Angelo Barberini (Luke Kirby) is the gay son of Italian immigrants, Gino (Paul Sorvino) and Maria (Ginette Reno), a constantly bickering but loving couple who hold fast to Italian traditions in their Montreal home. Angelo is an aspiring TV writer who earns a living in a call centre, and he’s in love with childhood friend Nino (Peter Miller) who’s a diligent cop and very much in the closet. Angelo’s sister Anna (Claudia Ferri, who looks bit like Prince) freaks out and sits in therapy, the entire length of the movie.

Angelo comes out to his parents, who are pretty rattled, but in a funny and endearing way (naturally). Soon the rumors of Angelo’s forbidden sexuality start spreading among the close-knit Italian community, with “hilarious” results.

This is where the film gets lost, chopped up in the meeting of its two separate currents: light ethnic comedy and light gay polemic. By its mid-point the film is trapped between trying to be funny and trying to be instructive. Greek Wedding rolled along because it didn’t have such high stakes: the Greek girl was marrying a non-Greek, not trying to find a way to tell her parents she was homosexual, and so there were light laughs aplenty as cultures clashed and protective yet daffy fathers sweated over their soon-to-be-diluted ancestral lines.

Discovering your son is gay is a challenging dilemma for many people, and a very traumatic event for older middle aged people with old-fashioned values. It’s not entirely believable that such conservative traditionalists come around to liberal thinking so quickly, and so publicly. It’s hard to giggle and laugh along with the older Italians, who look increasingly less cute and endearing as they grapple and in-fight bitterly over the big gay thing.

Angelo’s ginger ventures into the high tempo Montreal gay scene are fruitless and modern gay culture is portrayed sourly, with contempt. Great to see the movie not showing Angelo skipping off into a pink sunset, draped in a rainbow flag, but giving Angelo no settled direction or happy place to go lumps him in with his unhappy sister – two dysfunctional siblings living out their miserable, dysfunctional lives. How do we empathise with the jolly parents when we’re constantly confronted with what a bad job they’ve done on their kids?

The idea that gay people should find a place in their family and the community they grew up in rather than bat-out-of-hell it to the nearest big city gay ghetto is a fantastic and admirable one, but I get the sense that it’s accidentally found its way into this film. There’s no discernible exploration of it, the Montreal gay scene is used for laughs, and to show off Angelo’s cranky misfit persona. There’s just not the easy laughs in this kind of set-up, and it’s all too sour and implausible to be funny.

Why do we need to see queeny gay guys as the butt of really mean spirited jokes, such as when Angelo goes to a gay social group, saying he wants to expand his gay circle, but insisting it doesn’t include effeminate gay guys, as he can’t stand those? “Keep those away from me” he says, as we cut to the crestfallen face of an awkward poof. There’s nothing in the movie to suggest that we’re meant to take this with a grain of salt, as though it’s evidence of Angelo’s confusion/self-hate, etc. The message is that there are worthwhile gay guys and worthless ones, and that a class structure is acceptable within gay culture, with the effeminate gay guys, the ones fighting to be taken seriously on a daily basis, the obviously homosexual ones at the front line of gay visibility, unfairly slated at the bottom. That’s a poor message, and it ruined the film for me.

Guys that like having sex with other guys, but that don’t really want any part of the whole “gay” thing are trashed as well. Nino ends the film stuck in a sham marriage, creeping off to fuck guys on clandestine camping trips, and the moral condemnation dispensed to him is clear. This contradicts the film’s other message, that gay guys who embrace the whole “gay” thing – the sceney guys in the Montreal village that Angelo despises – are also trashy. Actually, no other gay character bar Angelo is presented in a positive light. Angelo isn’t a strong enough character to carry the whole film, and at no point do we have any reason to think that his way of doing things is admirable, correct, or worth emulating. Basically, what we’ve got is King Angelo, model for all gays.

But what Angelo wants, and what the film wants for him, is the same life his parents had, with a spousal gender transposition. Homosexuality here is simply heterosexuality with a different face, and we know that’s not what homosexuality is at all.

Mambo Italiano plods along a well worn path to nowhere.

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