SFIFF: US Premiere of Romance and Cigarettes
All that really needs to be said about Romance and Cigarettes is this: Christopher Walken ... singing and dancing ... to Tom Jones' "Delilah." Honestly, if that three-minute sequence was the entire movie, we would've been satisfied. In fact, we might've enjoyed the movie much more had that been the case. As it is, R&C is emotionally dense, and thoughtful, and very deliberately quirky ... but in the end we just couldn't quite figure out what all the fuss was about.
But maybe that's just us. Our favorite author is Lemony Snicket, and our favorite singer is Olivia Newton-John; so when writer-director John Turturro (yeah, the vulturey guy from Do the Right Thing) announced that he wanted to make a movie that blended Charles Bukowski and Bruce Springsteen, we guessed, correctly, that the movie might go just slighty over our heads. How to describe it? It's sort of a vulgar philosophical romantic musical comedy character study, with Susan Sarandon and Steve Buschemi and Eddie Izzard and a slumming-it Mandy Moore and lots and lots and lots of symbols and montages and quirky dialogue about quirky feelings. Man, this thing's only half a Parker Posey away from being the entire Sundance festival.
The story's modest enough: a married couple Of A Certain Age are losing interest in each other, and as their semi-grown children look on, the husband pursues a younger love and the wife boldly examines her options. And then they all talk about it ... at length ... in excruciating detail ... and from every conceivable angle. Now, admittedly, we are not an Old Guy, so this movie wasn't made for us. And judging from the audience at Saturday's screening (a full house, with a whole TWO PEOPLE giving a standing ovation at the end) there's some folks with whom it really resonated.