Queenie in Love

France, United States

2001

103 Min

Color

1.85:1

English

Currently 2.6/5 Stars.
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EXEC Pascal Breton, Olivier Brémond, Jean-Louis Piel

CAST Victor Argo, Valerie Geffner, Louise Lasser, Mark Margolis, Austin Pendleton, Joey Dedio, Kris Carr, David Wike, Joe Grifasi, Neal Jones, Jeremy Kareken, Rizwan Manji, Larry Pine

SOUND Giles Khan, Andre Marc Shirer

Cannes (Quinzaine des Réalisateurs), Göteborg, Mar del Plata

Synopsis

24 year old Queenie prefers the slums of the East Village in Manhattan to her parents multi-million dollar estate in Westchester. A wacky character who plays pranks on everyone, Queenie works as a social worker with kids while unsuccessfully pursuing an acting career in New York. Horace is a middle-aged ex-cop who lives by himself in the same neighborhood. Having been diagnosed by his doctor as terminal with only a few months to live, Horace starts going to a shrink and tries to find meaning to his life, at which point he meets Queenie, who takes him on a whirlwind of a ride, before they finally, truly find one another. Horace’s milieu also includes Martha and Spencer, a married couple of ex-gangsters now living a mundane life supplementing their income by throwing occasional S&M orgies for a few dollars. Queenie’s crowd includes Skip, her fiancé, an ambitious Wall Street broker, and her best friend, Tzocki, who is about to be married. —IMDb

Director

Amos Kollek

With a solid background in studies of the human mind, Amos Kollek has a knack for insightfully capturing the very essence of his often troubled characters. Despite the fact that his early films were bleak in depicting their characters’ fragility, the director has since excelled at transforming the darkness of his protagonists into a warm quirkiness by moving from serious drama to romantic comedy. A native of Israel who studied psychology and philosophy at Jerusalem’s Hebrew University, Kollek became interested in film after first working as a writer; his early mastering of the visual medium soon led to exploring serious emotional issues onscreen. In 1985, Kollek kicked off his career with the lighthearted comedy Goodbye, New York (1985), and after once again going for laughs with Forever, Lulu (1987), the director moved into darker territory with High Stakes (1989) and Double Edge (1992). If audiences had mistaken Kollek’s luridly titled Whore 2 (1994) as some cheap soft-core straight… read more

With a solid background in studies of the human mind, Amos Kollek has a knack for insightfully capturing the very essence of his often troubled characters. Despite the fact that his early films were bleak in depicting their characters’ fragility, the director has since excelled at transforming the darkness of his protagonists into a warm quirkiness by moving from serious drama to romantic comedy. A native of Israel who studied psychology and philosophy at Jerusalem’s Hebrew University, Kollek became interested in film after first working as a writer; his early mastering of the visual medium soon led to exploring serious emotional issues onscreen. In 1985, Kollek kicked off his career with the lighthearted comedy Goodbye, New York (1985), and after once again going for laughs with Forever, Lulu (1987), the director moved into darker territory with High Stakes (1989) and Double Edge (1992). If audiences had mistaken Kollek’s luridly titled Whore 2 (1994) as some cheap soft-core straight-to-video sequel, what they actually got was a realistic and downbeat portrayal of dangerous life on the streets. His 1995 documentary, Teddy Kollek, followed his eponymous father — who also happened to be the mayor of Jerusalem. In 1997, Kollek crafted the downbeat urban drama Sue, a saddening tale of urban isolation. The film found the director forming a close bond with star Anna Levine, and the actress would return to play the lead in Kollek’s subsequent film, the equally depressing Fiona (1998). Of course, drug-addicted prostitutes alone do not a career make, so his next film, Fast Food Fast Women (2000), was a refreshing change of pace for Kollek and Levine — and the film proved a surprising success at the 2000 Cannes Film Festival. The following year found Kollek sticking in the Big Apple for the romantic comedy Queenie in Love. If that film didn’t quite garner the attention that Fast Food Fast Women had, his 2002 comedy drama, Bridget (again starring Levine), benefited from positive word of mouth and a Golden Bear nomination at the Berlin International Film Festival. In 2003, Kollek directed Amélie star Audrey Tautou in the upbeat romantic comedy Nowhere to Go But Up. —allmovie guide

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