Romance & Cigarettes.

"Romance & Cigarettes, like One from the Heart, is an interiorized musical set somewhere between stark lower middle-class reality and all-consuming artifice," writes Michael Koresky at indieWIRE. "[A]lso like that film, it's not entirely successful in its aims, often poking around rather than rooting to its characters' emotional core. Yet the labor of [John] Turturro's love is evident in nearly every frame."

"More than two years after its original intended North American release date, this bawdy, ambitious musical has finally wended its way to a single screen." Franz Lidz tells quite a tale in the New York Times. "At times I've felt like jumping out a window," Turturro tells him. "A paean to the twin pleasures of lust and tobacco, Romance & Cigarettes is an ensemble piece that centers on a construction worker (James Gandolfini) caught between his wife (Susan Sarandon) and his mistress (Kate Winslet), a salty seductress with curves of Titanic proportions."

Updated through 9/10.

Oh, yes, he did.

"I suppose the film has 'marketing issues,'" sighs Andrew O'Hehir in Salon. "It's a peculiar blend of baroque fantasy and working-class realism; it veers from erotic farce to wrenching domestic drama and back again; it's a musical comedy without a conventional happy ending; it's a love story about the most difficult kind of love, between two people who've been together almost forever and hurt each other almost irreparably. But all those things are also what make Romance & Cigarettes so great. It's the most original picture by an American director I've seen this year, and also the most delightful." And he talks with Turturro.

"The characters in John Turturro's directorial efforts (Mac, Illuminata) have a yen for treating choleric fits like arias, a tendency unwisely literalized in Romance & Cigarettes," writes Fernando F Croce at Slant. The result "feels like a Jacques Demy film played at the wrong speed."

"Deeply felt, but not especially deep, it works best at its most passionate, which could probably be said of most other musicals as well," writes Matt Singer at IFC News. "But most other musicals don't also include shockingly vulgar language, dancing garbage men, pencil-thin mustaches and the most sexualized fire hose in cinema history.... You kind of have to be as nutty as John Turturro to appreciate it."

In the Voice, Michelle Orange finds it "less a story than a state of mind, and less a musical than a meditation on how we instinctively set our lives to music, if not other musicals; unfortunately, it is just shy of convincing on both counts."

"Turturro's point: Our shared pop heritage is wishful and poignant," writes Armond White in the New York Press. "Taking the movie-musical seriously puts Turturro miles ahead of the recent awful Hollywood musical resurgence - Chicago, Moulin Rouge, Dreamgirls, Hairspray - that confuse personal musical expression with camp."

For Filmmaker, Nick Dawson talks with Turturro "about the film's difficulties, the influence of Charles Bukowski, Dennis Potter and Etta James, and working with non-driving actor Christopher Walken."

Online listening tip #1. Turturro is a guest on the Leonard Lopate Show.

Online listening tip #2. "This week on the IFC News podcast, we speculate on what led to the demise of the musical, and look into how the burgeoning genre of the indie musical plays up the disconnect between a song and dance number and a harsher reality."

Updates, 9/10: "There is more raw vitality pumping through Romance & Cigarettes... than in a dozen perky high school musicals," writes Stephen Holden in the New York Times. "This is a movie in which a dirty mind is a good thing. Call it 'The Singing Id.' Prudes, be forewarned."

Online listening tip. Andrew O'Hehir's conversation with Turturro.

Posted by dwhudson at September 6, 2007 2:47 PM