Occidental (Neïl Beloufa)

[baby doll]

IMDB / Wiki



Does something streaming on MUBI that never had a theatrical rollout in North America count as a 2019 release? Discuss.

Here's what I wrote about the film from TIFF 2017:

Relative to the other films in this year’s Wavelengths program, the most striking thing about Neïl Beloufa’s Occidental is how classical it seems, both in terms of its storytelling and its mise en scène. Set entirely in and around a kitschy, retro-1970s hotel adjacent to a massive street demonstration and unfolding largely in real time, the story centres on two men claiming to be Italians (Idir Chender and Paul Hamy) who check into the honeymoon suite and then keep coming down to the lobby for cokes—raising the suspicions of the hotel’s no-nonsense night manager, Diana (Anna Ivacheff), who has been on the job long enough to know that Italians never drink coke. The title, which is also the name of the hotel, suggests that Beloufa intends this story as an allegory for the state of contemporary Europe, but the film works best simply as a dark comedy. (Louise Orry-Diquéro, who looks like Greta Gerwig mashed into Ludivine Sagnier, is particularly delightful as the hotel’s ditzy receptionist, Romy, who loses her head completely when one of the fake Italians flirts with her a little.) Clocking in at a mere 73 minutes, the film has the sort of narrative economy one associates with the best Val Lewton B films of the 1940s, and Beloufa gets a lot of mileage out of the hotel’s architectural features, which isolate the characters in Sirkian frames within frames so that the destruction of the hotel at the end of the film feels like a liberation.