Time to remember 1988: Some Girls!
The story revolves around a college student Michael (Patrick Dempsey) who goes to Quebec City, Canada for Christmas at the request of his college girlfriend Gabriella (Jennifer Connelly), after months of her stonewalling him after she left college in mid-semester.Michael starts the vacation full of hope and youthful enthusiasm because she has invited him to stay with her family. He arrives and is left waiting at the airport for hours. Gabriella (he calls her Gabi) eventually arrives to pick him up and explains that sometimes they just don’t answer their phone. He brushes off his frustration because he’s happy to see her.When Michael arrives at the house and meets Gabi’s family, he finds them rather eccentric. Her father (Andre Gregory) is wearing only a towel, but will spend much of the rest of the film in the buff. Near the end of the film he explains he is writing a treatise on the philosopher Blaise Pascal and that he cannot write with clothes on. The mother (Florinda Bolkan) is fiercely religious and a very strong yet quiet woman. A Catholic priest named Father Walter (Jean-Louis Millette) is also present, apparently a close—even uncomfortably close—friend of the family. Michael also meets Gabi’s two energetic, beautiful, coquettish sisters (Sheila Kelley and Ashley Greenfield), along with a handsome young handyman named Nick (Lance Edwards) who is romantically involved with Gabi’s elder sister Irenka.
Although Michael enthusiastically attempts to join in the unusual habits of the family (an example is the apparent tradition of growling at one’s dinner plate before eating) he quickly learns that fitting in is going to be a challenge. The situation is complicated by the illness of Gabi’s grandmother, who is the matriarch of the family, and the reason Gabi left school in the first place. Almost immediately, Michael commits the apparently unforgivable gaffe of expressing his condolences to Gabi’s mother. Things go downhill for Michael from there. As soon as they have time alone, Gabi announces she no longer loves him. His attempts to change her mind seem somewhat successful, but the fickle female spirit continues to thwart him. In the meantime, he is seductively teased first by Gabi’s coquettish sister Irenka, then by her other sister Simone, and possibly even by her mother, all with the apparent complicity of Gabi. At one point, Gabi appears to have a change of heart toward Michael, but then again decides she doesn’t love him.
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Gabi’s grandmother (Lila Kedrova), whom we know only as “Granny,” is in a care facility apparently suffering from some form of senile dementia. Upon meeting Michael, she acts as if he is her long dead husband who was also named Michael. In an attempt to find her husband, she escapes from the hospital and goes to the country estate they shared when they were first married. The girls, Nick, and Michael frantically rush to the estate, hoping Granny hasn’t frozen in the cold of winter. In the course of their searching, Michael gets lost in the woods and falls into a hole, unable to get out. He hears footsteps and finds it is Granny. Apparently, she helps him out and they go back to the house together where Michael lights a fire and gets Granny out of her wet clothes. She then proceeds to talk to him as if he were her husband, and they form an unexpected bond.Granny falls ill on the return trip, and despite Nick’s valiant attempt to reach a hospital in time, she dies. After the funeral, and a tryst with Gabi’s sister Irenka, Michael makes a solitary visit her grave-site where he encounters a mysterious young woman and confesses to her that he deeply loved Granny. Later he recognizes the young woman from a photograph as Granny in her youth, and realizes their meeting may have been supernatural. Ultimately, he returns home and we are left to assume he never sees Gabi or her family again, as she has decided not to return to college. But Michael’s does not seem disappointed in the end of their relationship; instead he is deeply touched by his unexpected spiritual bond with her grandmother.
