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‘Everybody Wants to Be Italian’

If you’re not Italian, you may find the jokes amusing; if you are, you may find them tired.

By Bob Brown
AS the title suggests, the humor in this romantic comedy depends a great deal on your ethnic funny bone. If you’re not Italian, you may find the jokes amusing; if you are, you may find them tired. Every culture has its take on the border skirmishes between the sexes. In this movie, it’s détente Italian style: Each side has a secret tactic for making the other do its bidding, whether it’s love or marriage, not that these are always mutually exclusive.
   The plot falls into the matchmaker genre, a type that by and large trades on mixing or matching ethnicities. At its funniest, we have small films with big hearts, like My Big Fat Greek Wedding (2002), or Norman Jewison’s more ambitious Moonstruck (1987, Little Italy in the Big Apple). Writer-director Jason Todd Ipson is a former plastic surgeon who turned from horror films to make this unassuming, sometimes charming little story about a Boston fishmonger who can’t get over his first love.
   Jake Bianski (Jay Jablonski) inherited his parents’ fish store in Boston’s predominantly Italian North End. Everything about the neighborhood is Italian, including his two clerks, Steve Bottino (John Kapelos) and Gianluca Tempesti (John Enos III), as well as Papa Tempesti (Richard Libertini). They’re full of sage, sometimes ribald, advice about Jake’s pathetic love life. He’s been longing for his “soul-mate,” Isabella (Marisa Petroro), for the last 12 years, during most of which she’s been married to Mario (P.J. Marino) and rearing their three kids. In other words, Jake is self-delusional and can’t seem to get unstuck.
   When Steve bumps into the very attractive Marisa Costa (Cerina Vincent) one night behind the store, he sees the perfect match for Jake, and Gianluca agrees. But they’ve got to make sure Jake acts Italian so he can connect with this nice Italian girl. Papa draws on generations of experience to warn Jake of the ways of Italian families when it comes to courting their women.
   The problem, of course, is that Jake is Polish, but Marisa doesn’t know that; while Marisa is Spanish, and Jake and his crew don’t know that. Marisa, meanwhile, is being advised on how to please an Italian man by Mrs. Abignali (Judith Scarpone), who has suffered through her own marriage to one.
   To further twist the knife, Jake is the poster boy for “How To Turn Off a Woman” on their first formal date: he wears sloppy jeans, orders her dinner without asking and (almost-always fatal), he mentions his “girlfriend.” But this near-disastrous meet-ugly has somehow been weathered, despite the crudity, as Marisa becomes more charmed by Jake’s persistence and his boyishly charming naiveté.
   As if the ethnic mix-up weren’t enough, the story layers on a professional mismatch: Marisa is a veterinarian, which is the source for doctor and animal jokes. “Hey, I like animals. I own a fish shop!” Marisa has clever ways of playing tit-for-tat.
   Jake and Marisa are both so cute and so wrong for each other, the film overloads the dice to make sure we get the impact of what should be a momentous clinch. Bianski, who has six-pack abs and a puppy-dog smile, is a perfect hunk. But his character’s abnormal neediness, not to mention cluelessness, is a little hard to believe. Still, it’s what drives the plot. Costa trades on her ravishing looks to play this stock character: the smart, beautiful woman, biological clock-aware, who doesn’t want a man unless he wants kids. (Remember how romantic comedies used to drive toward a marriage proposal? Now, it seems they have to drive toward pregnancy.)
   The story drags when dealing with Jake’s unrequited love and his colleagues’ advice sessions. But there are a few bright moments here and there, and one belly laugh. With a snappier script and tighter editing, this could have been a winner of its type. Instead, we settle for a run-of-the-mill romantic comedy. And with no nudity whatsoever (unless you count a glimpse of Jake’s abs), its R rating must rest entirely on Gianluca’s crude suggestions. At that rate, it strikes out, because its blatant vulgarity is never redeemed even by some fleeting titillation. If you pick this as a date movie, be forewarned. On a positive note, there are some nice location shots in Boston’s North End. Ciao.
Rated R for some sexual references.