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Tulse Luper Suitcases 2: From vaux to the sea
The Tulse Luper Suitcases – Film 2, Vaux to the Sea
Synopsis:
This second film in the Tulse Luper Suitcases series, deals with the life and times of Luper and his friends, lovers, jailers and enemies, during the Second World War, in three bizarre prisons, in a chateau at Vaux in Northern France, in a cinema in Strasbourg, and in a collaborationist household on the French coast at Dinard.
Taken by his jailers at the outbreak of war to the German-occupied chateau of Vaux, north of Paris, Luper becomes involved in the lives of three Fascist-loving women, and a German officer, General Foestling, who has grand designs on reversing the history of Fouquet and Louis XIV, and his prisoner Charlotte des Arbres, a great teller of unrequited love stories. Drawn against his better judgement into adventures of art-theft and the murder of his jailer, Figura, Luper is driven away from Vaux to be imprisoned in the Arc en Ciel Cinema in Strasbourg where he packs a suitcase full of film-clips of prison-escape-movies, survives Allied bombing and is befriended by two French children who spirit him mysteriously away to Dinard on the French coast to the bourgeois household of the Moitessiers, a china-dog loving mother who impersonates Ingres heroines, and an anatomist father who is obsessed with his Jewish lover exiled in a concentration camp and persecuted by a sexually ambiguous housemaid. In this treacherous household Luper is obliged to dress as a female servant to avoid conscription, to pose as a life model, and to teach children politically-inspired English, before seizing an opportunity to escape as the house floods with Gestapo police investigating the murder of Madam Moitessier.
Chateau, cinema and bourgeois household, Vaux, Strasbourg, Dinard, three prisons in Northern France, physical enough, but more importantly metaphorical, the prisons of classic literary history, of cinematic dreams and of stifling bourgeois claustrophobia.
Length: 121 minutes
World Premiere: Berlin / Berlinale Special, Germany
Festivals & Markets 2004
American Film Market, USA
Baltic Pearl, Latvia
Berlin / EFM, Germany
Black Nights Film Festival, Estonia
Facets – Chicago, USA
Haifa International Film Festival, Israel
New Horizons, Poland
Seattle International Film Festival, USA
Seoul Net & Film Festival, Korea
Skopje Film Festival, Macedonia
Tapei Golden Horse Film Festival, Taiwan
Thessaloniki International Film Festival, Greece
Festivals & Markets 2005
Cambridge Film Festival
European Media Art Festival Osnabrück, Germany
Istanbul International Film Festival, Turkey
Mexico Contemporary International Film Festival, Mexico
Tribeca Film Festival New York, USA
year: 2004
distributor: Fortissimo - Amsterdam
catalog number:
rights: The Kasander Film Company
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