All You Can Eat Buddha
A mysterious stranger fascinates the clients of a South-American holiday resort. He starts performing miracles on the spot. Who is he?
After too much time spent in a sanitised, childish setting, vacation resorts can feel very surreal. But never weirder than in Ian Lagarde’s first feature. Mike is a quiet, corpulent tourist, who enjoys the routine in a South-American resort to the point where he could stay there forever. After an encounter with an octopus on the beach, bizarre events occur. Mike starts to perform miracles.
ALL YOU CAN EAT BUDDHA unfolds into deadpan, Zen-like, unnerving visions as Mike becomes the inscrutable Buddha of the title. Clients come and go, the resort is not immune to some political events out there but Mike stays the same. Lagarde slowly draws us into a dreamscape, reminding us that at the end, as the Talking Heads sang, ‘Heaven is a place where nothing ever happens’.