On a Las Terrenas beach in the Dominican Republic, Noeli and her partner, who passes himself off as her brother, strike up relationships with tourists. Paid for but not always ephemeral: for Anne (Geraldine Chaplin), who is seriously thinking of moving from Paris to end her days in the sun, commerce has given way to sentiment. As for Noeli, her youthful years of prostitution have nourished her dream of leaving the island. But can their dreams converge? Is any reciprocity even conceivable? Like Robin Campillo’s recent Eastern Boys or, in a more sombre mode, Ulrich Seidl’s Paradise: Love, this free adaptation of Jean-Noël Pancrazi’s Dollars des sables challenges a contradictory fantasy. Laura Amelia Guzman and Israel Cardenas – who made the splendid portrait Jean Gentil (in competition at F3C in 2010) – subtly suggest the irreconcilable parallelism of the lives that Anne, midway between romanticism and exoticism, would like to lastingly entwine.
C.G.
