Alternately wistful and whimsical, DREAMING OF RITA revolves around a romance that's straight-laced even by the standards of Hollywood's golden age. But it contains several interesting characters, including one who's obsessed with Rita Hayworth.
DREAMING OF RITA is set in modern day Sweden. As a young man, cinematographer Bob (Per Oscarsson) was so enamored of Hayworth that he named his daughter after her. Now the elderly Bob seems more interested in watching Rita Hayworth movies than attending his wife's funeral. The adult Rita (Marika
Lagercrantz), a musician, tries to hold her own family together while mourning her mother's death. Husband Steff (Philip Zanden) is preoccupied with his business, and Rita alone looks after their new-born, Adam (Adam Blanning), and restless teenage daughter Sandra (Yaba Holst).
After the funeral, Bob's Hayworth fixation prompts him to search for Sabine, the beautiful woman he loved before he met his wife. Rita, with Adam in tow, follows Bob as he travels by train to the hotel that Sabine used to manage. At a station, Rita persuades Bob to join her in her car and agrees
to bring Erik (Patrik Ersgard), Bob's new-found traveling companion, along.
As Rita, Bob, Erik and the baby make their way toward the hotel, Steff tries to find his wife. Rita and the free-spirited Erik have a brief affair, and Erik then goes his own way. At Sabine's old hotel they learn she's no longer an employee, but the concierge suggests that they try the Hotel
Cansino (Hayworth's real name) by the seashore.
Meanwhile, Steff happens to meet Erik on the road, and gets the same tip about the Hotel Cansino. Unaware that Erik has been Rita's lover, Steff invites him to come along. Bob finally finds Sabine, who doesn't remember him. Rita draws Sabine aside and asks her to pretend; she obliges by dressing
up in 1940s garb and spending the night with the old man. Steff arrives the next morning and pleads with Rita to return to him. But when Steff finds out about Erik, the two men begin to duke it out. The battle is interrupted by Sabine's announcement that Bob died during the night. Erik walks away,
leaving the family to pull itself together.
DREAMING OF RITA aspires to quirky originality in the manner of films by Lasse Hallstrom and Emir Kusturica. But it's really telling a resolutely old-fashioned story in a surprisingly traditional way. Staffan Erstam's screenplay not only incorporates references to GILDA--the 1946 Hayworth picture
Bob so admires--but (consciously or not) duplicates the sort of melodramatic love triangle in which Hayworth was so often enmeshed. The Swedish Rita has an uncaring husband who wants to own her and a boyfriend who's less socially powerful, but more worthy of her. In a twist that makes those older
films seem more progressive than the new one, DREAMING OF RITA ends with Rita returning to her spouse. Steff's journey to find Rita supposedly loosens up his character--he's wearing a leather jacket and riding a motorcycle by the time he meets up with Rita at the Hotel--but he continues to say
things like,"I hate those modern feminist husbands," and there's no reason to disbelieve him.
Director Jon Lindstrom occasionally manages to make DREAMING OF RITA seem less conventional than it really is, and odd moments mix with touching ones in a pleasant way. The best of the picture's sentimental interludes include a father-daughter scene between Bob and Rita in the hotel, and Sabine's
wistful recollections of the past: "They all loved Gilda, but they woke up with me," she tells Rita, in a paraphrase of Hayworth's famous lament. (Violence, nudity, sexual situations, profanity.) leave a comment
