TWO FAMILY HOUSE

Raymond De Felitta = director

reviewed by Joanne Yamaguchi and Gus Calabrese
at the 2000 Toronto International Film Festival

Clicking on some of the photos and text will run video clips

Two Family House is a period piece. The period is the fifties. This film is a narrated, simply told flashback tale. It is narrated in the voice of the child that Buddy inadvertently took in, when he took in the infant's unwed mother.

Stories about losers risk becoming losers themselves. The challenge is generated by the situation: will this loser transcend loserhood, to reach universal heights. Will this film transcend the trap of becoming what it's about? Each of us has wanted to be a singer (like Buddy Visalo), or some such analogous dream. Each of us has felt vanquished by put down's and discouragements by those close to us (as Buddy is by his wife Estelle). Along the lines of vanity press, Buddy aspires to renovate a fixer-up two-family house into an apartment for his family (now consisting of a woman-with-babe whom he has rescued from homelessness) and a bar for himself. It doesn't matter if some nights nobody comes to the bar and listens to him sing. For the most part that is exactly what happens. Nobody shows up. It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter that it's vintage vanity press. It's a story about the courage of a nobody who makes himself into a somebody. It doesn't matter that nobody notices. We notice. The viewer has been invited to be the other family dwelling in Buddy's two-family house. Somebody else has noticed and is in fact the one who has brought it to the viewer's attention. It is an incidental passenger through Buddy's journey. It is the infant child of the unwed mother whom Buddy has more or less rescued from ignominy.

The charm and edge of Two Family House comes in the sneak attach it launches against the viewer's sentiment. It restrains against conventional sentiment displays. Then in a sneak round-about, a sense of sudden solidity erupts from the quiet picture as the viewer realizes the whole story is told from the POV of a person who would very possibly not have had a noteworthy life at all, save for Buddy rescuing the unwed mother. Then, strike two, another chunk of sudden solidity as we learn from the narrator that after Buddy died, the narrator's mother kept Buddy's bar and dream alive. Strike three, and the viewer is punched out, by being told that the incidental person in Buddy's life, the narrator, is now the barkeep, manager, owner of Buddy's bar. The poignancy of an individual's dream being kept alive generations after his death by people who happen into his live quite by accident, hits a home run. Plain people. Simple situations. Plain people thinking outside their situations. Killer sentim