Antares

Hello There My Little Biscuits !

So, I got a lot to say. For starters, I bought my plane ticket to Europe for September. Paris and Amsterdam to be exact, and in Amsterdam I should be hanging out with Porkstar, my bestest blogfriend in the whole world.

I remember when he came out to visit Ashleigh and I in December. My favorite moment of the day was when we were all on the escalator going down to the train. We were all hugging and I screamed "BFFs coming through !".

Anyway, above is Antares, an Austrian film that I recently finished watching. I love foreign films because they are not like Hollywood films. The pace of the film is more like that of normal daily life. Usually in a Hollywood film, you have the main problem in the film, and at the end it must be resolved, and usually it is even if it is completely unbelievable. And usually the endings are so happy. We are programmed to expect a good outcome. There is pressure to reach a good ending.

In a foreign film, there isn't really a soundtrack, it's not about tricks or stunts and life goes on. I watch foreign films because it's like a snapshot into normal life in other parts of the world. And if there is a problem in the film, it usually isn't resolved by the end, rather you are usually left guessing about the future.

Anyway, I love Antares mainly because I got to watch normal everyday Austrian life on screen again, and bonus points since the director is from where I lived. Finally a film where I can hear German in the dialect I learned it in. Austrian German is different, and finally the characters sound like my family. When I saw the mother come in and make salad, pay the cleaning lady and talk to her daughter, it was like I was living with my aunt all over again. You see so many foreign films from Germany or Eastern Europe, but never really any from Austria. I was thrilled that the director is from the same town I used to live in.

The film takes place in a high-rise apartment complex that used to be nice back in the day, but now is inhabited by immigrants and people on lower incomes. Kind of like my aunt's apartment that I lived in back in 1990. My aunt and uncle built a nice house and moved out a few years back. The neighborhood of that apartment complex has changed a lot since then. I felt saddened when the nice bakery I used to go to as a child was turned into a lower grade internet cafe, when there are so many internet cafes, or locutorios already, and it had to be where the old bakery used to be.

The film was about three couples in the high-rise apartment complex that each had their own problems, but end up crossing paths. Basically, the film starts out with a man getting into a car wreck, and then shows the lives of each of the three couples leading up to that event.

Basically the three couples featured are having relationship problems:  1.) A night-shift nurse is so bored with her husband that she has a torrid affair. 2.) A store clerk fakes a pregnancy to keep her Yugoslavian boyfriend 3.) A single mom who kicked her deadbeat ex husband to the curb and is sleeping with the Yugoslavian boyfriend.

I liked the film because I felt these issues are so close to real life. How many people out there seem to have a nice routine life, but inside are really miserable ? I wonder about that all the time. That is why I fear a routine life. I don't want my life to be peaceful and uneventful. I want a happy life, but I don't want it to be predictable. One of my biggest fears in life is simply existing and living a predictable life. My life may be full of drama or I may get a lot of monkey wrenches thrown in that constantly mess up my plans, but the flip side is at least I am not bored. At least I can wake up and know that anything could happen. And great things have happened to me unexpectedly as well.

You see how miserable these people are in the film and you feel for them. The married night-shift nurse was so bored with her married life that she took up a heated affair and really let loose. I felt bad for her, it was so obvious that she just wanted to feel alive again. Anything to feel passion. That's where the sex scenes in the film came from. She and her married lover were definitely uninhibited. I don't condone her cheating as cheating is never the answer to solve your problems, but I definitely understood why she did it and how people fall into routine traps, life passes them by so quickly and one day they decide to wake up and wonder where all the time went.

Anyway, that is all for now. Check it out sometime of you want.

Time to get ready for bed.

Besitos !