Movies
True Love
A New York comedy about a universal problem: how far into seriousness a relationship can get before either party gives it much thought. (In this case, all the way to the altar, but most people will at some point in some relationship have gone thoughtlessly far enough -- out to dinner, into bed -- to give themselves a point of comparison.) Even under the license of comic exaggeration, the movie waits too long to start up the thought process. And most of the joke material, although delivered in a distinctive Bronx bray, is conventional battle-of-the-sexes stuff: guys this, girls that. (Guys are drinking beer and throwing up; girls are gabbing, and cuddling on the couch; etc.) Most of it, too, is not all that funny, but is compensatingly sad. The huge and monstrous social paradox whereby each sex tends to live with those of the same sex but live for those of the opposite is persuasively, and pessimistically, laid out. And the detailed ethnic documentation of New York Italians, although it may provide a too-easy escape-hatch for outsiders ("I don't sound like that, therefore I'm not like that"), is unblinkingly candid without ever being gogglingly so. Directed by a woman (Nancy Savoca) but co-written by her and her husband (Richard Guay) to ensure a semblance of fairness, True Lovewould make a valuable supplement to any high-school Sex Ed. class. That it was marketed as art-house material, instead of as shopping-mall multiplex material, is a statement in itself on the health of modern romance. Annabella Sciorra, Ron Eldard. 1989.
Reader Rating:
MPAA Rating: R
