Interview. Maria Maggenti.

Michael Guillén introduces his latest interview for us at the main site: "In 1995 writer-director Maria Maggenti turned conventional narrative on its ear by melding it with a lesbian teen romance, creating The Incredibly True Adventure of Two Girls in Love. Over a decade later, Maggenti tweaks the romantic comedy once again in her InDiGent production of Puccini for Beginners, this time limning gender fluidity with laughs and posing fresh questions for an evolving queer community."

Related: "This film is a charmer," writes Marcy Dermansky, "a genuine screwball comedy, set in springtime New York, a fantasy Manhattan where everyone lives in gorgeous brownstones, takes taxis, and drinks wine out of goblets. No matter. It is a romantic comedy."

Updated through 2/7.

"It captures the neurotic self-absorption of a class of academic and literary New Yorkers who put enormous stock in precisely verbalizing every opinion and emotion, using terms like 'paradigm shift,'" writes Stephen Holden in the New York Times. "At the same time, it carries off the difficult feat of making this tiny segment of the chattering class more or less likable."

"Maggenti writes hilarious dialogue and is one of the few genuine intellectuals in this business," writes Salon's Andrew O'Hehir. The cast is great, and he laughed. "Sounds great, right? What's the problem? Well, I don't know how to say this nicely, so I won't try. I'm not sure Maggenti could direct a cardboard box to lie on the sidewalk."

Writing at Slant, Nick Schager finds that Puccini "yearns to be a bisexual screwball comedy but turns out to be only a simplistic sitcom stretched to feature length."

Nick Pinkerton for indieWIRE: "Puccini deliberately positions itself in the lineage of the screwball comedy... but any given episode of in-its-prime Gilmore Girls does that legacy more honor, not to mention shows more 'filmic' chops."

Update, 2/7: "Puccini for Beginners might have been a more interesting picture if it scrutinized gay romance as an experience outside the middle-class norm," suggests Armond White in the New York Press:

Last year, critic B Ruby Rich praised Julien Hernandez's Broken Sky for "Uncompromising and groundbreaking portraits of the young characters outside the mainstream." But the way the mainstream press stubbornly ignored Broken Sky suggested that it wasn't so much put-off by Hernandez's gay content as it was simply (perhaps unconsciously) devoted to promoting mainstream interests. Puccini for Beginners is insistently facetious - filled with stylistic digressions such as subtitles that comically comment on the characters, freeze-frames that allow for jokey voice-over asides and other too-cute formal devices. They're part of the compromise Maggenti has made as an indie filmmaker seeking mainstream attention and success.

Posted by dwhudson at February 3, 2007 12:28 PM