“Roseland” is made up of three stories, sometimes connecting, all set in the famed New York dance palace, and all having the same theme: finding the right dance partner.
Tag: 1970s
A new teacher arrives at a school and begins to suspect his predecessor was murdered by the pupils, though his suspicions are written off as paranoia. He sets out to prevent the same fate from befalling him.
Initially conceived as the story of an older woman hitching a ride with a trucker, bemoaning the demise of the revolution and the impoverished state of society (“the world has gone to rack and ruin”), Le Camion is the film that ensued when Duras couldn’t find a suitable actress for the lead. Instead, she and Gérard Depardieu sit at a table and read from the script, discussing the film that might have been, with periodic cutaways to a truck driving along the highway at night.
The daily routine in the village of Yugla is shaken by the statistician clerk Asenov who come with a mission to take the census of the hares in the locality. He makes the village mayor Bay Georgi mobilize the local men in realization of the absurd task. On the very day all the village men are in the field. The mayor, the teacher, the veterinarian… even an old men join the group. Naturally all the efforts failed in fulfilling the mission since not a single hare came into sight.
The world’s first commercial supersonic flight, Maiden I, is about to take off from New York to Paris, filled with a group of contest winners and crew. Unfortunately, Les Phillips, an engineer, fed up with being dissed by the plane’s designer, Willy Bassett, sabotages the plane’s hydrualic system, causing it to malfunction during flight. And as if that isn’t bad enough, Ralph Therman, an epidemioligist from WHO, has the plane transport a highly infectuous Senegal flu, turning the plane into a flying quarantine zone.
A war widow searches for the true reason behind her husband’s death, and why she’s been unable to collect survivor benefits. It turns out he has been classified a traitor and a deserter, and the exact cause of his death listed as ‘unknown’. She sets out on a quest to find the people he served with, to determine the real story behind the government smokescreen.
Athos Magnani, a young researcher, returns to Tara, where his father was killed before his birth, at the request of Draifa. The father, also named Athos Magnani and looking exactly like the son, was killed by a fascist in 1936 — or so says Draifa (his mistress), the town statue, and everyone in town. As the son untangles the web of lies this story is constructed from, he finds himself ensnared in the same web.