So I was watching Mambo Italiano on Logo the other night, and it was kinda good…better then most gay romantic comedies I’ve seen.  I could even identify somewhat with the main character, Angelo, though not his internalized homophobia.  He’s a geeky kinda guy, way too analytical for his own good, and too impatient with others.  He’s cute, but not dazzlingly gorgeous.  The film is full of Italian ethnic humor that doesn’t stereotype so much as remind you how human we all are beneath the cloth of culture and tradition.  There were, I’m certain, a lot of cultural in-jokes that were going right over my head most of the time, and yet I laughed.  I could see myself, and the Pennsylvanian Baptist culture I grew up inside of in the characters in that film.  Well…except for the confessional scenes…

The film hinges around what happens to the main character’s life after he comes out to his family, and in the process shoves out of the closet his boyfriend, who is a policeman.  His parents don’t take it well, his boyfriend, aghast, eventually lets himself be "cured" by a woman his own Italian mother sets him up with, and who he decides to marry.

[SPOILER ALERT] If you haven’t seen the film, I’m about to spoil the ending for you.  But I need to do that in order to make the point I want to in this post.  Sorry.  Perhaps you should consider skipping the rest of this post until after you’ve seen the flick…

Anyway…

The main character, Angelo, sees his life start to unravel around him.  His love life…his job…his relationship with his family…it all starts to come undone.  But this is not a tear jerker.  Believe it or not…it’s funny.  Not funny in a way that is contemptuous of its characters, but the opposite…funny because it has a genuine fondness for its characters and all their human eccentricities, which come roaring out under stress.  After his boyfriend breaks up with him, Angelo volunteers at a local gay community center, as a way of trying to meet someone else, even though at this point he really doesn’t want anyone else.  There he meets Peter, who is not quite as hunky and gorgeous as his ex-boyfriend, but is handsome and seems to have a sweet, decent character.  Peter tries to get Angelo to go out with him, but Angelo is still grieving for his boyfriend, who is soon to be married.

Here’s what I like about this film: you can see it setting us up for the dramatic showdown at the boyfriend’s wedding, and yet instead of getting the scene where Angelo rushes to the chapel to declare his undying love and beg his boyfriend to take him back, instead of getting the scene where the vain and beautiful boyfriend finally realizes What Really Matters In Life, and dumps the scheming selfish homophobic woman his mother set him up with to go live happily ever after with the One He Really Loves, what we get is a scene where the vain and beautiful boyfriend actually Does marry the woman his mother set him up with after all, so everyone can assume he is a 100 percent manly heterosexual kind of guy…while at the same moment, Angelo goes back to the gay community center, and accepts Peter’s offer to go out on a date with him.  It’s a wonderful ending.

And yet…

…it’s all too easy.

The filmmakers may have outraged one hoary movie house cliché, but they paid homage to another one: that beautiful people are shallow.  It’s easy to dismiss Angelo’s boyfriend as superficial, internally homophobic, selfish and cruel because…well…he Is.  And that makes it easy to see how Angelo is far better off dating, and then being loved by Peter, who is perhaps not as beautiful, but genuine.  The happy ending is possible, because we know that the boyfriend was wrong for Angelo.  In fact, it’s a pat film ending we’ve seen hundreds of times before; the plain but true heart, winning out over the vain and hollow beauty.

But…what if the beautiful boyfriend wasn’t so shallow?  What if he was as beautiful inside, as he was outside?  What if he had a kind and decent heart after all?  Well, in Mambo Italiano that simply would not have worked, because Angelo wouldn’t have had to suffer being shunned by him when they were both school kids, let alone abandoned after he came out to his family.  This story would not have worked with an honorable boyfriend.  So he had to be shallow and selfish.  Okay…fine…but then why did he have to be beautiful too?  Well…we might have wondered what it was that attracted Angelo to the boyfriend in the first place…but it could just as easily have been status.  The boyfriend could have come from a rich and influential family.  But no…he had to be beautiful.  Because only beauty, particularly in males, is a reliable external indicator of a shallow, flawed inner character.  In the Hollywood mythos, the beautiful man is almost always the most untrustworthy character in the film.  Not necessarily the most evil, but the most untrustworthy.  Ironically, he’s probably also a faggot.

It’s too easy.  Show me a story where the hero had to choose between pursuing a beautiful boyfriend who is not only beautiful, but noble, and an average Joe who thinks wanting a soul mate is the stuff of cheap paperback romance novels.  Mr. Average is not contemptuous.  He considers himself a realist.  And you see in him a potential to beauty that is utterly strangled inside of a concrete bound mentality.  But this is no tale of the ugly duckling or the frog prince.  Mr. Average knows he could be more attractive then he is, he just doesn’t want to be that.  He doesn’t care.

In other words, turn the Hollywood morality tale about how beauty is only skin deep on its head.  Our hero sees that it’s the beauty within that matters, from discovering how beautiful Mr. Average could be, if only he wasn’t so damn apathetic.

We can all be beautiful, each of us in our own way.  But more often then not we’re taught that we are not beautiful, and we come to believe it.  So we don’t take care of our bodies. We don’t buy those bright attractive clothes.  We become shy, too afraid to make the first move toward that beautiful someone we happen to chance meet.  And we project that insecurity out in front of us, everywhere we go.  And so the beautiful someone walks out of our lives forever.

But sometimes they do anyway.  The beautiful one in this story is just not in love with our main character.  And because he is noble, he isn’t cruel or cold about it.  He is patient.  He is kind.  You’re a very nice guy…and someday you’ll make someone very happy…but not me.  You are not right for me.  Not like that…  He’s a decent guy.  He doesn’t want to break our main character’s heart.  And worse, he is not only beautiful, he is absolutely right for our main character.  But our hero isn’t right for him.  That can happen.  So they just don’t connect.  That the beauty our hero sees in him turns out to be much more then just skin deep after all, only makes that rejection all the worse.  That’s how it usually is.  Ask me how I know.

Mr. Average on the other hand isn’t so much shallow, as indifferent.  He could be better then he is, but he doesn’t think it’s necessary.  And he’s right.  He’s talented, but he knows he can get by in life on idle just fine thank you.  It isn’t until late in the film that we realize that he’s actually quite beautiful on the surface.  He isn’t selfish or stupid.  Just…indifferent.  Love isn’t perfect Mr. Average quietly insists.  You have to compromise.  You have to take what you can get.  Mr. Average would make a decent enough boyfriend, but not one our hero would walk through fire for…and for that matter, vice versa.  It isn’t love, it isn’t even lust.  Mr. Average offers only an escape from loneliness.  And what is more, he thinks this should be enough for both of them.

But while the beautiful one is searching for his soul mate, that person just isn’t our hero unfortunately.  Our hero is made to realize that finding that soul mate is a very rare thing.  Maybe you get one chance at it.  A lot of people don’t even get that.  By the end of the flick he comes to believe that it probably won’t happen to him unless he gets unreasonably lucky.  I mean…win the lottery kind of lucky.  Mr. Average is offering him a kind of consolation prize.  Forget the quest for a soul mate, he says.  Be reasonable.  Accept what life offers you, and don’t yearn for what it does not.   Beauty is only skin deep after all.  The irony here is that he’s right in one sense, and yet he is most profoundly wrong in the sense that matters.

What will our hero do?  Does he settle for Mr. Average?  More then anything he doesn’t want to live a solitary lonely life.  But if he is not happy in a relationship, won’t that be just as lonely?  Does he keep on trying to find his heart’s desire, and just hope there is something better somewhere, somehow, in a world that seems to him like loneliness is the rule, not the exception.  Or does he accept what life offers, and walk away from what it probably will not?  Perhaps our hero might settle for Mr. Average…until something better comes along.  Perhaps he even proposes this to Mr. Average, and Mr. Average shrugs and agrees.  Sure…let’s both call it an affair, until something better comes along…  But would that really be a salve for loneliness?  And if he did that, and lightning struck and his soul mate did finally come along, would he still be a worthy lover?  In the end the beauty he is struggling to find and embrace one day, is his own.  But is it worth it, if the prize is an utterly solitary life?

I’d watch that movie.  But that is not the kind of film Hollywood dreams are made of.