***SPOILERS*** ***SPOILERS*** This Italian-American farce is one of those intentionally "so bad it's good" sorts of movies. It's a decidedly B movie, but it's campy fun. She radiantly plays an angelicly pure but smoldering 16 year old princess, more than ready to pop the cork on her sexuality, previously successfully guarded by her parents. Phew!!! It's her youngest soft, romantic type role. "I'm crazy in love with you Rosario". "My parent's don't like any man for me. Especially they don't like you. Because you are sexy, and dangerous." "Be tender with me Rosario. I'm a virgin." In what other movie will you get to see Anglina lose her innocence??? (Well, maybe in Cyborg 2. There she's a kick boxing sex assassin robot though, so perhaps it doesn't count.)
Of course "Love is All There Is" fully intends to be campy. It's a broad humor romp though 60's or 70's Italian working class bad taste, mixed with endearingly warm personalities and high sex drives. It's plot is a reprise of the Romeo and Juliette story, played with an in your face lack of subtlety. The unlikely 16 year old couple are the children of two rival NYC Bronx (City Island) catering families, brought together by their roles in a community play. It's staged by Gina's (Jolie) parents to attract the goodwill of the bedrock S. Italian working class (culturally, if not necessarily economically) community, which is crucial for their business success. They are titled Florentines, but economically reduced enough to be trying to make a big success in the same business and community where Rosario's (the Romeo) parents are better established, in a down scale sort of way. Rosario's parents' have decidedly working class S. Italian roots (like most of New York's, and America's, Italian community) and working class taste, although they have made good, if precariously, in the local wedding banquet business.
Of course the stage kisses that really bring this couple together become vastly overheated by their ripe sexuality and first love passion. Jolie's father is horrified, and the onlooking S. Italian women from grandmothers to teenagers become overheated in sympathetic excitement. Their impetuous, reckless romance then proceeds at a galloping pace in their real lives, while the two families try to keep the two apart for their class different but essentially similar reasons.
The humor is often too broad to feel just right, though it nearly always scores some sort of hit. You tend to wince through some of it. You also can't help but chuckle or laugh at other parts. There is no doubt that the direction in this movie was always to overact, to make characatures of all the parts, and that's just what the actors do. Paul Sorvino was at the time the big name here and is only so-so, but Barbara Carrera, who though stunning is usually a poor actress given limited eye candy sorts of parts, is actually very good here as a haughty aristocrat. (She's most famous as Fatima Blush in some Bond films.) Anglina Jolie is one of the few who doesn't overact -- though the others no doubt do so by design. She's absolutely radiant as a previously virginal but precociously sexually overflowing 16 year old. It's easy to suppose the whole farce was structured around her -- though at the time she was a little known fledgling actress.
The conflict between Northern and Southern Italian culture, often symbolized by the cuisine of these feuding catering families, is a running joke -- sort of. Jolie is seen holed up in her room at one point, with a plate of elegant N.Italian butterfly pasta, with a thin white sauce, left untouched. (It looks right out of countless Manhattan northern Italian restaurants.) Meanwhile Rosario's parents are given to roccoco four food wedding cakes, to impress their mostly seriously overstuffed clients. Their house is filled with elaborately awful 'sculpted' plastic objects, and the like. In one hilarious scene, Rosario and his buddies make good on their scheme to snatch Gina from her parents by staging a chaotic diversion at their northern Italian style catering hall. They sabotage the pale pink pasta sauce warming in a huge sliver serving dish by -- horror of horrors -- pouring in a huge cooking pot's worth of dark red tomato sauce!! The guests start gaging at the results, of course.
Well, it's all worth it for the still virtually teenage, way beyond luscious, Angelina.
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