A bizarre guest appearance by former
Dallas star Patrick Duffy is the key selling point for this unorthodox docu-fiction hybrid, which world premiered at the Berlin Film Festival last week. Blending Cold War memoir with 1980s pop-culture homage,
Hotel Dallas is written, produced and directed by a married couple of New York City-based artists, Livia Ungur and Sherng-Lee Huang.
Partly funded by a grant from Yale, where Ungur studed art, the duo's debut feature overcomes its obviously limited budget with wit, imagination and visual flair. That said,
Hotel Dallas still has the experimental feel and niche appeal of an art project. Beyond film festivals, left-field documentary channels and perhaps even galleries will be its most obvious home.
The inspiration for
Hotel Dallas is rooted in Ungur's childhood memories of Communist-era Romania in the 1980s, when
Dallas was the only US import screened on state-controlled TV, ostensibly as cautionary propaganda about the evils of western capitalism. But the plan backfired when the show became hugely popular among impoverished Romanians, who embraced it as aspirational lifestyle porn. Indeed, Larry "JR" Hagman later credited
Dallas with helping to topple the country's former dictator Nicolae Ceaucescu.
Hagman himself cashed in on the show's enduring cult appeal, making TV commercials for oil products in post-Communist Romania, which Ungur and Huang include in their patchwork of old and new material. One local sunflower oil tycoon even went as far as building his own Southfork-style ranch hotel close to the southeastern city of Slobozia, erecting a quarter-sized Eiffel Tower replica in the garden as an added bonus. This surreal location explains the film's title and serves as a narrative jumping-off point.
Both directors appear in the film. A pixie-like figure in an outsized cowboy hat, Ungur plays a fictionalized version of her younger self, blurring reality and fantasy, documentary and lightly scrambled autobiography. The central plot is a kind of dreamlike road trip across present-day Romania, with Duffy providing the voiceover as a baffled American tourist clearly modeled on his
Dallas character Bobby Ewing. Recording his contributions in LA, Duffy is mostly a vocal presence, though the film-makers also incorporate short visual snippets of him into their deconstructed, arty collage.
Punctuating this loose central narrative are multiple offbeat digressions, including clips of the 1947 John Wayne western
Angel and the Badman and monochrome restagings of key
Dallas plotlines, all given an ironic Cold War twist by child actors dressed as Pioneers, Romania's Communist youth group. There is even a playful reworking of the show's opening credits sequence, complete with a gypsy-folk version of the theme music.
There is probably a keen audience for a straight, informative, fact-driven documentary about the soft-power role that hugely popular US shows such as
Dallas played in hastening the fall of the Berlin Wall. But this is not that film. Instead, Ungur and Huang have made something far more eccentric, esoteric and impressionistic.
Hotel Dallas is maddeningly quirky in places, making few concessions to mainstream docu-drama conventions. But it is also rather lovely in its loopy rhythms and luscious visuals, a charmingly personal take on shared cultural memories.
Production company: Ungur & Huang, New York
Cast: Livia Ungur, Patrick Duffy, Razvan Doroftei, Serena Sgardea,
Maria Croitoru, Nicu Ungureanu, Sherng-Lee Huang
Directors, screenwriters, producers: Livia Ungur, Sherng-Lee Huang
Editor: Sherng-Lee Huang
Music: Samuel Suggs
Sound design: Adam Chimera
Sales company: Heretic Outreach, Athens Details More>>
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Allegiant directly follows the events from Insurgent after the demise of Kate Winslet's Jeanine character. Naomi Watts reprises her role as Evelyn and pretty much follows the same unfortunate path that Jeanine did as leader of the dystopian Chicago. Four and Tris, played by Shailene Woodley, lead a small group of survivors into the outside world which was teased at the end of the last film. From there, every cliché you can possibly think of, follows. The characters who you think will die, die. The people who you think will be good or bad, end up being good or bad. There is nothing surprising or noteworthy about the film's plot.
The positives do however come from some of the performances. Theo James continues to be a pleasant surprise and does as much as he can with a weak script. He has a definite future in the film business. Woodley is solid as she usually is and so is Jeff Daniels and Naomi Watts. The problem is that the film around them is average at best. The pacing is painfully slow at times and nothing really happens until the final 20 minutes. Of course, it's set up for an unnecessary and unplanned 4th film purely for the reasons of making money, because there could have easily been an ending here. Overall, a weak script and horrible green screen moments end up making a disappointing third entry in the series.
+Music +Performances from James and others -Green screen moments -Pacing -Nothing original and full of clichés