Veteran director António da Cunha Telles’s Portuguese box-office hit features popular actress Marisa Cruz as a young woman who escapes her unhappy small-town life by fleeing into a fantasy world in which she is Marilyn Monroe. Kiss Me is set in the late 1950s, with Portugal under the Salazar dictatorship. Cruz plays Laura, who has made a disastrous marriage with a violent brute. She abandons her husband to live in another town with her eccentric aunt, a free-thinking woman whose liberated American ways are loathed by the locals. Shy provincial girl Laura decides to liberate herself by transforming into a Monroe-like blonde bombshell. Imitating every aspect of her Hollywood idol — hair, dress, comportment — she begins turning the heads and igniting the passions of the town’s men folk, single and married alike. Kiss Me was named best feature at Toronto’s first annual Fantasy World Wide Film Festival in 2005. Colour, 35mm, in Portuguese with English subtitles. 110 mins.