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.
