Tarantella at Purdue

[19-5-1997]

The Purdue Romance Languages, Literatures, and Film Conference will hold its first ItalianAmerican Film Celebration beginning at 5:45 p.m. on Thursday, October 9, 1997. It will feature TARANTELLA, by award-winning independent filmmaker Helen De Michiel. A round table discussion with the director will follow the screening.

Some time back I began to follow with interest the thread on the then forthcoming "Godfather Week" on A&E. While there were many different perspectives, several contributors reflected a general feeling of unhappiness concerning the media depiction of Italian Americans. Others expressed regret at the lack of films depicting Italian as other than gangsters or as food-obsessed "gumbahs." Others still stated that there was a need to better educate everyone regarding the ItalianAmerican heritage and contributions to this country. There was also a degree of disagreement concerning the depiction of Italian Americans in the films of such Italian directors as Coppola and Scorsese.

Since I was then, and still am, writing about ItalianAmerican cinema, and given the very obvious expertise of many of the correspondents, I asked for names of ItalianAmerican actors and directors who might deserve to be included in an essay on Italian American cinema. The response was prompt and generous. I would like to thank everyone who responded and, in particular, I would like to thank Dolores Di Mita, Andrea Di Tommaso, and Edvige Giunta for their numerous invaluable suggestions.

I must also thank Marina La Palma, a frequent participant in our Romance Languages Conference (where she has read her poetry and presented scholarly papers) who sent a copy of my inquiry regarding ItalianAmerican cinema to Helen De Michiel. As a result, Ms Michiel wrote me, asking me if I might be interested in her 1996 feature dramatic film TARANTELLA. She included a brief history, a list of the actors, and synopsis of the film which reads in part:

"Diana Di Sorella, a young and ambitious photographer, is forced to come home to the world of her Italian-American family and past when her mother unexpectedly dies. An only child, Diana has no choice but to return to her old Italian-American community to prepare her family's house to be sold. Catapulted into a world she has defiantly left far behind, she dutifully packs up her childhood home and hesitantly explores the changing working-class neighborhood. When confronted with inevitable and strong emotional states she's long avoided, Diana discovers herself face-to-face with her own history of contradictory family, ethnic and social identities."

Ms De Michiel pointed out that the film "stars Mira Sorvino (we filmed it right before she went on to make MIGHTY APHRODITE)." She closed by offering to send me reviews, other materials and a copy of the video. I responded politely, but somewhat noncommittally. I had never heard of the film. Once you have asked someone to send you a film, how can you say what you really think? So I went to my friend and colleague Anthony Tamburri and asked him if he had seen the film. In my experience, if it is Italian American, Anthony Tamburri either knows about it or has it, or both. Therefore, I assumed that if the film was of any interest whatsoever, he would know about it. My assumption proved to be correct. Anthony Tamburri not only knew about the film, he had served as consultant on the project, and had a copy of the video. Without comment, with his customary generosity, he lent it to me.

Paesani, you can quit complaining about the lack of films that serve as antidotes to all the stereotypical depictions of Italian Americans and of the Italian American experience. That film has already been made, and it is called TARANTELLA. This is what Caryn James had to say about it in the May 12 NY Times:

'Tarantella': Heartfelt and Artful

[P] laying a savvy professional photographer, Mira Sorvino responds to the news of her mother's death by pulling a long black dress out of her closet. "Is it Italian enough?" she yells at her boyfriend. "Do I shroud myself in black and mourn for the rest of my life?"

Soon she has returned to her old neighborhood to sell her childhood home, and a family friend delivers her mother's legacy: a huge scrapbook filled with clippings, recipes and a violent story that reveals a family secret.

This heartfelt and artful little movie, "Tarantella," opens the second season of the "American Independents" film series (beginning Monday night on WLIW in New York and syndicated on various dates around the country). "Tarantella" is followed Monday night by "The Blinking Madonna and Other Miracles," a fictionalized documentary about another Italian-American woman who videotapes a statue of the Virgin Mary that appears to blink. These are thoughtfully shaped works about a generation of young adults wondering how to absorb religion, superstition and the notion of family itself into their ultramodern lives.

"Tarantella" is by far the richer and more sophisticated of the two, anchored in a subtle, wonderfully natural performance by Ms. Sorvino as Diana. With refreshing honesty, the film illuminates her mixed feelings about her past, sometimes in fantasy sequences. Diana envisions herself standing in a long dress in a wheat field and thinks, "One generation from the word peasant, one mother away >from village gossip, one language away from hidden feelings and ugly caricatures."

The director, Helen DeMichiel, captures the Old World texture of Diana's neighborhood without condescension. And Rose Gregorio is a soothing presence as Pina, the friend who helps Diana understand the secret her mother and grandmother carried.

Diana's mother's tale, which recalls an arranged marriage in Italy, is told through a puppet show. Though the film's dialogue can be awkwardly formal, its fantasies and puppets offer a surprisingly smooth way to enter the characters' minds and stories. Diana's mother used to warn her, "The curious monkey finds only trouble." In "Tarantella" she finds a warm, unsentimental appreciation of her heritage.

Martin Scorsese's first commercially-released, independently directed feature film, MEAN STREETS (1973), a powerful, disturbing depiction of the life of a few (atypical?) young ItalianAmerican men in a particular ItalianAmerican community, has come to be widely construed as THE depiction of the ItalianAmerican urban experience. While I found the film to be an impressive first effort, it revealed the directors lack of funds and of experience in many small details--not the least of which was the Tuscan accent of the purported "godfather," Cesare Danova. Even more to the point, it didn't strike me as being very "Italian." (Begging the reader's indulgence, a brief biographical note: I grew up in Italy (Roma, Torino, Napoli) and came to the United States when I was almost 18 years old.) The characters in the film, the community depicted didn't trigger any sympathetic echoes in my mind. These were people I didn't really recognize. They struck me as being closer to the inhabitants of inner-city America, be they Hispanic or African-American, than to the people I had grown up with in Italy. >From the comments in this thread, more than a few Italian Americans do not recognize themselves or their communities in Scorsese's MEAN STREETS either. And, while they would like to see depictions of their communities from which the ethnic traits have not been stripped, almost universally they want something they can recognize, and not the aberrant and atypical behavior depicted in such films.

TARANTELLA, Helen De Michiel's first feature film, is the corrective for which so many Italian Americans have been looking. If Scorsese's MEAN STREETS was a story of aberrant young ItalianAmerican males, TARANTELLA is a story about an infinitely more representative young ItalianAmerican woman, much as THE JOY LUCK CLUB is more reminiscent of the ChineseAmerican experience than, say, RUMBLE IN THE BRONX. I jest, but only in part. While Scorsese has gone on to become universally acknowledged as one of the great directors of all times, De Michiel's first work is more nuanced and artistically mature than his.

I think that the first thing which struck me about this film is that, unlike the characters in the overwhelming majority of ItalianAmerican films, the characters in TARANTELLA reminded me of Italians and Italian Americans I have known over the years. Here, finally, we find no hint mobsters lurking in the shadows; here neighbors are overwhelmingly decent, hard working people. Here, even the clichés (the bocce-playing men, to cite only one example) feel real, new, fresh.

As for Mira Sorvino, I don't think anyone who enjoyed her delightful performance in MIGHTY APHRODITE will argue that she did not deserve her Oscar. And yet, after seeing TARANTELLA one realizes that her Oscar-winning performance merely scratched the surface of her acting abilities. We all know the camera loves her. But here she goes far beyond that. Here, in the role of Diane Di Sorella, she appears at first as we have come to expect her, as the all-American beauty: tall, slender, clad in slim-hipped blue jeans. As the film opens, she is living with her long-haired boyfriend Matt (Matthew Lillard). She has an open face, the face of one who, as Rosa might have said, is American, unafraid. But as the story unfolds, beneath that open countenance the shadows of her oppressive heritage ebb and flow: poverty, hunger, la miseria, fear, and an oppression which ranges from a thousand-year history of foreign domination to the more personal misery of arranged marriages, abuse, and thankless toil.

It is this heritage that Diane at first doesn't want to acknowledge. She wants to be "American," free, modern. But slowly she is drawn into the mystery of her mother's life when her mother's best friend, Pina De Nora (Rose Gregorio) brings her the beautiful "libro di casa," the "house books that Diana's mother, Silvia, kept over the years. Diana can't read it because it is written in Italian, and so she has to turn to Pina. Her readings are represented visually as dramatic, stylized, traditional Italian puppet shows.

The use of color in this part of the film, the unconventional narrative technique, the sense of foreboding, the absence of the conventional deus ex machina who solves all problems for the viewer, all reminded me of Bertolucci's SPIDER'S STRATAGEM.

The difference, and here once again I am reminded of THE JOY LUCK CLUB, is that the protagonist eventually triumphs against both the traditional maschilist oppression and over the equally oppressive new freedoms as a result of her reconnection to her mother and to her gender.

More than any film I have seen, this film celebrates the heritage of Italian women. If you are a man, Italian, ItalianAmerican, American, whatever, traditional or modern, this film will make you squirm. To be more precise, it made me squirm. And yet, or perhaps precisely for these reasons, I feel that it is an important work, one which must be seen and discussed.

For more Information drop me a line

Ben Lawton <benjamin.r.lawton.1@purdue.edu>