Oh, The Irony: aGLIFF Presents Puccini for Beginners

Delightful Irony #1: Opening night at the start of the showcase film screening at the 19th Annual aGLIFF, a female voice loudly implores other members of the boisterous, predominantly female, near-capacity audience to “be quiet.” No. No, please don’t be quiet. As the opening credits for Puccini for Beginners begin to roll and the audience settles in, the point becomes all too clear: this—the film itself, our participation, everything that will happen in the next eight days—is all about voices too long silent.

Delicious Irony #2: The urbane Puccini for Beginners, written and directed by Maria Maggenti, is billed as a “screwball comedy,” and indeed it is. Allegra Castigleone (Elizabeth Reaser), a self-avowed opera-loving commitment-phobe, has deep, deep relationship troubles. After her girlfriend Sam (Julianne Nicholson) leaves her for, of all things, a man, Allegra’s world becomes a relationship maelstrom--she finds herself, inexplicably, attracted to Phillip (Justin Kirk), a philosophy PhD at Columbia, who has ended a long-term relationship with his girlfriend, Grace (Gretchen Moll). When, in a charmingly self-reflexive moment, Grace and Allegra meet at a screwball comedy film festival, what follows are hijinks of Shakespearean proportions. Of special note are the performances turned in by Jennifer Dundas as Allegra’s goofily weepy platonic girlfriend, Molly, and by Tina Benko as Allegra’s Yale-educated misandrist ex-girlfriend, Nell. The film, on the whole, is intelligent and well-crafted while not being above the occasional sight-gag involving, say, a “pleasure appliance.”

The irony, you ask? What is so ironic about that? The irony involves Maggenti’s choice of genre, screwball comedy. See, the beauty of the genre is that, no matter what kinds of subversive, perverse, improbable goings-on transpire for the bulk of the plot (We're talking about Shakespeare here, folks), the mechanisms of fate will bring to pass the highest and most exulted form of social order: marriage. How exactly does that happen in a film largely involving lesbian relationships set in the United States?