“The Building Tales” (magical realism/black comedy)

I’ve loved “weird” or surreal movies as long as i can remember. So much so that I decided, on a cold december evening, to write my own screenplay. I love to write since I was a child, but this project is bar far my most ambitious one !

I wanted to combine my favorite “genres” together : French whimsy (Jeunet & Caro’s works, “The Science of Sleep”, “Celine & Julie go boating” and “Zazie dans le metro” (in case you’re wondering, yes i’m French! ), campy black comedies (“Beetlejuice” (and any early Tim Burton’s films, really!), “the Addams Family” and “Little Shop of Horror” (1986 musical version), but there are many more.) and my beloved childhood classics (mostly 1980’s cheesy kids movies), with a touch of gothic fairytales, stopmotion madness (to express the characters’s inner worlds), and Czech new-wave (yeah, that’s a lot!).

The story is set in a building in a big French city (maybe in the 1960/70’s, I am still not sure.). A young couple move into their new flat (she is a perky goth who collect freaky taxidermies , he is an embroidery aficionado.), but they began slowly to realize that the other tenants (respectively: a dentist who may or may not be an angel, a cannibal ingenue who literally craves love, a japanese boy whose father turned into a goldfish, a middle aged man with lobster pincers instead of hands and an old lady who calls herself the “Pigeon Queen”) are not what they seem… (I’m not the best to resume plots, especially in a second language.)

The whole aesthetic is part kitsch/retro (Wes Anderson style), part “disturbilingly cute” : in this surreal town, you can grown carnivorous tulips on your balcony, and listen to the Super Glues, the coolest girlband ever (Why “the Super Glues” ? Well, they are conjoined triplets! ) ! Oh, and the stuffed animals talk like cutesy Disney characters!

Beside the dark humor and poetic nonsense, there is also a far more political aspect. I am a autistic bisexual (<= still questioning) girl, someone you don’t always see on screen, and when you do, it’s mostly realistic dramas. I craved to watch a queer equivalent of “Amélie”, or “Edward Scissorhands”, full of quirks and wonder. The same goes for autistics characters. In this ’‘project", the main couple is autistic and most of the protagonists are LGBT+ ( the japanese boy have a crush on the “angel” dentist, the cannibal ingenue is bisexual and the main character’s best friend is a lesbian trans woman. The two lovers are also concerned (she is bi, he is asexual. ) .

I will try to translate some exacts, but i can’t help, but worry if the metaphors and wordplays will loose their “tastes”.

If you are interested, you can subscribe to my tumblr blog (only in french for now) : https://thebuldingtalesproject.tumblr.com/

Your support would mean the world to me! :)

edited 10th Apr '18 11:32:31 AM by PoppyStardust

Try putting this in Writer's Block instead. There's really nothing to add as far as World Building is concerned, it looks like.