Beyond the Multiplex

"Romance & Cigarettes": Singing garbagemen, wronged housewives and a lingerie vixen in a hallucinatory Queens opera
There's at least one point of continuity between the place where John Turturro lives now, on a peaceful, leafy street lined with gracious brownstones in the Park Slope neighborhood of Brooklyn, N.Y., and the place where he grew up, a few miles away in the working-class Rosedale district of Queens. Both neighborhoods lie directly under the flight path toward LaGuardia airport; as Turturro and I sat under a spreading old tree in his backyard on a lovely late-summer afternoon, jets flew overhead low enough that we could identify the airline by color.

Turturro's childhood in a crowded Italian-American household has shaped his entire acting career, which encompasses more than 70 film and television roles over 28 years. Whether he's playing a Jewish intellectual like the title character in the Coen brothers' "Barton Fink" or an ignorant pizza slinger like Pino in Spike Lee's "Do the Right Thing," his characters are often New York archetypes, the kids or grandkids of immigrants with itchy mannerisms and something to prove to the world. His speaking voice has an old-school outer-borough purity you don't hear much anymore; the word "man" comes out as a two-syllable nasal diphthong, and "humor" is pronounced with a distinctive Y-sound at the beginning.

It's presumptuous to say this about somebody with such a long and varied career, but it seems to me that everything in Turturro's life and career has led up to "Romance & Cigarettes." It's a dazzling, bittersweet concoction, directed with a verve and confidence Turturro only hinted at in "Mac" and "Illuminata" (his two earlier directing efforts). If the roots of its story about a marriage gone sour lie deep in Turturro's childhood, I think only a filmmaker with the experience and perspective of a middle-aged family man could create something that's simultaneously so daring and so compassionate.

"One thing I do know," Turturro says, after finishing a sandwich brought to him by Katherine Borowitz, his wife of more than 20 years. "I know whence these people come. I grew up in a neighborhood like that, a neighborhood with all small houses, planes going overhead and a house full of music. Everybody in our neighborhood had marital strife, in different ways. I used to eavesdrop on my mom's conversations with her girlfriends, I heard a lot of things and I was very interested in the women's point of view. A lot of movies, you know, you've got one woman. We've got everybody from Mandy Moore to Mary-Louise Parker to Aida Turturro to Kate Winslet to Susan Sarandon. Those are powerful people." (Moore, Parker and Aida Turturro, John's cousin, perform a killer cover version of "I Want Candy.")

While the characters in "Romance & Cigarettes" burst into song at implausible moments, singing along (in voices of varying quality) with Tom Jones and James Brown and Bruce Springsteen, the emotions they're expressing are based in a gritty, largely realistic story about marital infidelity and the prodigious loneliness that can come with middle-aged married life. The story, says Turturro, came "from painful things I'd been sitting on for a long time. I hope I've expressed them in a way that's accessible and a way that's exhilarating, where you can mine the humor out of something horrible. I like all kinds of humor, but the humor that makes me laugh the most, by far, is when I recognize something."

Born in 1957, Turturro grew up in an Italian-Catholic milieu where divorce or separation were virtually unacceptable. "People stuck together," he says. "There were good marriages with problems, and then there were marriages where I don't know why they ever got married. But people didn't so much have the option of getting divorced, or just leaving, in large part because they were poor."

The marriage of Nick and Kitty Murder (played by Gandolfini and Sarandon without a hint of caricature) lies somewhere between troubled and why-the-hell-did-they-ever-get-hitched, especially after Nick meets Tula (Kate Winslet), a working-class sex kitten from the north of England who works in a lingerie shop and talks so dirty that even Nick is horrified. (You probably never expected to hear Winslet utter the line: "Give me that fuckin' fairy dust!" Yes, the context is exactly what you think.) Winslet works magic with this impossible character, finally turning a woman who seems like a projection of male fantasy into a flesh-and-blood creation, as beset by love and longing as Nick or Kitty are.

Expressing characters' internal emotional state through music is of course one of the oldest ideas in the dramatic arts, and Turturro is clearly borrowing from various sources, most notably from early 20th-century Italian opera and from the brilliant miniseries of English television writer Dennis Potter. "I mean, the Greek plays were serious plays that had music and dance and a chorus," he says. "Film hasn't always kept up with other art forms, with literature or painting or music. There are only so many stories to tell, and it's more a question of how you choose to tell it. We see so much fantasy in film, but there's not much fantasy that comes out of reality. Even the great folk tales, the greatest fairy tales, come out of reality. They burst out with imagination but they come from the ground."

The idea of dramatizing the way ordinary people use pop music -- the dramas we all create in our heads when we sing along with Elvis or Aretha in the shower -- came to Turturro after he inserted a brief fantasy sequence in his last film, "Illuminata." He described it to a friend, who suggested he watch Potter's legendary series "The Singing Detective," which features lip-synced versions of pop hits from the 1930s and '40s. As soon as he saw Potter's work, Turturro says, "I knew I didn't want to watch too much of it. When I read a book of interviews with him, I realized that he came from a poor background. He talks a lot about the power of popular music" for working-class people. "I didn't want to be beholden to his set of rules: He only used a certain period of music, he was very strict about it. But I realized that he was onto something."

"Romance & Cigarettes" establishes its own world and its own set of rules. Although the tragicomic mode is not so distant from Potter's, Turturro's film unfolds in a specifically American context, a vision of working-class New York that isn't quite now or any other precise moment, a vision suspended somewhere between the '60s and the '90s. Turturro says he listened to an Etta James song and read a Charles Bukowski poem every day before he started writing, and that strangely consonant combination defines his movie pretty well.

Emotion in Potter's world is very English, rather minimal and arch and restrained, whereas the sexuality and hatred and hilarity of "Romance & Cigarettes" are bigger than life. "I think this movie has the passions of opera," Turturro says. "Opera is a heightened form; somebody always dies, but there's also a lot of humor."

As that suggests, this film's final vision is a rueful and tragic one. Maybe that's what scared the studio off, rather than Winslet's randy one-liners or the chorus of firefighters cavorting to Buena Vista Social Club's "Cuarto de Tula" or James Gandolfini's not-too-bad singing voice. Whatever the reason, this is a once-in-a-lifetime underdog American classic, disgracefully shelved. Do whatever you have to do to see it. "There's all different mysteries in life: birth and death," Turturro told me. "But how people are able to love another person over a period of time, it's a real mystery. It's the biggest mystery around." Then he went back inside his lovely Brooklyn house to his wife and kids, while the jet planes kept on roaring overhead.

"Romance & Cigarettes" opens Sept. 7 at Film Forum in New York. Other engagements, and DVD release, should follow.

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