Projects matching: Terence Gross

Synopsis

In spite of a cast list boasting Toni Collette, Daniel Craig, Katrin Cartlidge and Stephen Tompkinson, the real star of Hotel Splendide is the hotel itself. Director Terence Gross and his team spent more than a year searching for the perfect location. They finally found it in the Slieve Donard Hotel in Northern Ireland. "It had all the qualities we were looking for - a fairy tale element, a hint of gothic and was overwhelmingly big to dwarf the staff and guests," says producer Ildiko Kemeny. Gross sees the Hotel Splendide as embodying the spirit of Mrs Blanche, the late matriarch of the family who still manages the crumbling establishment. "She created a very ingenious heating system that runs off human waste. After her death she has had herself cremated into it and has a kind of presence in the hotel," explains Gross. "It's very Oedipal, with the children still living inside her." Although the film has what Cartlidge describes as "a European sniff about it" ("it's very unusual for a British film to veer away from naturalism," she says) Gross sees it as carrying a very British message. "The whole film is a metaphor for the way the British settle for less and feel that mediocrity is better than risk," he says. But if that sounds portentous, it is also leavened with an essentially British sense of humour, as outsider Kath (Collette) brings liberating chaos into the suffocating environment of the hotel. The film, which is Gross's feature debut, was selected for this year's Berlin Film Festival in the Panorama section.

Synopsis

Set on a remote island off the coast, Hotel Splendide follows the Blanche family's attempts to maintain a crumbling, dilapidated hotel and health spa following the death of the family matriarch. Under his mother's tutelage, Ronald Blanche has been instructed in the art of a healthy Regime, based on boiling everything within an inch of its life. His sister Cora runs a treatment room where services consist solely of mud baths and enemas, and Dezmond Blanche, determined to keep the spirit of his mother alive, is leading the hotel into ruinous straits. Into this bizarre universe bursts Kath, Ronald's erstwhile sous-chef and lover, banished from the island by his mother. Behind the peeling façade a gastronomical competition ensues, and as tensions and emotions mount, the hotel takes on a life of its own . . .