Cosmic Candy (Fantasia Fest)
**Seen for the 2020 Fantasia International Film Festival.
This Greek comedy-drama is oddly charming. Often, it’s just odd, but co-writer/director Rinio Dragasaki gets a lovely performance from lead actress Maria Kitsou that pushes the film through when it seems to just stall in its story of a woman thrust into a situation of taking care of someone else, and realizing the ways she has not really taken care of herself in the process. It’s a sweet movie.
Anna (Kitsou) is a woman who’s been working at the store her late father co-founded for fifteen years. She basically goes through the motions, though, and the store is struggling; she does things like take from the inventory orders, and she’s not that fond of customers. She goes home, and is trying to get inside before being talked to by her next door neighbor’s daughter, Persa (Magia Pipera), who wants her to come to a school play she’s in. The next day, Persa’s father doesn’t come home- we get the feeling because of criminal issues- and Persa almost thrusts herself into Anna’s care, complicating her life in a way she didn’t expect or really need.
The title of the film comes from a candy that Anna is particularly fond of- it’s essentially flavored sugar, and by the end, Anna is having some pretty trippy hallucinations. The film is very slight and upbeat and seems to want to be a fanciful movie like “Amelie,” and while the performances by Kitsou and Pipera are engaging to a point, they’re not necessarily enough to make the film anything other than a moderately entertaining movie.
