Belle Époque

Belle Époque (1992)

In 1931, a young soldier deserts from the army and falls into a country farm, where he is welcomed by the owner due to his political ideas. Manolo has four daughters, Fernando likes all of them and they like him, so he has to decide which one to love.

Date of release
1992-12-04
TMDB
6.7 / 10 (215)
Runtime
1h 49m
Genres
Comedy, Drama, Romance
Director
Fernando Trueba

Casting

Interesting facts

  • Awards: 1 · Nominations: 1. Including: Academy Award for Best International Feature Film

Belle Époque is a 1992 comedy-drama film directed by Fernando Trueba. Consisting of a fable-like story, primarily displaying a warm tone, and set in an idyllic countryside location during the transition to the Second Spanish Republic, the film features Jorge Sanz, Maribel Verdú, Ariadna Gil, Penélope Cruz, Miriam Díaz Aroca, Fernando Fernán Gómez, Gabino Diego and Chus Lampreave, among others.

Production

The film project originated in 1990 at a Madrid restaurant where Fernando Trueba, Rafael Azcona, and José Luis García Sánchez frequently met to discuss cinematic projects. The story contains autobiographical elements for Trueba, as the director’s real-life father-in-law is named Manolo—just like the father-in-law of the protagonist, who shares the director's first name, Fernando.

Before writing the screenplay, Trueba wanted to show Azcona and García Sánchez Jean Renoir’s Partie de campagne to illustrate the tone he envisioned for the film. From that movie—as well as from Jean Renoir’s The Rules of the Game—he drew the concept of main characters fleeing the city in search of a bucolic setting where primal instincts could surface.

Trueba wanted the story set at the beginning of the Second Spanish Republic, a period that represented a fleeting moment of hope and the promise of paradise—a promise that soon vanished. He explained that he never intended the film to serve as a parable of that historical era, nor did he want the setting to evoke any specific region of Spain.

A Spanish-Portuguese-French co-production, Belle Époque was produced by Fernando Trueba PC, Lola Films, Animatógrafo, and French Production with the collaboration of Sogepaq and Eurimages. The film was shot between July 5 and August 26, 1992 in several villages of Portugal.

The soundtrack was conducted by Antoine Duhamel and performed by the Madrid Philharmonic Orchestra at Kirios Studios in Madrid in November 1992, while the songs were performed by Mary Carmen Ramírez.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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