5 - “An honest contrivance”: opera and desire in Moonstruck

Summary

Moonstruck isn't heartfelt; it's an honest contrivance – the mockery is a giddy homage to our desire for grand passion.

Pauline Kael

Pauline Kael captures the quirky but exhilarating quality of Moonstruck, the popular 1987 film that garnered three Academy Awards. Roger Ebert also identifies something special when he writes, “The most enchanting quality about Moonstruck is the hardest to describe, and that is the movie's tone.” One might characterize the film as a wacky marriage between Italian-American ethnic comedy and romantic idealism tethered to the magic of the moon. The combination should not work, yet it succeeds brilliantly, perhaps because both are rooted in exaggeration. Kael expresses the operative conceit as parody playing against what is being parodied, or contrivance against the real thing. We are dazzled by their juxtaposition and convinced by the rightness of each. The film's originality “is that the mockery doesn't destroy the overblown romanticism – it intensifies it.”

Opera figures in this special tone. Puccini's La Bohème, one of the most popular and lush operas of the repertoire, plays a major role in Moonstruck. Excerpts feature prominently on the soundtrack, the protagonists attend a performance of Bohème and display affinities with the opera's characters, and Bohème's connection with the Metropolitan Opera is underlined. In addition, the dualistic tone of the film is itself operatic and resembles an encounter between opera buffa and verismo.