Sara Batkie
There’s a certain adage about film that’s probably been around since Edison captured Fred Ott’s sneeze, but regardless always feels true: “They don’t make them like they used to.” That constant churn of nostalgia is part of the appeal of the cinematic experience, but it’s also likely more than a little irritating to the filmmakers whose toil to get their work financed is invisible by design. And it must be infinitely frustrating for the many writer-directors like Nancy Savoca whose work was either unavailable or difficult to find for years. One of the first things out of her mouth in the documentary that accompanies Kino Lorber’s new Blu-Ray of Household Saints (1993) is that it’s not that her third feature couldn’t get made today; it couldn’t really get made then, either. Any film that reaches the screen is in some sense a miracle, and that word applies to Saints in more ways than just one.
Savoca was still in film school when she read Francine Prose’s source novel, which she loved so much she wrote the author a letter expressing her hopes to adapt it. Prose filed it away as a nice piece of fan mail but didn’t consider the possibility until she saw Savoca’s 1989 Sundance Grand Jury Prize-winning debut, True Love. Like the novel, that film is set in a disarmingly specific New York milieu, in this case a group of Italian-Americans in the Bronx. While there’s the scaffolding of a plot – a newlywed couple tries to work out how compatible they actually are – True Love is much more communal in focus than that description suggests. Its hangout vibes surely appealed to Prose, whose novel shares a similar ramshackle curiosity about its setting. “I just started out with the card game,” she says in an archival interview included on the Blu-Ray. “Even I didn’t know where it would go from there.”
The card game is pinochle, a distinctly masculine pursuit. Like everything else in the tight-knit immigrant-dominated neighborhood of 1949 Little Italy, leisure activities are divided by gender. The players include Joseph Santangelo (a rakishly charming Vincent D’Onofrio), the local butcher, and Lino Falconetti (Victor Argo), whose cinematic last name is not a coincidence. The plot, as much as there is one, is kicked off here when Lino drunkenly bets the hand of his daughter, Catherine (Tracy Ullman, much more subdued than usual), and loses to Joseph. “You think this is the old country? This is America,” Catherine shouts when she hears the news, but Lino is a man of his word. So, too, is Joseph, and he finds himself drawn to Catherine’s innocence despite the fact that she’s a hopeless cook – a potentially lethal quality for a woman in this community.
What follows is a sprawling narrative that gradually emerges as a generational story of three unusual women. Catherine and Joseph wed, and their connection proves deeper than the sordid origin story that follows them around. They live with Joseph’s mother, Carmela (the delightfully witchy Judith Malina), who holds tight to her Italian superstitions. In Savoca’s rendering, the past lives comfortably with the present, and a ghost is just another member of the household, regularly appearing to dispense advice. Carmela becomes convinced that Catherine’s first pregnancy is “marked.” When the baby dies in childbirth, the completion of the curse seems to drain Carmela as well. Her own death sparks a renewal for the couple that culminates in the arrival of a baby girl, Teresa.
Unfortunately, the child retains Carmela’s devout tendencies. Lili Taylor essentially takes over the last portion of the film, and the beatific stillness she brings to Teresa might turn even the staunchest atheist into a believer. A follower of Saint Therese, she commits herself to “the monotony of daily toil,” which manifests in a maniacal dedication to domestic chores. She sees God in everything, sometimes literally, and through her fate the Santangelo-Falconetti clan moves from old country faith to modern skepticism and back again.
Films that take such steadfast belief in a higher power at face value rather than a source of comedy are vanishingly rare at today’s box office, outside of those made specifically for the evangelical market. Work that is so defiantly female-driven is rarer still. But as Savoca and her husband/collaborator Richard Guay tell it, it was a hard sell back in the early nineties too. Several of the producers they cobbled together were concerned about the script’s narrow focus. It wasn’t until Jonathan Demme, who is prominently listed as “presenting” the film in the opening credits, got on board that the project came together.
Something else added to the urgency to get Household Saints made: Savoca’s pregnancy, which seems oddly fitting given its subject matter. Films are labors of love; so is parenthood. So it’s understandable that Savoca stuck mostly to doing television after Saints failed to hit big at the multiplexes. The film fell into obscurity along with its director, and wasn’t available on DVD at all until Milestone lovingly restored it in 2023. It follows a trend of resurgent interest in Savoca – her second film, Dogfight, is a recent addition to the Criterion Collection and True Love also got a spiffy Kino Lorber release last month. But Savoca hasn’t made a feature since 2011. To resurrect her older films for new audiences is a worthy cause. Maybe, like her heroine Teresa, all she wants is to be thanked. A more capacious industry that makes room for the stories she wants to tell would be a great place to start.
“Household Saints” is now available on Blu-ray, and is also available for digital rental or purchase.
