Vegas

Las Vegas stubbornly defends its myth of being the capital of entertainment and superlatives. Where, if not here, can you make a quick dollar or a career straight up to show business heaven? Millions of fortune seekers come here every year. Some of them stare at the movements of their chips; others hope to work in one of the temples of entertainment – or anywhere. Still, nobody will be surprised to hear that there are a lot of losers in this city of illusions. And more so since the recession has reached this oasis in the middle of the Nevada desert. Director Lukasz Konopa, who was born in Poland and lives in England, found symbolic images, protagonists and situations that stand for the crumbling American dream above and beyond Las Vegas. A performance at Caesar’s Palace is replaced by an old people’s home with its deaf residents, who do not really appreciate the rising star’s singing. Houses are sealed because their inhabitants are bankrupt. New homes are found in sewer pipes. Konopa juxtaposes his quiet tale of life at the margins of the city with the loud, glittering and feverish metropolis that looks like a distant, artificial backdrop. He lets the losers tell their stories, giving them the space in his film that they never found – maybe never could have found – in Las Vegas. Gradually, the portrait of a city that is absent and disappears in the flickering neon light somewhere on the horizon emerges.