On Film

...During the first hour, the dreamy, tentative mood of the film intrigues us and toys with our expectations...

...Still, there is a well-developed plot behind the subtle scheme for securing our involvement...

...she is sexually inhibited, and he is having an affair with Ann's barmaid sister Cynthia (Laura San Giacomo...

...Having received the tales of the flight from Italy and the talking pig with a wonderment usually reserved for Biblical legends, he is the natural chronicler of the Luccas' fortunes...

...And Graham, while taping Ann (who shows up at his home on a dare) learns he can speak about himself, too, when Ann seizes the camera and turns it on him...

...He did not need a higher budget for sex, lies, and videotape...

...In Queen of Hearts (is it a coincidence that both movies are about people of Italian descent...

...Amiel's daringly nonrealistic approach plays out its home truths in a passionate dramma giocoso...

...The result is as deeply gratifying as a well-sung aria, or a bedtime story about a faraway place told in a magically foreign accent...

...Then we witness the revelations of each character's secret activities to the others...

...Both as writer and director he hides his artifice, disclosing the personalities of his characters in a way that tricks us into forgetting that the story we are watching unfold is fiction...

...Then they make a stunning leap into the void, expecting to die, but instead land safely in a haytruck...

...Queen of Hearts is unabashedly a fairy tale (and it is photographed as such by Mike Southon, distilled onto the screen in the brown and gold colors of a Sienese painting...

...Like the old storyteller, Eddie loves to spin a good yarn...

...John discovers that Cynthia has let Graham record her and that she was aroused by talking about sex on tape...

...Although it does not mean "lucky" in Italian, Grisoni uses the sound of the word to suggest chance and felicitous coincidence...

...The man, of course, is Barbariccia, who is still in pursuit of Rosa and has followed the Luccas to London to cause as much trouble for them as he can...

...The London where Danilo and Rosa settle down in the 1950s is a hard place to make a living...

...With the loan from friend Mario's appliance shop of a coffee machine—lovingly dubbed la bella macchina—the Luccas' star is soon rising...

...Yet the work is hardly predictable, in large part because we are unused to portraits of family solidarity...

...But Soderbergh has steered us toward a Big Theme in his small, modest work, something American features rarely do without fanfare and prestige...

...The spaces between these people as they make love, manipulate each other or merely talk in immaculate rooms seem vast, and the atmosphere is hypnotic...

...our imagination supplies what the film doesn't show...

...Ann learns of John's affair with Cynthia...

...Weshouldbe relieved, however, to have our disbelief back again after such a rocky emotional ride...

...If he does not entirely convince us that he stands uncynically behind the relatively happy ending, his very hip-ness could be to blame...

...Indeed, the dialogue—almost exclusively sex-talk—would sound like psychobabble were it not for our total absorption in the characters' very familiar problems...

...Even he, we learn, has the feelings of a credulous child—"But you were promised to me, " he weeps helplessly to Rosa, who will never be his...

...Although he touches your life, you can't touch him back...

...All the scenes you want and expect to see in a film of this kind—conflicts between rivals, siblings, lovers, schemers—take place in good old-fashioned style...

...Must be...

...But this is not really Louisiana, this is anywhere—a colordrained "anywhere" in which people drink white wine and iced tea from tall, clear tumblers, dress mostly in black and white, and watch videos in a pale yellow, sparsely furnished apartment...

...The bare-bones plot is on the surface a simple one...

...Portrait of a young videophile as Mr...

...Soderbergh crafts his first film with precocious skill...

...Small country, small films," hesaid...

...Hope and love are what redeem the Luccas and thwart Barbariccia, making him at the end the victim of his own selfish dream...

...Eddie's voice guides us through the family's colorful, eccentric lives and prepares us for the sad turn of events that overtakes them...

...When Barbariccia becomes a wealthy nightclub nabob, he purchases Mario's store and repossesses the bella macchina that had been lent out to the Luccas...

...Soon they board a ship headed for England, accompanied by Rosa's sharp-tongued grandmother (Eileen Way) as chaperone...

...Gradually, he exacts his elaborate revenge, partly by alienating the ambitious Bruno from his unsophisticated parents with the promise of women and cash...

...The movie redeems the villian, too...

...Soderbergh is finally not ambiguous at all about what his characters stand for—Ann/fear, Graham/truth, Cynthia/defiance, John/deceit...

...Much of the film's mood of enchantment derives from the voiceover narration by Danilo's son Eduardo, or Eddie the dreamer (Ian Hawkes...

...The coin is a fivepound note that Danilo gets as a tip and gambles into a wad large enough to buy the Lucky Cafe...

...Moonstruck, for instance, is one box-office hit that succeeded marvelously at persuading us to believe its concluding toast, "Alia famiglia...

...Viewing the film feels like a dream you might have while floating in a sensory deprivation tank...

...Set in Baton Rouge, with some scenes shot in temperatures of 100 + degrees, its spare look hardly captures any Southern flavor, and the only heat we see on screen is generated by its cast of four principals...

...Soderbergh would be terrific writing for radio...

...The film has a sense of extravagance that is strikingly un-British, though, perhaps because its characters are Italian...

...In a moment that is so grandly melodramatic it might have been taken from a libretto, the two run up a church tower to escape the butcher Barbariccia (Vittorio Amandola), to whom Rosa has been unwillingly betrothed...

...Moreover, given how expertly sex, lies, and videotape seduces us with Cool, we are surprised to see it veer toward a moralizing ending that in a moment of epiphany has Ann surrendering to her desire and Graham conquering his impotence...

...Sad to say, this catches us off-guard...

...Throughout the involved and charmingly improbable plot twists in the second half of the film, Eddie's faith in true love that never dies and in the wisdom of one's parents is affirmed...

...He is the Rainmaker with a camcorder, or any movie antihero who serves as a plot catalyst, and Spader endows him with an elusive, otherwordly quality, as if he were a visitor from a distant planet...

...Yet because we are told so little about these people's exterior lives, and so much about their interior doubts and desires, we can shape them in our own image...

...By opening with Ann's therapy session, for example, he creates the illusion of eavesdropping and undetected observation that not only has the effect of making us invisible onlookers in his tiny /eujc-documentary but participants as well...

...Soderbergh has called sex, lies, and videotape a film about "accountability," and he has said it is highly autobiographical in the emotions it depicts, albeit not the incidents...

...We don't mind the movie's occasional clichés intruding upon its laid-back style—the wife's discovery of the other woman's pearl earring is the most outrageous...

...Danilo's surname is Lucca...

...Graham's peculiar obsession changes the lives of the other three, as his prying camera leads them to revise their perceptions of intimacy and betrayal in love and friendship...

...Written by Tony Grisoni, Queen of Hearts effectively employs the conventions of kitchen-sink drama the British cinema has always excelled in...

...A colleague at a well-known film magazine once told me with conviction that the British can only make little pictures...

...A harmonious family is nowadays more a tarnished ideal than a reality, and as an artistic subject it is often treated so dully in grubby films of domestic realism that most audiences welcome an offbeat, big-hearted handling with open arms...

...Otherwise, the film becomes little more than a party game for the white middle-class cinéphiles who are presumably the audience it is primarily attracting...

...He adores dispensing espresso alongside his brother Bruno (Jimmy Lambert), his sisters and his grandmother...

...We assume our talented young culture heroes will remain blas...

...Yuppie lawyer John (Peter Gallagher) and meticulous homemaker Ann (Andie MacDo well) are unhappily married...

...But while waiting tables in a Soho eatery Danilo has a miraculous vision that leads the family to prosperity—a roast pig's head comes to life and warns him to " fear the man with the knife" and "trust the coin...

...Danilo and Rosa (played by Nottingham-born Joseph Long and the exquisite Italian actress Anita Zagaria) are star-crossed lovers in a small southern Italian town...

...These are the determining forces in the family's life, not the whiskey and the dole that shape the drab existence of so many characters in British films...

...Spock...

...Now Amiel has done Queen of Hearts, his first theatrical feature, a satisfying fable about faith and fortune that places Amiel alongside Stephen Frears, Neil Jordan and Philip Saville as one of the most lyrical British filmmakers of the '80s...

...They are like skeletal constructs whose human qualities Soderbergh relies on us to flesh out from our own experience...

...Most of all, though, he favors Nonno (Vittorio Duse), the grand father known in the family for his fantastic anecdotes whom Eddie models himself after once Nonno arrives in London...

...David Lean and Michael Powell apparently slipped his mind, along with the gifted phantasmagorist Jon Amiel, director of the seven-hour Singing Detective and other television films...

...We do not expect a lesson about how important it is for people to make contact with each other from the writer-director of a postmodern movie with a lower-case title...

...Remarks like, "the object of your obsession is something negative over which you have no control" will break up some viewers anyway...

...Into this mess comes drifter Graham (James Spader), John's old college chum, whose passive, introverted personality expresses itself through the videotapes he makes of women discussing their sex lives with him...

...On Screen FAITH, HOPE AND SEXUALITY BY JOHN MORRONE BY turning its low budget into an asset, Steven Soderbergh's sex, lies, and videotape ends up being the most substantial minimalist film of many a year...

...Can a message this conventional really be Soderbergh's point of view...