ABOUT THE FILM

In his review (used with permission), cinema commentator Andrew O'Hehir (Salon.com), sets up Romance & Cigarettes quite nicely:

"It's a peculiar blend of baroque fantasy and working-class realism; it veers from erotic farce to wrenching domestic drama; it's a musical comedy without a conventional happy ending; it's a love story about the most difficult kind of love, between two people who've been together almost forever and hurt each other almost irreparably. But all those things are also what make Romance & Cigarettes so great.

"It's a dazzling, bittersweet concoction, directed with verve and confidence ... If the roots of its story about a marriage gone sour lie deep in Turturro's childhood, I think only a filmmaker with the experience and perspective of a middle-aged family man could create something that's so simultaneously daring and compassionate.

"It's the most original picture by an American director I've seen this year, and also the most delightful.

"When the movie's protagonist, a softhearted, skirt-chasing New York bridge maintenance worker named Nick (played by James Gandolfini), comes out of his Queens bungalow for a smoke after a fight with his wife, at first he just stands there staring into the middle distance, like guys all over the world throughout eternity. Then he comes down off the porch, twirls around a streetlight with surprising grace, and starts to sing along with Engelbert Humperdinck's "A Man Without Love." Accompanied by a chorus of singing and dancing sanitation workers, kids on bicycles and random passersby. "It's one of the most exhilarating moments in recent American cinema, and Romance & Cigarettes is loaded with them.

"Susan Sarandon, who plays Nick's long-suffering wife, performs her own dynamite singalong version of Piece of My Heart, along with a church choir led by Eddie Izzard. Christopher Walken, as her Elvis-worshiping cousin, performs an all-singing, all-dancing dramatization of Tom Jones' infidelity-and-revenge saga Delilah that compresses the over-amped pathos of a Puccini opera into three minutes. And don't get me started on Kate Winslet's performance as the foulmouthed, oversexed lingerie-shop girl who threatens to wreck Nick's marriage.

"There's more hilarity, more sense of risk and more sheer filmmaking joy in Romance & Cigarettes than in roughly the last 157 indie pictures I've sat through. One way or another, Turturro's picture will make its own reputation, as eccentric works of genius always do. Some viewers will be thrilled, as I was, and I'm sure others will find its combination of sweetness and acidity bewildering. ...this is a once-in-a-lifetime underdog American classic ... Do whatever you have to do to see it."

Andrew O'Hehir has more to say about Romance & Cigarettes, John Turturro's childhood in an Italian-Catholic working class neighborhood, Turturro's concept of a "musical" stemming from Italian opera and the work of Dennis Potter, and the disgraceful way the film was locked away and held for $3 Million ransom. Read his entire article in Beyond the Multiplex at Salon.com.

Mr. O'Hehir has covered film for Salon since 1996, and written the indie-film blog Beyond the Multiplex since 2003. He has also written for the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Hollywood Reporter, Sight and Sound and other publications. He lives with his wife and two children in Brooklyn, N.Y.