film can't fail. It is erotic, wonderful, lovely. Ace.

An ordinary foundry worker called Horty : Olivier Martinez wins a strongman contest and his prize is a trip to Southampton to see the launch of the Titanic. In England, Marie : Aitana Sanchez Gijon , saying she is a chambermaid on the Titanic and cannot get a room, asks to share his room. They do, chastely; when he awakens, she is gone, but he sees her at the sailing and gets a photo of her. When ship sinks in 1912 and chambermaid probably dies, his story gains popularity. But lie always has its price. When he returns home, he suspects that his wife Zoe : Romane Bohringer, has been sleeping with Simeon, the foundry owner. Horty goes to the bar, where his friends get him drunk and he starts telling his past incidents and gradually beginning to believe his own lies about his passionate escapade. There was more than one love story on the Titanic !.

A romantic and slow-moving drama based upon the novel by Didier Decoin about the erotic fantasy of what happened our starring and Marie , as he becomes a story teller drawing a larger audience each night , while he fakes a love story between him and the chambermaid from RMS Titanic. The peculiar filmmaker Bigas Luna (Jamon Jamon, Yo Soy La Juani) directs this co-production starring Olvier Martinez (Unfaithful), Aitana Sánchez Gijón (La Carta Esferica) and Romane Bohringer (Vigo) . Passable interpretation from Olivier Martinez as Horty, a French foundry worker who wins a contest and is sent to see the sailing of the Titanic while meets a beautiful chambermaid called Maria, finely performed by Aitana Sánchez Gijón, with whom he shares the hotel room .

The motion picture was decently directed by Bigas Luna , following his particular style , though displays a number of flaws and gaps. He often uses in his films twisted events , erotic scenes and surrealist images. Luna was a Bon Vivant who along with his wife, produced wine, ham, and organic products ; they are well shown in his films . In 1990 producer Andrés Vicente Gómez persuaded him to return to cinema and entrusted to him the direction of Las Edades De Lulú (The Ages of Lulu), an erotic drama about a young woman exploring extreme sexual practices , this was a commercial success . Without abandoning his dedication to painting and photography, reflected in numerous exhibitions, he began the well-known "Iberian Trilogy" with Jamón Jamón ("Ham, Ham", 1992), Huevos de Oro ("Golden Balls", 1993) and La Teta y La Luna ("The Tit and the Moon", 1994). Jamón Jamón, which launched the careers of both Javier Bardem and the 16-year-old Penélope Cruz was a major international success and won the Silver Lion at Venice in 1992. Cruz returned in Volavérunt (1999), a film about the relationship between Francisco Goya and the Duchess of Alba . This film ¨La femme de chambre du Titanic (1997)¨ is stylishly photographed and smartly designed and here Bigas Luna delivers his ordinary and erotic goods in cool sense of style . Rating : 5.5/10 . Acceptable and passable but a bit boring.

because this film is a poetry...

the developing prose of the story with the abstract implying ideas (specially the suggestive narrative story telling) that synchronize in the rhythmical scenes and intense drama of passion, along the scripts playing with language from polite to vulgar.... and then there's how it's filmed rich in emotion from all the characters even by the by-standers, with an almost accurate period movie where past early after turn of the 20th century we get to glimpse travel.... but at always this film remain or kept itself simplistic in style despite the intricate weaving and integrating of the art of old world romance, dark mystery movie and sarcastic humour in suppress comedy, while the drama of human conflicts and aspirations are all in one (it all depends on your receptors at the time of watching)... or very accessible to watch...

and then there is the way of how contrasting dimensional realities (but naturally looked at as life) becomes romantic even in the hindsight tragic of titanic (distasteful exploitation of as soon as that event happened)... and then on top of even another dimension is that the story is focus on the fantasy element - huge passionate erotic romantic narration that are all base to the "keep coming back to that ultimate one-night stand" which is the center of the plot....

For instance: life in the smelters or foundry, the peasantry lower working families of rural mining processor towns, the intrigues and the theatrics of salacious subject matter have driven the pheasant existence of workers who could only dream of what's life in opulence, of experiencing real passionate romantic escapade in the midst of luxury even as a servitude (instead of just daily toiling and working to meet the basic necessity in the back-draft of small rural factory town)... sexual passion with a sensual stranger in forms of flashbacks that make one wonder of life beyond the town.... the main character's fantasy is now the town's.... whereby it begins to represent the workers' escape of a humdrum life, as all they want is to be entertained with stories of concocted true events or fantastic lies well put together..... which really is the component (patronizing crowd audience) and what is binding to the elements (the story telling or narrative) of the film...

what really is surprising and very much what makes treasure of the film is between Olivier Martinez and Aitana Sanchez-Gijon chemistry and real genuine passion, that's hard to fake sensual romantic intensity, as much as naturally born sexiness, sex appeal and good looks cannot be faked either....