Puccini for Beginners
Directed by Maria Maggenti
“Doesn’t anyone realize that love is a smokescreen to keep us from facing the real issues of the world?” asks Allegra (Elizabeth Reaser), the heroine of the lesbian romantic comedy Puccini For Beginners. Allegra then name-checks the issues: “Global warming, poverty, famine, floods, tornados, tsunamis, real estate development, gated communities.” But writer-director Maria Maggenti promptly ignores them all. Allegra’s facetiousness is Maggenti’s real concern; she’s infatuated with it. After Allegra breaks up with her girlfriend, she sits alone in a coffee shop and mopes: “I’m narcissistic, passive-aggressive, self-absorbed and incapable of connecting.” Even more facetiousness. This alerts you that Puccini for Beginners is meant to be charming.
It takes a meager film like Puccini for Beginners to explicitly reveal a serious problem common to indie movies. So many are made to appease a fatuous, educated audience that knows the hot-button issues but, really, is only interested in itself.
“I have a rent-stabilized apartment!” Allegra exclaims, identifying with New York’s white middle class. She’s an archetypal Woody Allen character—a published novelist and an habitué of the Metropolitan Opera—but relocated to the East Village for indie cred. Allegra’s romantic conflict as she becomes involved with Philip (Justin Kirk), a Columbia philosophy prof, and flighty glass-blower Grace (Gretchen Mol) is just a smokescreen to keep us from realizing the class issues that prevail in the indie world. (There’s added distraction in the appealing cast: Reaser’s diminutive version of Sandrine Bonnaire’s brainy intransigence; Kirk suggests a laid-back Chis Kattan; and though the bloom is off Gretchen Mol, she’s a fragile, sensual presence.)
Puccini for Beginners might have been a more interesting picture if it scrutinized gay romance as an experience outside the middle-class norm. 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.
Instead of developing her own perspective on how modern, young, urban women flounder between social and sexual choices, Maggenti follows the least exploratory and original models. She has conceived Puccini for Lovers along the lines of a Rob Reiner or Nora Ephron movie. The opening credit sequence of downtown Manhattan sights even features a Reiner/Ephron-type showtune. Maggenti exhibits a suspicious yearning for class that begins with Allegra at a Met performance of Puccini’s Turandot. When a soprano sings, “No man shall ever possess me,” Maggenti cuts to Allegra holding hands with her date. Gayness and snobbery hold hands.
Maggenti’s social view becomes problematic as she stages scenes of anonymous urban turmoil in the background of Allegra’s solipsism. These “funny” episodes on the periphery of the love farce aren’t really funny; there’s no sense of social connection, responsibility or feeling. Allegra’s romantic troubles are resolved with glib wistfulness. But when an elderly literary couple informs Allegra about her concluding quotation of Emily Dickinson, she ignores them and remains oblivious; Maggenti doesn’t make a Dickinson affinity. Instead, Allegra recalls the self-absorption of an Andrew Bujalski character. Is this what indie really means? No longer a popular art form but a coterie’s self-indulgence?
