Two lonely businessmen, Bennie (Miguel Sandoval) and Frank (director Alex Cox) are sitting at a table in the restaurant of a large Victorian hotel in Liverpool. In the dining room there is however no sign of any staff. The two men decide to go and find somewhere to eat, even though neither of them knows the city. They take an underground train towards the centre, they hope. But when they get out, there are not many people around. In addition, it doesn’t look like the city of Liverpool any more. Unlike the two roaming businessmen, the Rotterdam festival audience will soon recognise where they are: in familiar festival locations, on Schouwburgplein, the Greek restaurant on Kruiskade, where our heroes are given ahuge plate of food. However they don’t get to eat it and, in the meantime, the businessmen talk about all kinds of things. As they continue their quest for a restaurant, we find ourselves in a different port more familiar as an Asian metropolis. At dawn, they meet a third lost businessman, Leroy (Robert Wisdom). Together they find a place for breakfast in Josephine’s roadside diner. There a surprise is in store for them. Three Businessmen is a humorous, surreal film, with a script (written by Tod Davies) full of sharp observations on modern business that will eventually end in the big-city version of a very old story… –IFFR
English director Alex Cox studied law at Oxford—at least until being deflected into theatre through his participation in the University’s drama department. Cox switched to a film studies program at University of Bristol, received a Fulbright scholarship, then traveled to the United States to attend the UCLA film school. His plans to become the next Welles or Scorsese were muddied by several years’ inactivity, during which time he took a job repossessing automobiles. Drawing from the experience, Cox made his feature-film directorial bow with the wildly inconsistent but very entertaining Repo Man (1984), which served as one of the first starring assignments of Emilio Estevez. Repo Man’s musical score was drenched in punk-rock, a symbolic form of violent rebellion explored further in Cox’s Sid and Nancy (1987), a fascinating if depressing chronicle of the life and death of “punk” musician Sid Vicious and groupie Nancy Spungen. Critically celebrated for both films, Cox’s reputation declined… read more
