Thoughts on Household Saints

     On Criterion, I watched Household Saints, a 1993 drama directed by Nancy Savoca and co-written by Savoca and Richard Guay, based on the 1981 novel of the same name by Francine Prose. The film centers on three generations of Italian-American women: Carmela Santangelo (Judith Malina), an Old World immigrant woman in New York City who is very superstitious; Catherine Falconetti (Tracey Ullman), a reserved daughter of an Italian immigrant named Lino Falconetti (Victor Argo), who is "won" in a pinocle game bet by the local sausage butcher Joseph Santangelo (Vincent D'Onofrio) and marries her; and Teresa Carmela Santangelo (Lili Taylor), the teenage daughter of Joseph and Catherine who is devoutly Catholic and is looking for miracles and wants to be a Carmelite nun.

    The film spans from 1949 to 1970, and tracks how Italian-American culture in New York City can be very insular, very bigoted (the film's characters are racist against Black and Asian people with their attitudes), and following Catholicism to a rigid degree, as an excuse for controlling women's lives and shaming them for anything they do wrong. When Joseph holds Lino's word that he will marry his daughter if he loses (a bet that Lino made while drunk and not serious, and insisting that his daughter is plain and not worth marrying), Joseph tries wooing Catherine, who is skeptical and doesn't want to be married off as if it's the old country, but grows to love Joseph anyway in their marriage. But Carmela hates the Falconettis, openly insults the food that Catherine cooks for them, and is overbearing towards Catherine, criticizing anything she does while pregnant, including instilling fear in her that her baby will born a literal chicken because she witnessed Joseph slaughtering a turkey in his butcher shop. 

    In 1952, Carmella has passed away, and Joseph and Catherine, while pregnant, read a book debunking old wives' tales about babies and superstitions, to rid their future of that toxic influence Carmela had on them. They have a girl, Teresa (portrayed by Rachael Bella as a child), and raise her in a Catholic school, where she begins to question miracles and expecting the Pope to share news of a supposed letter from the saint Fatima. She sees her uncle Nicky Falconetti (Michael Rispoli) struggling with depression and alcoholism, as he is shamed for being attracted to Asian women and not "sticking to his own kind," then being rejected by Chinese and Japanese women, as well as being verbally abused by his domineering father. His character is a tragic case, of someone expected to stick to narrow rules of Italian masculinity, and not being given the opportunity to break out of it to be happier as himself. Rispoli, a character actor I've always liked from films like Rounders, To Die For, While You Were Sleeping, and Kick Ass, is excellent in this film.

    Teresa, as a teenager, wants to be a Carmelite nun, but her father forbids it, seeing nuns as wasting their lives in devotion to "God" but really lining the pope's pockets, and not standing up for themselves, like if they shop at his butchery and don't get the meat they want, and decide it's God's will and don't argue or assert themselves. She goes to a Catholic college to get a teaching degree, and is courted by Leonard Villanova (Michael Imperioli), a fellow student who wants to work in "T.V. law" and talks big about it without knowing that isn't a real thing. He invites Teresa out to have coffee, and as he is talking, Teresa begins to feel like she's having a religious experience, seeing "miracles" all around her of couples and friends and families together, and this experience is all because Leonard is holding her hand. They begin dating, but Teresa, while she is reconsidering her ideas on becoming a nun and being with Leonard, has a hallucinatory experience where she talks to "Jesus" in her home, and her family has to confront her mental health issues and unhealthy devotion to Catholicism.

    I hadn't seen this movie since I saw it as a teenager on Bravo in the 1990s, and I really liked it a lot, while noticing a lot I hadn't remembered before, like the first half of the film largely focused on the Italian Old World characters, I mainly remembered the Lili Taylor and Michael Imperioli parts. (This was also the first time I had seen Imperioli in a film, prior to his breakthrough role as Christopher Moltisanti in The Sopranos five years later). I did think it was funny to see D'Onofrio and Taylor play father and daughter when they had played a couple of the same age in Mystic Pizza five years prior, as Ullman and D'Onofrio are only eight years older than Taylor, and Taylor did not look believable as a fourteen-year old in the 1966 scenes.

    Although I couldn't stand her character, I really liked Judith Malina's performance as Carmela, in how diabolical she was in breaking the spirit of Catherine in her new marriage and filling her head with worries on how her baby was going to turn out, and Catherine being too polite to lash out at her mother in-law without being shamed for it. Malina was fantastic in this film, coming from her history in co-founding The Living Theatre and being a veteran character actor.

    As a third-generation Italian-American who grew up in Long Island and lived in New York City for twenty years, I can unfortunately understand the limited views that the older generations had, though I don't share those views. D'Onofrio as the father giving sarcastic retorts in his New York accent was very close to home, as is the feeling of having to respect your elders even when they're wrong and being shamed for going against them or for getting angry. I'm not in the same generation Savoca is in, so I don't have that same kind of closer relationship to Italian relatives that she has, but I can understand a lot of that Italian-American experience that she shows onscreen. I also grew up Catholic and went to Catholic school for two years, but my family is more secular and relaxed, not treating the Pope like a God or following the conservative attitudes of the church.

    I'm glad this film is streaming on Criterion and hasn't fallen into obscurity, it's a really interesting slice of the 1990s independent film boom.

    

Thoughts on Sentimental Value

     On Friday at the Angelika Film Center in New York City, I went to see Sentimental Value, a 2025 Norwegian drama directed by Joachim Trier, co-written by Trier and Eskil Vogt, centering on a family drama of an estranged relationship between an acclaimed filmmaker named Gustav Borg (Stellan Skarsgård) and his daughters, Nora (Renate Reinsve) and Agnes (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas). Gustav and his wife Sissel split when Nora and Agnes were young girls, and he went on to be a successful filmmaker, leaving his family behind, except when he cast Agnes as the lead in one of his films when she was a child twenty years prior.

    The film opens with a narration about the house in which they grew up, which belonged to Gustav's family for generations, and the narration is from the girls' point of view, of how they felt the "belly" of the house was full when there was life in the house and play and action, and how hollow the house felt when there was misery and depression. It's a great opening that sets the mood for the film, giving a personality to the house, and how it has affected the lives of Gustav's family, like his mother, who was a Resistance fighter against the Nazis in WWII, and imprisoned and tortured for her rebellion, and the trauma led to her suicide in the house when Gustav was seven.

    In the present-day, Gustav has been making documentaries and is still well-respected, but hasn't made a narrative film in fifteen years, and wrote a script with the intention for his daughter Nora to star in. Nora is a theater actress in Oslo, but struggles with stage fright and anxiety. She is also having an affair with her married costar, Jakob (Anders Danielson Lie). Gustav comes to Oslo for the funeral of his ex-wife Sissel, and after the wake, he meets with Nora to ask her to star in the script, where the script is inspired by his mother and he wants to film it in his family home, but she rejects it because he has been an absentee father and alcoholic, and is only interested in her when it benefits him and his artistry.

    Gustav decides instead to hire the American actress Rachel Kemp (Elle Fanning), who is popular, and her involvement convinces Netflix to secure the financing. But while she is initially enthusiastic, she feels insecure about not being able to speak Norwegian for the role or do a convincing accent, is self-conscious about Gustav translating the script into English for her, and feeling like she's too American and too removed from the story to do it justice. Gustav is kind and empathetic to her, but more condescending towards his daughters and insulting them with microaggressions, like telling Nora that her internal rage prevents her from finding love.

    Her sister Agnes works as a historian (side note: as an archivist myself, it did please me to see the brief work montage of her using the rolling archival cabinets and analog card catalogs to do her research work in, as well as seeing the same kind of library montage when she later researches archives about her late grandmother), and is married to Even (Andreas Stoltenberg Granerud) with a young son, Erik (Øyvind Hesjedal Loven). She is more sympathetic to her father, but when Gustav, who connects more with his grandson through films (like teaching him about filmmaking techniques with his smartphone), wants to cast him in the film, she refuses to allow it, remembering how it was fun when he doted on her when she starred in his film but he ghosted her afterwards, and she doesn't want to set her son up for that kind of disappointment from Gustav.

    I really liked how this film shifted between the perspectives, and gave a deeper understanding of each character, and I liked how rich it felt as a character study of a fractured and complicated family. The lead performances were excellent, and while I know that Skarsgård and Reinsve will get the majority of acting nomination attention, I really liked Lilleaas' performance as Agnes, which was more subtle and quiet as the "good" sister who isn't as explosive as her father or sister, but feels things intensely, and has her own struggles with her father. And I liked that Fanning as Rachel isn't depicted in a cruel way as a dumb Hollywood actress out of her depth, but that she really tries hard to understand the script, the character, the Oslo setting and the house, and doing her work, even while feeling like she is more of a consolation prize to the director for the role than who he really wanted.

    This is a really great film, especially as a follow-up to Trier's outstanding 2021 film The Worst Person in the World, also starring Reinsve, and one of the best films I've seen this year.

Thoughts on Carol & Joy

    On the Criterion Channel yesterday, I watched Carol & Joy, a 2025 short documentary film directed by Nathan Silver, executive produced by Natalie Portman, featuring the actress Carol Kane and her 98-year old mother Joy in their shared New York City apartment. Nathan Silver had directed Carol Kane in the 2024 film Between the Temples, and made this short film, at 38 minutes long, to focus on the interesting life of her mother, Joy. 

    Joy is originally from Cleveland, OH, and grew up with an abusive father who beat her when she wet the bed at three years old, and had a mother who undermined her and criticized her body. Yet, despite that upbringing, Joy was passionate about dance and music, having been brought to the symphony by her father when she was a girl, and feeling the music lift her in her body and having a spiritual experience. 

    Yet when she was a young woman, her family forced her to marry a young man, Michael Kane, putting in an engagement announcement in the newspaper without her knowledge or consent, and her father threatened to put her in a sanitarium if she tried to escape to New York City to be a dancer. So she married Michael, who became Carol's father, and felt stifled and unhappy in the marriage, hinting that she later cheated on him as a way to get him to divorce her, but that he still wanted to stay married. They finally divorced in 1964, when Carol was 12, and she was made to be examined by doctors through a psychological exam afterwards, a sign of the times of distrusting women's feelings and wanting them to stick to the status quo. She moved to Paris, where she could make her life with her own artistic visions, became a music teacher, and has been living in New York City in her Manhattan apartment for the last 25 years, with Carol's apartment right above hers, and they have lived together since the pandemic in 2020.

    I really enjoyed this film a lot. Joy was fascinating and thoughtful and spoke deeply about her life, and Carol, despite being famous, largely takes a backseat to listen to her mother's stories, spending the first few minutes of the documentary making coffee for her mother and looking for the half and half creamer.

    The filmmaking crew had a habit of running out of film, saying "roll out" to mean the film had ran out, so the picture would go but the audio would be running, and often interrupting Joy's stories, and afterwards I felt it was rude to keep doing that to her, as they are a professional film crew and should know better, as well as to respect the time of a woman who is nearly 100 years old telling them her life story.

    I could see how Carol Kane, with her charming eccentricities and her commitment to being independent (she has never married or had any kids) could be influenced by her mother's strive for autonomy and being an artist on her own terms. I really enjoyed this lovely slice of life documentary a lot.

Thoughts on Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter

    A while back on Tubi, I watched Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter, a 2014 drama written and directed by David Zellner. It starred Rinko Kikuchi as Kumiko, an office worker in Tokyo who is 29 and working a dead-end job, who lives alone with her pet rabbit, and deals with both her mom asking why she isn’t married yet and her boss asking her why she’s still in a job largely occupied by younger single women. She likes treasure hunting, and finds a VHS copy of the 1996 film Fargo on the shore, and when she sees the scene with Steve Buscemi’s character burying a suitcase full of money in the snow, she thinks the suitcase is really there (as the movie had a fake disclaimer by the Coen Brothers saying that it was based on a true story) and plays the scene over and over, mapping out where the suitcase may be in Fargo, and she even tries to steal an atlas from the library, where the security guard takes pity on her and lets her take a ripped out page of a map of Minnesota.

    She goes to Minnesota, abandoning her job while having the company credit card with her while running work errands, with limited English skills, and is trying to get to Fargo, with a sheriff’s deputy (Zellner) confused by her mission and trying to get her to understand that the film is fictional. Yet, she keeps going on to find the suitcase.

  

    I really liked this movie. Kikuchi as Kumiko is a lonely character with mental health issues, and it’s sad watching her go further into delusion, but she makes her sympathetic and understandable. The story is based on a real-life story about Takako Konishi, a 28-year old Japanese office worker whose body was found in 2001 in Detroit Lakes, Minnesota, ruled a suicide, and an urban legend said that she thought the buried suitcase in Fargo was real, but the story came from a misunderstanding between her and a Bismarck police officer with whom she had been speaking.

    This film was really interesting, and I’m glad I came across it.