City Gets New Art House Cinema

By Galina Stolyarova

The St. Petersburg Times

Published: March 20, 2013 (Issue # 1751)

Movie buffs in St. Petersburg now have the opportunity to enjoy world-class foreign cinema in the rarefied atmosphere of one of the city’s most elegant hotels, following the recent opening of a new movie theater at the city’s Angleterre Hotel.

According to the owners, the new art house cinema will offer local audiences a chance to view films that rarely make it into city theaters. All of the films at the cinema will be screened in their original languages with Russian subtitles.

Angleterre Cinema, which also goes by the rather confusing name of Theater & Cinema, opened its doors for the first time with the Shaded View on Fashion Film Festival at the end of last month.

The storied venue can hold up to 187 spectators. Its target audience is much wider than local expats and tourists — who will no doubt rejoice at the increased availability of foreign-language films in the city — and also includes local art lovers and film aficionados.

According to the project’s director, Stanislav Yershov, Angleterre Cinema will make a habit of hosting special events along the lines of the March 5 master-class led by the aspiring U.S. opera diva Nicole Cabell or the local premiere of Roman Coppola’s new comedy “A Glimpse Inside the Mind of Charles Swan III,” which was attended by the director.

The cinema is currently showing Artus de Penguern’s comedy “La Clinique de l’Amour” (The Love Clinic), which received critical acclaim at the 2012 Cannes International Film Festival. In his second film, de Penguern creates a witty and hilarious and take on American medical soap operas along the lines of “General Hospital.”

This parody about paramedics blends slapstick elements, like the improvised resuscitation of a bear, and melodramatic sentimentality.

“I intended the film as a parody through and through, from the female heroines’ almost identical make-up and shiny hair [which looks] as if it came straight from a 1950s Hollywood melodrama to the graphic, vivid, shocking, in-your-face scenes of surgery that American medical television series are notorious for,” the director said at the opening of his film at the cinema March 13.

In the film, de Penguern takes the lead role of the surgeon, who rescues the family business — a clinic — after his greedy and happy-go-lucky brother falls for a voluptuous brunette nurse who manipulates him into selling the hospital to a large medical holding with inhuman policies.

“With a farce-inspired story that includes everything from ricocheting bullets and alternative anesthesia methods to Canuck brown bears and plastic surgery how-to handbooks, this is the kind of film where the plot keeps thickening until the gleefully clichéd characters actually become affecting in their manic search for storybook happiness,” reads a recent review of the film by Variety magazine.

Upcoming offerings at Angleterre Cinema include Steven Soderbergh’s Freudian thriller “Side Effects” starring Jude Law, Rooney Mara and Catherine Zeta-Jones; Gilles Bourdos’s drama “Renoir,” based on the eponymous Impressionist’s last years at Cagnes-sur-Mer during World War I; and Pablo Berger’s silent black-and-white Spanish drama “Blancanieves,” inspired by the tale of Snow White by the Brothers Grimm. Berger’s fantasy drama won in ten categories at this year’s Spanish Academy of Cinematic Art and Sciences Awards, including taking home the prize for Best Film.

Angleterre Hotel, 24 Ul. Malaya Morskaya. Tel. 494 5666. M: Admiralteiskaya. For more information and a full schedule of screenings, visit the cinema’s website at: www.angleterrecinema.ru