Chicken with Plums and The Runaway

Remember when I told you about Amélie? Well here is another French movie that looks much in the same vein as far as style goes. (It sounds like they even have the same narrator.)

In Chicken with Plums the main character is a gifted violinist who doesn't see a reason to live after his beloved violin is broken, so he decides to lie in bed and wait for death. Even though the film starts out as a love story between a musician and his violin, it's a story of a man realizing how the love in his life allowed him his talent.

The film looks lovely in its stylized and slightly surreal dream sequences, and you know how I like my surreal dreams. (In case you don't know, I have a like my surreal dreams.) It seems that the French do humorous melancholia, or dark films that don't burden your soul, better than anyone else.

Speaking of countries that are good at things, I feel like the Irish do comedy like no one else. Well, based the Irish films that make it to America anyway. (See War of the Buttons and Waking Ned Divine.) Maybe it's that humor is a valid and useful tool that helps people cope with controversy and strife.

The Runaway is about a small Irish town that helps a Columbian pilot who crashed his plane near their town. I don't know what else to say about it except that the preview looks absolutely charming and hilarious.