Review of Puccini For Beginners.

Occasionally, the greybeard leaves his cave and ventures forth to take in a flick. Once in a while, he feels compelled to write a review, either because the film moved him or because it seems likely to be otherwise overlooked. One warning: the movie is not typical geek fare.
Here goes:


A Review of Puccini For Beginners
Reviewer: JustiN Orion Neal Taylor

As far as I'm concerned this was the perfect post-90s romantic comedy movie. It deals with the tangle of issues related to sexuality and commitment that love theoretically entails for the post-90s crowd, but it makes them funny.

Plot Summary: Allegra, is a writer who loves opera; her best guess is that ten people read her book, but somehow it was nominated for a prestigious award; oh, and she's a lesbian. Samantha is Alllegra's girlfriend who breaks up with her at the start of the movie. Samantha keeps saying she's not a lesbian even though she is in love with and having sex with Allegra; she still has a boyfriend and goes back to him because she wants someone to grow old with and Allegra has commitment issues.

Allegra's friend Molly, drags her to a party to try and meet somebody new. In the midst of binging on the party's buffet to soothe her emotions, Allegra meets Phillip. Phillip is smart and charming and handsome and he read her book.

After a series of accidental meetings and the beginning of a sort of flirty friendship between Allegra and Phillip, Phillip enitces Allegra to go out with him by offering her tickets to Don Giovanni. After the opera date, they have sex.

Afterwards Phillip wants to keep going out with Allegra, but she resists both because she still sees herself as a lesbian and because of her fear of commitment. While dealing with the confusion engenderd by this situation, Allegra meets Grace. Grace is a beautiful straight woman (played by Gretchen Moll, the only actor whose name I can remember from this movie) who just had a bad break up with a boyfriend who was afraid to commit. After a flirty sort of freindship develops between the two of them, they end up sleeping together. Oh, and Phillip is Grace's ex-boyfriend.

And then in the final act: Molly talks Allegra into catering a party with her. The party is the engagement party of Jeff and Samantha, Allegra's ex from the beginning of the movie. And Jeff and Samantha are friends of Phillip and Grace who both end up at the party too...

A bit of an actual review that amounts to more than "It rocked": It was funny. It dealt with gay and straight characters evenly without resorting to stereotype. It ended happily. It dealt with sex in a manner that most people would find reasonably tasteful (i.e. no real nudity and an aboslute minumum of vulgarity). All of those factors combined to make it a movie that I would not hesitate to recommend to anyone that would not be offended by a movie that dares to portray homosexuality as a legitimate lifestyle.

I think that's one more area where it succeeds. It manages to be a movie that deals with gay issues without doing it in a way that is confrontational and without unsubtly pushing a social agenda.

I do have to say that as a straight male, certain jokes that got a giant laugh from the rest of the theatre, did go right over my head, but I'm okay with that that. Every group has its own vocabulary and running gags.