Dancehall Queen

Rating:
Summary: Sadly funny. romance and terror, tragically violent.
Review: Violetta was born and raised in a shack in the Australian outback. She never has worn shoes and she talks with a funny accent and odd vocabulary (to no one in particular) because she has always lived alone so she speaks in made up words. She has a slightly broken front tooth, too,(an old bar fight injury that traumatized her and causes her to seem "simple") She wonders what the rest of the world must be like. One day, a crew of fashion photographers from London show up in the outback with some high fashion models, etc., the whole 9 yards. Tony St.Swithens Dove (Hugh Grant)is the famous jet setting head cameraman. He catches a glimpse of violetta squinting at him in the bush while he searches for a spot of necessary privacy for a few minutes. She thinks he must be an angel, he in his Tommy Hilfigger color-blocked oversize rapper's jacket, pierced eyebrows, anemic chest, and plastic yellow pants (now down around his knees). Well, I guess the story is sort of predictable from here, but I loved it anyway. It was so sadly romantic, so depressingly sweetly weepy. (The first time I saw it I cried so hard that my nose ran all over my tub of extra large jumbo popcorn.) Tony, as you have probably already guessed, "discovers" Violetta and brings her back to London, his new discovery that sets the fashion world's teeth on edge. She becomes the last word in haute couture and makes women all over the world want to have a chipped tooth, too. She also makes Tony's old girlfriend, actress BiBi Wensch, to go completely postal. It becomes de riguer for androgynous males as well as models, to seem "simple and shoeless, speaking in made up, gutteral sounds." Violetta lives with Tony for 364 days and experiences all life has to offer a young sophisticate such as herself. But, alas, Tony has a short attention span. I won't get into the gory details, but they get separated at the disco during wet beer bong nite, and never see each other again. She, well dressed now, kicks off her shoes in the middle of a snowstorm and wanders the earth in search of him, but to no avail. All kinds of people come up to her and offer her money, houses, cars, food, roller skates, bagpipes, a kitten, some pipe cleaners, themselves even, but alas, she only wants her "angel" Tony. The actress playing Violetta, Audrey Tottingham Hillyard, gives a brilliant performance as an inarticulate model going over the edge in a long soliloquy about "My Tony Dove, my Tony Luv-Dove, Tony Rub-a-dub-dub-luv-dove, dovey-lovey tone-man, "me eat off spoon" and the plaintive, heart wrenching "...dude?" Her inarticulateness is stunningly convincing. In the very last scene, we see Tony, now an old man reminiscing with his young grandson about his travels and his loves. He squints up at the sky, now quite symbolically cloudy and overcast, and mutters to no one in particular, "What ever happened to old...unhhh... what's her name?" They heavens suddenly open up, the rain pours down with a rare ferocity, and the old man gets drenched. The end. Incredibly meaningful. Laden with enough symbolic weather changes to make a meteorologist weep like a little girl. I highly recommend this film.