Watched on Amazon Prime Video

Depending on one's conception of love, either the French or the Italians are considered to have expertise in this field: the French are probably somewhat more generous and immoral, but at the same time more pragmatic in their choices. Love and sex are as much a part of everyday life as eating and drinking, passions are not locked up because they want to be lived out. And French sex sounds like a chanson, performed in a smoky voice that tells of passion, but also of the gravity of it. The Italian is much more romantic and sentimental: when he gets it on, it's a metaphysical event that sweeps him away and changes everything around him. The moon is no longer a pale celestial body, but a "big pizza pie", as Dean Martin sings in "That's amore", which opens "Moonstruck". And his characters are just as lively as this song, almost tipsy with love. The fact that Norman Jewison sets his romantic comedy in the extended family circle of an Italian immigrant family in New York says less about Italians or Italian-Americans than it does about the moods and feelings that Jewison wants to create.

From Dean Martin's opening song, to the settings, to the characters with their smouldering passions and the music, "Moonstruck" is characterised by bittersweet melancholy. Loretta (Cher) longs for the one, but chooses the compromise because she fears that otherwise she will come away empty-handed; her parents, Rose (Olympia Dukakis) and Cosmo (Vincent Gardenia), have a marriage that has lost the spontaneity that Cosmo now hopes to find in his lover Mona. Johnny (Danny Aiello) secretly wants to stay with his mum, Loretta wants to marry out of a sense of duty and Ronny's (Nicolas Cage) passions are so intense that he is barely able to survive. In Jewison's film, love always threatens to be suffocated by reason: Because everyone is afraid of death, they wear themselves out in pointless games instead of unconditionally surrendering to their feelings.In the film's most beautiful scene, Rose meets the university professor Perry (great: John Mahoney) in a restaurant where he has just received a violent rebuff from his female companion, a student. A strangely intimate conversation ensues between the two strangers, which forms the prelude to a love scene that never follows. Instead, they both return to their lives, which they can now see with different eyes.

"Moonstruck" is perhaps a little too fond of its image of the Italian-American dolce vita: Jewison's character of Ronny in particular is perhaps a little out of his depth and I'm not sure whether I really believe the love that Ronny and Loretta feel for each other or whether I shouldn't see it as a little too subordinate to the narrative purpose. On the other hand, the film does give its characters temporary insanity anyway: Under the influence of the moon, hormones can go crazy and make you do the wildest things. Perhaps the Castorinis and Cammareris are already complaining about their love woes again today.