Main Cast: Anna Thomson, Jamie Harris, Louise Lasser, Robert Modica, Lonette McKee
Release Year: 2000
Country: US/FR
Run Time: 95 minutes
MPAA Rating: R
Plot
Amos Kollek directs this quiet, understated comedy about lonely hearts and empty pockets in New York. Pushing 40, Bella (Anna Thomson) works as a waitress at small downtown diner in Manhattan. Her elderly regulars include Paul (Robert Modica), a lovelorn retiree who scours the personal ads and his ill-tempered buddies Seymour (Victor Argo) and Graham (Mark Margolis), who are more than a little disparaging toward Paul's attempts at finding love. Involved in a 12-year relationship with married Broadway theater director George (Austin Pendleton), Bella craves marriage and children. On a blind date set up by her mother, Bella meets Bruno, a divorced cabbie and fledgling novelist with two young children. Meanwhile, Paul meets ready-and-willing widow Emily (Louise Lasser), while Seymour shacks up with Wanda (Valerie Geffner), a stripper with a master's degree. This film was shown in competition at the 2000 Cannes Film Festival. ~ Jonathan Crow, All Movie Guide
Review
A genial set of interlocking stories about looking for love in the Big Apple, Fast Food Fast Women is the kind of movie in which someone inherits millions of dollars for one act of kindness and keeps her day job, in spite of her professed need to quit it. If this strikes a chord with you, you will probably also find charming the regular fire-escape musings of a lovely young woman clad only in a towel, which she eventually sheds, to be picked up in the courtyard below by a vagrant. There are two main stories here, and it's the older actors who are the most convincing and ingratiating. Bella (Anna Thomson, a willowy blonde with bruised lips) and Bruno (Jamie Harris, a scrawny Brit) are the younger would-be lovers. They have sex on the first date and spend the rest of the film trying to figure out if they're really in love. She keeps mice as pets, he drives a cab but really wants to be a literary novelist. Paul (Robert Modica, looking like he could star in The John Cassavetes Story) and Emily (Louise Lasser, looking fit and fine) are the older romantics. Paul and Emily are both widowed, and their willingness to seek companionship is balanced by an understandable need for true love. Bella seems just flaky in the Holly Golightly-Annie Hall mode, while Bruno is mostly self-centered, sympathetic only when he's charming his children from a marriage gone bad. It's a modest film that could have benefited from making Bella less of a ditz and Bruno less of a rotter. ~ Tom Wiener, All Movie Guide
Victor Argo - Seymour; Angelica Torn - Vikta; Austin Pendleton - George; Mark Margolis - Graham; Judith Roberts - Bella's Mother; Salem Ludwig; Irma St. Paule
Fast Food Fast Women is a 2000French romantic comedy film written and directed by Amos Kollek. The tag line for the film was "There are 18 million people in New York City, but only one like Bella." It was entered into the 2000 Cannes Film Festival.[1]
