IR TV Review: A HEIDELBERG HOLIDAY [Hallmark]
Continuing in the context of perspective based holiday time, "A Heidelberg Holiday" takes another approach with the essence of creativity versus business and where personal loves and compromises must be found. Ginna Claire Mason plays Heidi, an artisan who gets accepted to showcase at the Heidelberg Christmas Market in Germany. She has been working her whole life for this and her mother encourages this even setting her up to stay (or at least rent) from her friends in the city where she used to live. Heidi arrives and immediately runs into Lukas (Frédéric Brossier), an artist himself (though he even says to her that he is passive) who ends up being the son of her hosts. The story is, of course, very coincidental but it is Hallmark. And like many of the Hallmark Christmas movies before it, it keys into the location. Most of the exteriors are shot in Heidelberg itself with perhaps the remainder being shot in Belgrade, Serbia which has becomes a bigger destination for soundstage work in Eastern Europe.
Heidi brings her tradtions to her new Germany host family and they do the reverse, all the while trying to push Lukas and her together. A secondary relationship of Lukas' sister and brother-in-law is that she was a baker in the market and he was in the US military. He decided to stay with her in Heidelberg and raise a family there. As with many of these Christmas movies from Hallmark, there is an obstacle to overcome and a choice that must be made, both personally and professionally. There is a continual joke about the German Postal Service being the most efficient when Heidi's packages fail to arrive for the market. There is also an interesting cross cultural element about the hard versus soft sell which gives a nice balance between the cultures. "A Heidelberg Holiday" again finds a unique location (Hallmark should do group trips to highlight some of these places --- there is a specific chocolatier shop highlighted and I am pretty sure the woodworking shop exists) and builds a simple story around it...not too complicated to celebrate the holiday. B
By Tim Wassberg
