Rating
Genre
Unconventional Drama, Black Comedy
Year
2018
Country
USA
Original language
English
Subtitles
English, Spanish, Portuguese (PT), Portuguese (BR)
Runtime
89'
Whitney Horn & Lev Kalman
Set in remote Colorado in 1893, Two Plains & a Fancy follows three tourists: a Dandy Watercolourist, a Mystic/Reformed Confidence Woman, and a Lady Geologist from France, looking for the perfect geothermal hot spring spa (and finding only ruins).
Over three nights and four days, the tourists trek deeper and deeper into the plains, deserts and mountains. And it’s somewhere between a classic Western travelogue and a really epic day at the mall. The tourists have encounters with purported time travellers, underemployed cowboys, a native teen, and ghost whores. They reach the limits of their respective knowledges, and blissfully cross them. And then a geothermal event literally undermines them all.
Gorgeous, ominous and ridiculous, Two Plains & a Fancy is a “Spa Western” comedy that only Whitney Horn and Lev Kalman (L for Leisure) could make. Their 16mm slacker absurdism clashes against the grandeur of American History, the myths of The West, and Deep Time. The intimacy and directness of their filmmaking grounds the film in everyday reality, creating a vision of the late 19th century that is both eerily familiar and totally absurd.
Benjamin Crotty, Laetitia Dosch, Marianna McClellan, María Cid, André Frechette III, Libby Gery, Michael Murphy
Writers: Whitney Horn, Lev Kalman; Composers: John Atkinson, Talya Cooper; Cinematographer: Whitney Horn; Editors: Whitney Horn, Lev Kalman
BFI London Film Festival
- Two Plains & a Fancy, 2018
- L for Leisure, 2014
- Blondes in the Jungle, 2009
- Jazz Christmas, short, 2006