MAMBO ITALIANO makes such a good start before it devolves into the bland humor found in the type of second-tier type of sitcom that its hero, Angelo, dreams of writing.
The story begins with Angelo (Luke Kirby) on the phone to the Gay Hotline, spilling his family history to a volunteer who can barely get a work in edgewise. It’s a hackneyed flashback device, but one handled surprisingly well, with writer and director Emile Gaudreault putting an operatic spin to the episodes full of candy colors, ominous rainstorms, and melodrama handled with a light but heartfelt touch. When Nino moves out of the house at 27, his mother wails while his father, red-eyed and stoic, tells him to go and not look back as music swells and the camera spins in for vertiginous close-ups and spin pans..
Obviously there is much humor, insight even, to be gained by closely observing the nuances of Italian-Canadian family life. Angelo is in a perfect position to observe, being the son of immigrant parents who were shooting for the United States when they left Italy, but, due to an unfortunate misunderstanding of the world “America” ended up in Canada. The French-speaking part, something that papa Gino (Paul Sorvino) hasn’t gotten over in the 40 years since it happened. The atmosphere in the Barberini home is one of serene chaos as sister Anna puts it. A place where everyone screams but nobody means it. They also get smacked on the back of the head a lot, but no one takes it personally.
The serenity of that chaos is lost, however, when Angelo first moves out of the house at age 27, with all the attendant angst on the part of his parents, and then falls in love with another guy from the neighborhood, Nino (a smoothly hunky Peter Miller), and then decides to out them both. This is where the film emerges from the flashback and into the real reel world, and where the humor becomes more forced, the situations more obvious, and the inevitable confrontations leaden given the tone of the rest of the film tries to maintain. Sure, the blustery recriminations Gino and wife Maria (Ginette Reno) hurl at each other have a certain oddball quality with the way they continually use the Italian “homosexuale” with full accent and high dudgeon, but there’s not much there that we haven’t seen before with schtick like Gino blaming Maria for not letting him force Angelo to play hockey when he was a kid. There’s precious little to amuse beyond Sorvino and Reno’s admittedly excellent timing and soulful eyes.
Kirby and Miller are cute couple with an unfussy sort of chemistry that makes us root for them even in the face of pushy mothers and their fix-ups with the opposite sex. That sweet quality from the opening flashback holds true for their relationship even when the tone of the film as a whole becomes a little less consistent. There is also a nice sparkle to Anna. Sure, she’s trapped at home in the traditional Italian way until she marries, but Claudia Ferri twists the incipient madness of such bombastic claustrophobia into a sly rebelliousness that seems to be biding its time for a full coup d’etat. When Angelo worries that telling his parents he’s gay would kill them, you can see the Machiavellian wheels turning long before she pipes up with a deadpan “Tell them.”
As you watch MAMBO ITALIANO make its precipitous slide into mediocrity, you have to wonder which was the fluke, the piquancy or the plop. It’s never mean-spirited enough to irk, but the disappointment of its failure leaves a sour aftertaste that kills what joy there was.
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