"The first four days and nights of eternity are supposedly the worst; I read that sometime, somewhere..." (Clemens Klopfenstein). A modern tale of paradise regained and the magical power of love, Macao recalls the legends of Orpheus and Eurydice, Echo and Narcissus, filtered through a realism that is at once haunting and charmingly naive. Mark Grundbacher (Max Rüdlinger), a Swiss philologist, kisses his beloved wife Alice (Christine Lauterburg) goodbye and takes off for a conference in Stockholm. The plane crashes and he finds himself adrift in what should be the Baltic sea; why, then, is the island on which he alights balmy, tropical, and peopled with friendly Chinese? Mark's adventure in "other"-land-where he must communicate his dismay, and his new friends their caring, without words-is comic and moving by turns. Certain inexplicable goings-on in this so-called Macao lead Mark to realize that he may in fact be dead; he begins to plot his escape from paradise, back to love. Alice/Eurydice, meanwhile, wends her own magic out of sheer desire, and the film turns myth on its head in a most satisfying way. Klopfenstein (who visited PFA for a tribute in 1986) is the Swiss master of trance-like travelogues in films like Story of Night, Transes and Sibylla's Kiss. In Macao's fairytale realities-built of dreamy, magnetic images and wacky anachronisms-he paints a most inviting picture of eternity.