Bar Filmax

Bar Filmax is in a street that would make the perfect backdrop for a cop film, with its natural setting of urine-streaked walls and picked-over rubbish bins, and women asking the few passers-by for a date. If any love could be found here, it would be the kind dreamt of by Fassbinder or Kubrick in a bad mood. Bar Filmax is its own scene. Black-and-white photos of Liz Taylor, Antonio Banderas and Cameron Diaz are stuck to the glass of the front door. Propped up at the bar are men who seek style in the shape of the short-brimmed hats of their grandsons, while in a corner mothers and daughters celebrate a birthday. A woman in the middle of the bar holds up two lottery tickets and announces she'll share her winnings with whoever loves her tonight. Among the cropped photos of Bollywood beauties, Montgomery Clift and Rita Hayworth reign with their magnificence and leave the inferior beings out in the street to their dance of the lonely hearts.