Marisa Paredes Movies

aka: Their Golden Years In this failed attempt at auteur cinema, director Emilio Martinez-Lazaro puts together a disagreeble cast of characters whose only interest is self-indulgence. Luis (Jose Pedro Carrion), Maria (Patricia Adriani) and their friends have either fallen through the cracks of mainstream society or are trying to. Life swings from drugs to sex and back again, with little chance of ever changing or ever becoming meaningful. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, Rovi

Tata (Imperio Argentina) is a matronly nurse hired by a wealthy heiress who has spent the last 13 years in a convent. Fearing she is prone to nymphomania, Tata oversees the romantic antics of the sex-starved woman as she attempts to rejoin society. Satirical jabs at the military government, the aristocracy, and the Church highlight this comedy. ~ Dan Pavlides, Rovi

From Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar (Live Flesh, All About My Mother) comes this offbeat drama about Leo Macías (Marisa Paredes), a romance novelist who writes her trashy tomes under the pseudonym Amanda Gris. When her marriage begins to dissolve, Leo finds herself falling into despair, leading her to drink and lose her knack for writing her tawdry tales. Out of her turmoil, she writes a bleak novel that garners no attention. To make matters worse, Ángel (Juan Echanove), a newspaper editor with a romantic interest in Leo, hires her to write a scathing review of Amanda Gris, not realizing Gris is Leo's nom de plume. Nominated for several Goya awards, La Flor de Mi Secreto also stars Carmen Elías and Rossy de Palma. ~ Matthew Tobey, Rovi

Marcello Mastroianni plays several different roles in this off-beat, witty exploration of a man with multiple personalities from world-class filmmaker Raúl Ruiz. Mastroianni first appears as Parisian traveling salesman Mateo Strano who suddenly shows up at the home of Maria, the wife he abandoned twenty years before. She eventually remarried Andre. Mateo begins telling the skeptical Andre that he never really left Marie. Instead he was bewitched by fairies and has been living in the apartment across the street the entire time. He seems so serious, that he is able to lure Andre to the alleged apartment. There Mateo murders him with a hammer and then calmly returns to Maria who seems nonplused by the sudden turn. With pride she shows Mateo their adopted daughter. Mastroianni next appears as Sorbonne professor of negative anthropology Georges Vickers, a grown man who still lives with his cranky mother until he inexplicably leaves to become a vagrant. Living on the streets, he encounters Tania, a streetwalker with a passion for the philosophies of author Carlos Castaneda's Don Juan. The hooker and the tramp stay together until the day that Vickers returns and he leaves. It is soon afterward that he discovers that Tania is really the president of a major corporation. When he learns that she has been jailed for attempting to murder her creepy ex-husband, Vickers uses his clout to save her. The story then jumps to a newlywed couple happily struggling in a humble garret. Their lives change dramatically when a benefactor suddenly appears and provides them with a marvelous country house. They are also given a mute butler (Mastroianni) who answers their every beck and call. It doesn't take the couple long to figure out that the sinister valet (who actually owns the chateau) is quietly poisoning them. In terror they leave, but later he finds them and demands that they give him their baby daughter. He gives the child to Maria, Mateo's wife. Mastroianni's fourth persona, that of industrial magnate Luc Alamand then appears. He is in trouble when he learns that the wife, daughter, and sister he manufactured to impress potential clients are actually coming. The stress causes the sudden emergence of his other disparate personalities. Interestingly, though each live wildly different lives, they are clearly the same mild-mannered, self-effacing character. The comedy in the story works on wildly different levels with sight gags and puns running simultaneously with literary and cultural satire. Beneath it all runs a serious message about the destructiveness and confusion caused by trying to create a single European culture. ~ Sandra Brennan, Rovi

It is not necessary to know that this story is based on a true incident in order to enjoy it; in real life, a man landed in a major European airport without the necessary papers, and while authorities worked (slowly, ever-so slowly) to resolve his citizenship status, he lived and worked there, unable to leave either by air or by foot. This situation lasted for years. In the current movie, Arturo (Jean Rochefort) has flown into France from Montreal. He holds dual French and Canadian citizenship, but all his papers were stolen from him while he was at the Canadian airport without his knowledge. He is married to a Spanish woman and lives in Rome. This confusion of visas and nationalities is too great for the authorities to sort out quickly, and he settles into a behind-the-scenes existence at the airport while he awaits developments. There, he discovers a whole international community of the stranded, a nation-within-a-nation. ~ Clarke Fountain, Rovi