Dan Jardine

For Roseanna

Apollo Score: 77
Users' Rating: 74 (16 votes)

Italia: is any nation more romanticized on film? In recent years, Italy has been particularly well treated by British period pieces like Room With A View, Where Angels Fear to Tread, A Month By the Lake, and Enchanted April, where Italy becomes a magical land where repressed upper class Brits go to have their inhibitions peeled back  like the skin of a luscious grape.

For Roseanna (aka Roseanna’s Grave), however, is more in the tradition of Il Postino and Mediterraneo, as it follows the lives and loves of odd-ball citizens of a small Italian community. The film is beautiful to look at: both people and places are gorgeous. However, there are times when you can feel the screenwriters invoking these
earlier film’s spirits, particularly when For Roseanna strains to be both quirky and pithy.

 Still, For Roseannna is a lovely little film with enough ahhhhh - sweet touches, fall-down funny scenes and kleenex-dabbing moments to overcome some of its minor flaws. The film’s plot hinges around the attempts of Marcello (hilariously played by Jean Reno) to save one of the three remaining sites in the church cemetery for his beloved, dying wife, played with earthiness by Mercedes Ruehl (but for one so sick, she sure looks like a million bucks).

The movie’s best and worst farcical moments revolve around Marcello’s manic attempts to keep the citizens of his hamlet alive long enough to save the plot space.  Accompanying these slapstick scenes are others with his wife that resonate with romanticism and sadness. The subplots vary in quality and appropriateness: the plot
involving the gangster’s search for his money is both hilarious and absurd, while the plot involving the bitter
ex-suitor of Roseanna is well acted, but belongs in a different, more serious movie.

Regardless, For Roseanna is a touching, well acted and sumptuous piece of celluloid.

Starring Jean Reno, Mercedes Ruehl.
Written by Saul Turteltaub.
Directed by Paul Weiland. (STC) Opens July 4.

Summer has arrived with its usual sense of crushing predictability. Idiots are buying poisoned hot dogs on the street, kids are frying themselves to a crisp on the beaches and geezers are setting fire to each other in the old folks home, as the usual "you think this is hot? I'll show you hot!" conversations get out of hand. And, as usual, a romantic comedy about those zany, exotic Mediterranean types has arrived in the theatres as a low-key antidote to the typical summer blockbusters.

In the past, Mediterranean comedies have generally been fairly good. La Belle Epoque, Il Postino, Barcelona and A Summer In La Goulette were all very funny, and even the vacuous Stealing Beauty gave audiences the chance to stare at Liv Tyler for an hour and a half. The latest entry in this genre is called For Roseanna, and it too has a few good moments.

An American production set in a small Italian village, it stars Jean Reno as a beleaguered restaurant owner who is desperately trying to save one of the last remaining cemetery plots in town for his wife (Mercedes Ruehl), who is slowly dying from heart disease. Reno is best known in North America for his role as a ruthless hit man in Luc Besson's The Professional, and there is something funny about seeing him trying to stop people from smoking and drinking and committing suicide in his frantic attempt to keep the town's mortality rate down.

But as a romantic comedy, the film comes up short. As if to offset the black humor of the cemetery situation, the filmmakers have made the love between the husband and the dying wife seem utterly sweet and perfect and lighthearted, and so of course it is not particularly funny. And the burgeoning love affair between the wife's younger sister and a local lawyer is also too perfect for words.

The only impediment to their match is strictly external -- the lawyer happens to be the nephew of the grouchy old man who is refusing to sell his land to the church so that more cemetery plots may be created. Since an overabundance of petty jealousies and disreputable longings is usually what makes these Mediterranean comedies tick, the shortage in this department is keenly felt. And while For Roseanna may be in the same genre as films like La Belle Epoque and Il Postino, it is not really in the same league. -- T.L.

EMPIRE

ROSEANNA'S GRAVE
Bob McCabe

USA/UK 1996
Director: Paul Weiland
1 hour 37 minutes

In Travento, a small Italian village, Roseanna's final wish is that she be buried next to her daughter in the local
graveyard. But with only three plots left and the ageing village population looking none too healthy, Roseanna's
devoted husband Marcello has to work overtime to deliver her request, preserving life wherever he can and
hiding the odd corpse.

"There's a good deal to like here, Weiland effectively captures the atmosphere and intricacies of rural Italy...
quite charming."

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