Archive

Making “Puccini for Beginners”

In Giacomo Puccini’s Turandot, the princess’s would-be suitors are beheaded if they can’t answer her three riddles. In writer-director Maria Maggenti’s film Puccini for Beginners, our heroine Allegra (Elizabeth Reaser) also juggles multiple suitors, male and female, but with a decidedly gentler touch.

Allegra is a huge opera fan, and she goes to a performance of Turandot at the start of the film. “It’s a very interesting opera, and I chose it specifically because it echoes some of Allegra’s problems,” Maggenti said. One interpretation of the opera is that the princess Turandot is a woman who is emotionally incapable of feeling any kind of love – something that Allegra could be guilty of as well.

As Puccini for Beginners opens, Allegra’s girlfriend, Samantha (Julianne Nicholson), leaves her because she is finally fed up with Allegra’s commitment-phobic ways. Samantha goes back to her boyfriend and gets engaged while Allegra becomes involved with a man and a woman, not realizing the two are a recently split-up couple. It’s quintessential screwball comedy.

In music, allegro denotes a tempo that is lively and cheerful. It’s the Italian word for “happy,” with allegra being the feminine equivalent. And it describes the pace of this film – even if Allegra, herself, is more frequently vexed than she is cheerful.

In Puccini, Maggenti takes on ’70s feminism, ’80s identity politics and current, persistent gender stereotypes – all in a comical way. Maggenti believes in comedy as a great subversive strategy, and felt it was the best way to approach her story. “If comedy works, you can take stuff on that would be depressing under other circumstances,” she explained.

In one particular scene, Allegra’s unconscious speaks to her in the form of a restaurant full of diners weighing in on her situation. They express a variety of perspectives about the fluidity of sexuality and relationships, as well as the idea of a lesbian dating a man.

“There are the super academic people who say things like ‘sexuality doesn’t exist,'” Maggenti said, “and then there’s your classic ‘you cannot be a lesbian if you have a boyfriend,’ and the ‘hey, I’m happy now.’ They all represent these different kinds of arguments that have come up over the years.”

It’s familiar territory for Maggenti, who also wrote and directed 1995’s The Incredibly True Adventure of Two Girls in Love. She is a self-described “hasbian” who faced some harsh criticism when she became romantically involved with a man. She pointed out that the term is also a play on “has-been,” and when it was first used to describe her, many years had passed since her breakout hit film. So she reappropriated the moniker and is even amused “that it would enter the lexicon after coming into my life in such a painful way.” And now she has made a film that addresses how we label bisexual attraction.

But Puccini is certainly not the Maria Maggenti story. For one thing, she said, “I never experienced the hilarity. I mean, I never f—ing had to be cater-waiter at my ex-girlfriend’s engagement party; that’s pretty outrageous!” Maggenti based all of the film’s characters on people she knows and included some aspects of her own life.

“There’s the truth and there are the facts,” she said. “The facts of my personal life are quite different, but the truth of my life is very much there in the story: A woman who was a self-identified lesbian … fell for a man, and my life kind of got turned upside down. I know that. That was a personal, real experience to me. Luckily, with hindsight it became a funny story.”

Reaser, who portrays Allegra with a sense of humor about the situation, said: “I’m in agreement with Maria in that whoever you’re attracted to is who you’re attracted to. I’m very open to the idea and wish that more stories would reflect that. I’d love to explore that more, and I had a great time doing it.”

After years in development and pre-production, Puccini was shot in just 18 days. Reaser had only one week to prepare for the role. “The shoot was so fast, we were all out of our minds!” she recalled. “I’ve never seen anything like it, though. Maria was happy and excited the entire time. She never stressed. It was like she was at a party for three weeks.”

But it was no party casting the lead role, according to Maggenti. “That was one of the primary challenges in making the movie,” she said. “I needed an actress who could pull off the intellectual as well as the visceral in this character.”

For her part, Reaser enjoyed the challenge. “I think it’s fun to see a woman get to do something like that where it’s sort of a man’s role: being commitment-phobic and a bit of a womanizer,” she said. “It was fun for me, and I think people enjoyed seeing that.”

Maggenti drew strong performances from her entire cast, which includes Justin Kirk and Gretchen Mol playing the two characters Allegra gets involved with. Most of the actors are New York theater-trained, something Maggenti said was especially valuable given the tight shooting schedule. “That meant they had certain skills that allowed them to very quickly access the scene and the text and the emotions and the physicality sufficiently.”

Although they hadn’t worked together before Puccini, all of the cast members except Kirk and Mol have had roles on the various versions of Law & Order, and Nicholson even has a regular role on Criminal Intent now. But Reaser explained that it’s somewhat coincidental: “It’s like a rite of passage if you’re a New York actor.

Reaser had been acquainted with Jennifer Dundas, who plays Allegra’s friend Molly, from the theater world, and she had already known Tina Benko, who plays Allegra’s ex-girlfriend Nell, for a long time. But she hadn’t worked with either of them before Puccini. “I always thought Tina was extremely talented — like scary talented — and so wonderful and funny and cool,” Reaser enthused.

Benko made some her own contributions to the script. “If someone comes up with a better line than I wrote, I’m more than happy to take it,” Maggenti said, “and Tina was wonderful at that. She’s remarkably smart and funny and intuitive, and came up with some great lines.”

The script evolved and the film changed shape along with the performances. Maggenti arranged for many rough-cut screenings and then modified the film according to the feedback she received. “Sometimes what worked great on the page we realized just didn’t move quickly enough when we actually had the footage,” she said.

Puccini was shot in September 2005 and premiered at Sundance in January 2006, before screening at Frameline in San Francisco and Outfest in Los Angeles. Audiences have generally reacted with uproarious laughter. At Sundance, Maggenti kept thinking, “My God, is this a midnight screening? Is everybody here high?” But the laughs were even more intense at the queer festivals — and came at different moments. “They got a lot of the subcultural humor in a way that the other audiences didn’t,” she said.

Reaser concurs: “Outfest was such a fun audience, and they got every single nuance.” After the Outfest screening, Reaser attended a large after-party where she had a chance to talk to many members of the audience. “A lot of them were really interested in the idea of identity,” she said, “and how we like to name what we are. And how Allegra was really thrown because she had a name for what she was, and then suddenly she was attracted to this man, and it threw her whole life into a whirlwind because she didn’t know what that was, and she didn’t know how to name it.”

The film’s ending was a special challenge for Maggenti. “The setup had so many possible endings,” she said. She had to determine what would work in terms of the romantic comedy genre.

Viewers at the rough-cut screenings suggested that Allegra end up alone, but Maggenti tried that and found it too depressing. You’ll have to watch the film to find out what happens, but let’s just say that Maggenti chose a more organic conclusion, and Allegra winds up with the person she needs to be with.

Maggenti’s main preoccupation, however, is what we can do to make the world safer for women; to make it OK for a woman to always act on her desire without risking her health and safety. “Does my film necessarily answer any of those questions?” she mused. “No, but it shows what an ideal world would be like: that consequences of emotional engagement are emotional. They’re not political; they don’t make you lose your job; you don’t worry about someone beating the hell out of you.”

At Smith College, Maggenti was involved with the lesbian feminist movement and also began working with ACT UP just as it was starting. “It just was the perfect fit of the kind of activism I wanted to do,” she recalled, “which is direct action, and the kind of people I wanted to be with, which were iconoclastic and smart and rebellious and challenging everything in both mainstream and gay culture.”

Maggenti has spent time on both coasts. After graduating from Smith in 1987 with a degree in classics and philosophy, she moved to New York City. Then in 2002 she moved to Los Angeles and worked as a script editor and writer for the television series Without a Trace. In 2005, she sold all of her furniture and moved back to New York and made Puccini for Beginners, then six months ago she moved back to Los Angeles.

Her latest work is a Spanish-language short film that she made in conjunction with the Sundance Global Short Film Project, Los Viajes de King Tiny (The Travels of King Tiny). King Tiny is Maggenti’s dog, and “the film’s about a small dog who takes off one day when his owner is at work and he goes and takes a tour of Los Angeles and then he flies home. It’s strange and funny.”

Looking back on her film career, Maggenti is quite satisfied. “I’ve been really lucky because I’ve worked with people who really believe in film, and I’m really grateful for that,” Maggenti said. “That’s true with InDigEnt [who co-produced Puccini along with Logo]. They give you an incredible amount of creative freedom and support, and that was a great experience.”

Lesbian Apparel and Accessories Gay All Day sweatshirt -- AE exclusive

Related Articles

Leave a Reply

Back to top button