Two recent Canadian movies about gay issues. One is a docu-drama about the 2002 Charter of Rights court challenge made by Mark Hall, a high school student who was forbidden to take his male date to the prom at a Catholic school. On the whole, this is done with a light touch, treating it as a romantic comedy, rather than instructive melodrama. The court case was pretty much a forgone conclusion (the Canadian Charter of Rights is pretty damn clear on the matter), and the boy’s parents and school mates were on his side. The school authorities merely looked foolish to everyone.
Mambo Italiano, is intended as an offbeat comedy, but it has some genuinely moving dramatic scenes. It’s done in a style reminiscent of the TV show Arrested Development, mixed with a bit of My Big Fat Greek Wedding. Angelo (Luke Kirby) has two problems. A small one: he’s gay, in the closet, and romancing a cop. A big one: his family is Italian. Specifically, his family is part of that intense subculture of Montreal’s la petite Italie. (“When I came to this country, nobody told me there were two Americas, the real one, America, and a fake one, Canada. And then they didn’t tell me there were two Canadas, the real one, Ontario, and the fake one, Quebec!”). The Italian-Canadian comedy is painted in broad, exaggerated strokes, but the whole story is done in such a way as to demonstrate the fundamental absurdity of all the hero’s problems. 
Within the cartoon framework, there are many scenes that ring true. It’s more about the stress of being a ping-pong ball among family members and community pressures than about the problems of coming out. His cop boyfriend, believably, caves in to family pressure and marries a “nice Italian girl”, an outcome made certain when you look back at his cowardly behaviour when he was in high school. There are moments in the film that are genuinely hilarious, not because of the absurdist joke-style of the film, but because they are bitter reality.
There is more to this bleak story of a young man in a juvenile detention facility than just another bit of “social realism” or the usual formula of redemption-through-sport. There are layers and layers in Alan Sillitoe’s story, and Ralph Richardson’s film gets many of them across. It’s about being controlled, being used, being forced to play roles for others, and finally rebelling against it in a way that makes some sense. The actors clearly understood these subtleties, and avoided clichés in interpreting the roles. Tom Courtney became a star on the strength of this performance. Michael Redgrave, by then a venerable icon, worked every scene with him in delicate balance. This film still has a high reputation in the British cinema, and justly so.
