Kate gets down and dirty

Romance and Cigarettes

John Turturro calls his third film as director "a down-and-dirty musical love story". And if there is to be a scandal at the Venice Film Festival this might be it.

It has James Gandolfini as a New York ironworker chased out of his own house by his wife (Susan Sarandon) and three daughters, conducting a torrid affair with Kate Winslet's sex-mad femme fatale and talking dirty with whoever will listen to him.

There's also Christopher Walken as an elderly Elvis Presley clone, also talking dirty, Steve Buscemi as another ironworker, telling us what he likes in bed, and even Elaine Stritch as Gandolfini's mother describing a torrid affair she had in her youth. No holds are barred, in fact. You wonder why the film isn't called Sex and Cigarettes.

Added to all this, the cast keep on breaking into song and dance, sometimes lip-synching and sometimes in full voice. James Brown, Janis Joplin, Engelbert Humperdinck and Tom Jones standards help them along.

What all this eccentrically mounted derring-do is about will defeat most people. Perhaps it is that, despite all the sex, which has Winslet appearing as absolutely the opposite of an English rose, humping like a she-devil on heat, the film is really about the need for love, since Gandolfini suddenly finds that his wife, who says she hates him, is just waiting for a bit of affection.

The film is occasionally witty, sometimes genuinely funny but more often a bit embarrassing. It looks like a group of well-known thespians letting their hair down and unable to stop themselves going too far. As for the song and dance, it reminds one of amateur night on TV.

Apparently, when Sidney Lumet, the distinguished American director, visited the set he asked: "What did you do? Give the cast drugs or something?" "No", replied Turturro, "I didn't have that kind of budget."