MOVIE REVIEWS : Fantasy Reigns in Inventive ‘Queen’

For some time now, American films have become less and less hospitable to whimsy or fantasy. Once the truffles of the film world, fantasy has come to mean hardware, generally so overproduced that it sinks of its own weight, while whimsy perished for lack of nourishment years ago.

So it’s particularly nice to see that the imported “Queen of Hearts” (Westside Pavilion), a thoroughly inventive and rewarding comedy-fantasy, is unafraid of either of these delicacies.

Opening among the towers and spires of Gimignano, a medieval town near Florence, “Queen of Hearts” soon flies, like its desperate lovers, to London’s present-day Italian quarter. That’s where our 10-year-old hero, Eddie Lucca, and his sprawling family live, up over the Lucky Cafe, their pride as well as their livelihood.

But first, in Gimignano, we meet Eddie’s parents, Danilo (Joseph Long) and Rosa (Anita Zagaria), our faithful, fateful lovers. In this prologue, Rosa’s fierce little mama has betrothed her to Barbariccia, the town’s richest bachelor, but Rosa, who loves Danilo, will have none of it. Hounded by the entire village, the two lovers make a suicidal leap after deciding they cannot live without each other. Somehow, magically, they--and we--are flying to London where, over the course of the film’s 20 years, their family and their little cafe will become part of the heartbeat of the Quarter.

Newcomer Tony Grisoni’s screenplay is a delight: fresh, charming, not infrequently poignant. The Luccas are at the movie’s center and director Jon Amiel has filled in around them with a sketchbook’s worth of faces: grandfathers, grandmothers, aunts, uncles, cousins and might-as-well-be family members. Small, big-eyed, dark-haired Eddie (Ian Hawkes), youngest of the four Lucca children, is our omnipresent narrator and resident mischief maker. (Imagine an Italian Lukas Haas and you have a fair idea of Eddie’s charm.)

Eddie’s best friend, red-haired Beetle (Tat Whalley), is a whiz at anything electric. We watch as a vast family wedding is enlivened by the boys’ talents at generating small electric shocks, while Amiel sets up the whole event to look like some squirming corner of a Hieronymus Bosch canvas. (Amiel has already had noteworthy experience in signature scenes; his most famous previous credit is Dennis Potter’s “The Singing Detective,” one of television’s finest and most inventively staged dramatic fantasies.)

Years whiz by, as they have a way of doing. Danilo’s visiting father, Nonno (Vittorio Duse), becomes as much of a fixture as Rosa’s grandmother, Mama Sibilla (Eileen Way), who never smiles. Children grow up, break their parents’ hearts, then break their own. Suddenly, with the force of an entrance in opera, the vengeful Barbariccia (Vittorio Amandola) appears back on the scene. He has mellowed not one small bit, and the still-beautiful Rosa has never left his thoughts.

Luckily, “Queen of Hearts,” an English production of an Italian family’s saga, complete with a magical talking pig’s head and a miraculous hearing aid, is as long on inventiveness as it is on charm; it’s almost impossible to predict which way the story will jump. (Not even when one of its pivotal scams is as familiar as one from “The Sting.”)

Although the film is beautifully photographed by Mike Southon (“Paperhouse”), a few of grandfather Nonno’s recurring dream sequences don’t completely work; not enough to get disturbed about. Every one of its actors works superbly; most of them, who come from British or Italian theater, are making their English film debuts. (Not Vittorio Duse: In 1942 he was the lead in Visconti’s “Ossessione”; he’s 72 now and still arresting.) They are an enchanting lot.