Rating: 5/5
Loretta believes she’s unlucky in love, especially since her husband died seven years ago. Maybe it was because they got married in a courthouse. She lives at home with her parents, her grandfather, and their five dogs. Her father thinks she shouldn’t get married again because she’s bad luck.
Her boyfriend, Johnny, proposes — no kneeling, no ring, but she sets him straight and accepts the proposal. Johnny’s mother is sick, but they’ll get married when she dies. Before he leaves, he asks Loretta to invite his little brother, Ronny, to the wedding after five years of bad blood.
Johnny took Ronny’s life from him. Or rather, Ronny’s bride left him when he maimed his hand in the bread slicer, and he hasn’t been happy since. He doesn’t believe in luck, but both feel they lost their one chance at happiness. But they awaken something in each other that reminds them love is possible.
— A bride without a head! — A wolf without a foot!
As the film progresses, we see something awakening in several characters. Perhaps the moon has more of an effect than they realize.
The film borrows aspects of the opera that Ronny and Loretta see, La bohème, which offers a series of vignettes of the lives of Bohemians in 1840s Paris — a stoked fire, a cold night, and the discovery of love. Like love in this movie, La bohème has a tragic trajectory, but that first spark of love is sudden and intense.
The magic of the movie is time, measured by the moon. The moon shines a brilliant light at its fullest, allowing the characters to see the life they’ve built. It tells them that love isn’t a rational choice but a wildness—a death drive sending them careening into utter misery and unspeakable happiness. The people who seem happy in love are those who don’t forget the early spark and youthful desire that drew them together in the first place.
— Do you love him? — Ma, I love him awful. — Oh god, that's too bad.
Cheating on Olympia Dukakis is textbook insanity!