A seemingly normal literature club run by Madam Yankelova hides a dark secret: its purpose is actually for its female members to lure attractive men there, who will then be killed and their meat used as hot dogs. Sophie has already won 99 awards for bringing the best man to the slaughter, but she is aging, and thus cannot seduce them anymore without the help of her friend Hannah. One member tells Sophie that either she will win her next 100th award and be promoted or lose and be demoted to the sanitation department. As a librarian, Sophie meets Yosef and falls in love with him, since they both enjoy novels. Sophie wants to leave the club and save Yosef, a detective, but he goes there anyway, eager to find out what happened to his father who also disappeared. Sophie and Yosef run away from the castle, which gets blow up in an explosion caused by a barrel filled with gasoline.
This peculiar film is a strange feminist hybrid of "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" and "Dangerous Liaisons": the first association is warranted because of an organization that kills men and uses their meat for hot dogs, but the second one is warranted for a surprisingly subtle and measured love story in which one person who initially just feigned love actually falls in love. "Madam Yankelova's Fine Literature Club" is not for everyone's taste: the initial black comedy is deliberately suppressed for the development of the love story in which Sophie falls for her prey, Yosef, yet it has a certain twisted logic. The bizarrely allegorical story actually shows Sophie's maturing from only a physical relation with men to a spiritual bond—she is aging, and thus cannot rely on her good looks to lure men to the club, but for the first time actually finds something deeper, something cathartic, a soulmate in Yosef who enjoys literature. There is a neat joke in which Sophie only managed to get an old, bald man to the club, and is thus threatened by her superior to either bring a man who scores at least 8.8 out of 10 for the next time or she will be demoted to sanitation. Therefore, when she meets Yosef, she tranquilizes him on the couch temporarily and measures his skull and nose, calculating a score of 9.75, jumping up and down from joy. Some of the plot points were left unexplored: the reasons for the macabre ritual "menocide" by the all female club in never satisfactory explained, with only a hint that they represent angry women disappointed in love or toxic feminism. In the end, Sophie has to choose: either promotion in the club or exile for love. The ending is somewhat forced and too neat, yet there are enough twists in the characters to keep the interest going, whereas the director Guilhad Schenker has an elegant mood that flows smoothly throughout.
Grade:++
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