Euro ’24 Filmfest: Group D

In June, I challenged myself to watch at least one movie from each nation participating in the periodic regional soccer tournament. There are no rules for this challenge regarding genre or era; the only requirement is that the audio or subtitles be in English or German.

Every film in this group is with original audio! My end-of-year pie graphs are going to be wild.

Poland: Sniadanie do lózka (Breakfast in Bed) (2010)

Netflix, original Polish with English subtitles
Light rom-com about a chef finding new love and new success. Piotr catches his wife banging her boss on the day he gets fired, and while he’s looking for a new job, a blond single mother crashes her bicycle into his moped (he had the right of way). Instead of calling the police, he just takes down her name and address. Worst meet-cute I have ever seen. He finds a new job, wins a cooking contest, and gets featured by the magazine his ex-wife works for–and surprise, Single Mother is a stylist there. All the usual tropes follow, including the gay best friend.

I’m not sure the screenwriters actually know how to cook; there was a scene where Piotr breads a schnitzel, then puts it in the oven instead of into oil. It also felt like an extended commercial for a big East-European spice company; their logo was in every scene with food. But everyone was easy on the eyes, there was some nice shots of Warsaw, and there was a definite time-capsule feel with the flip phones and lack of dental veneers.

Not everything has to be a critically-acclaimed sermon, right? I feel I learned a bit about Poland that I wouldn’t have learned by watching sports, which was the whole point of this ridiculous exercise.

France: Histoires extraordinaires à faire peur ou à faire rire… (Unusual Tales) (1949)

Netflix, original French with English subtitles
Animal abuse warning: Horse murder.
A “horror anthology”–two stories based on Edgar Allan Poe, one by Baudelaire, and one from Thomas De Quincey (who I actually read back when I used to read)–of tales told in a 19th-century police station. Grizzled veterans trying to impress the rookie with stories of cases they’ve participated in over the years. It ends with a cheery song, as the constables head off to the latest murder.

All period films represent the time they were made more than the time depicted, but I am not clever enough to suss out what “The Cask of Amantadillo” meant to post-war France. Maybe it wasn’t supposed to mean anything, maybe it was just a fun afternoon of being scared in the safety of a cinema (People were easier to scare back then.). I wasn’t particularly scared or horrified; I enjoyed the costumes and the storytelling. Feel bad for the horse, though.

Austria: Mädchenjahre einer Königin (The Story of Vickie) (1954)

Netflix, original Deutsch
While scrolling through the list of Austrian films, I had thought maybe a studio was trying to cash in on the success of Romy Schneider as Sissi, but this film came first. It’s based on a 1936 film of the same name, and imagines the young Queen Victoria (Schneider) disguising herself as a commoner (but still very richly garbed, huh) to sneak out from under the thumb of her helicopter mother to France, to avoid meeting the German cousin her advisor wants her to marry. In the second-worst meet-cute of Group D, Prince Albert, who has disguised himself as a student to avoid meeting the British cousin his brother wants him to marry, is staying in the same guesthouse between London and Dover. He teaches her to waltz. Magda Schneider, Romy’s mother, plays her governess, and I can’t see her without thinking about Romy telling Stern that her mother banged Hitler in 3 Days in Quiberon.

Lavishly costumed light entertainment, but I couldn’t really get into it. I don’t mind artistic license in films about real people, but this one went too far off the facts. Maybe if I had seen it when I was twelve…

Sort of interesting: The film’s original US distribution was by Disney, so and that makes Victoria a Disney Princess. I’ll be here all week! Try the veal!

Netherlands: Tuintje in mijn hart (Home is Where Your Heart is)(2017)

Netflix, original Dutch with English subtitles
Another light romantic comedy, this time about how two estranged brothers (same mother, different fathers) in Suriname reconcile twenty-odd years after the stodgy Axel took off for Holland without telling anyone in the family that he was going. He returns for Christmas, after being told his mother was dying and the fight with brother Virgil starts back up. Meanwhile, Axel’s daughter is pregnant after banging half of Paramaribo while doing an internship at a resort and his sister-in-law has tagged along, on a personal mission to force European beauty standards on Surinamese women (who laugh at her, as they should have). Much of the action takes place in the jungle, after urban shopkeeper Axel decides to head out alone to some family property accessible only by air and water; he’s rescued by a local shaman who provides some good chuckles. The jungle and the animal inhabitants end up being the stars of this one, and responsible for most of the humor; the local charismatic preacher is also very funny.

Happy endings all around; some of them felt contrived. Axel gives up boring uptight Holland for brilliant lively Suriname–this film was funded by Dutch taxpayers–and his daughter finds a native man happy to raise her baby with her. (Not really spoilers; happy endings are endemic to the genre.)

There were too many characters to keep straight at first, the main characters were a bit one-dimensional, and the sister-in-law’s subplot felt unnecessary, but I enjoyed the tropical colors and music. And now I know a bit more about Suriname, in case it ever comes up at a cocktail party. Lol.