My 20th Century

East European whimsy is usually heavy-going, especially when most of the women are played by the same actress, and this feminist frolic through the political and technological birth-pangs of the present century has all the poetry of a dodo on downers. At the exact moment that Edison unveils the electric light bulb in a New York park, twin sisters are born in Budapest. This arbitrary conjunction leads into a collage of very loosely related scenes (crammed with allusions to movies, pulp fiction, etc, etc) in which the sisters' lives diverge and faithfully reconverge via a trip on the Orient Express. Chic b/w photography and relentless 'cleverness' won this wearying charade the Best First Feature prize at Cannes.