The Laughter of Maca Daracs

• 1991

• Watchlist

Maca Daracs (Barbara Auer) is a gypsy woman working in Austria, and she has a problem: she doesn't have any legal right to be working there. Furthermore, the police have already tagged her as someone to check up on really soon. If she can't come up with a husband to make it possible for her to stay, she can kiss her "good life" in Austria goodbye. For her, the long hours she spends working in a resort kitchen and the cot she has in a tiny room (and even the effort she must exert to fend of the unwelcome attentions of a hotel manager) are all infinitely better than what she has waiting for her where she came from. Suffice it to say, she's motivated. In this comedy, due to time constraints, she has basically two choices of mates: a paranoid semi-retired arms dealer, and a wealthy and socially prominent politician. Naturally, she hits on the politician first, but he admits that, while he finds her sexually alluring, he's not about to marry her. She tries to woo the nutso arms dealer next, but he soon appears to go genuinely off his rocker, and she's forced to seek him out at a nearby asylum. There, he proves his sanity by choosing to wed her instead of one of the formidable (and undoubtedly mustachioed) asylum matrons.