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Rating: Loretta Castorini is a young Italian-American widow obsessed with luck in love. She agrees to marry Johnny Cammareri, a mature man, more out of reasoning than love, but as soon as she meets his brother Ronny, it’s love at first sight.
During the same days, Loretta's father has an extramarital affair with a woman who is the exact opposite of his wife. Even Loretta's uncles are swept away by passion, although they are now
elderly, just like two teenagers with their first crush, and even her mother spends a pleasant evening in the company of a stranger.
The common denominator of all these events is the full moon. A big, bright, fascinating moon that makes the protagonists fall in love and become passionate. A romantic comedy with fairy-tale tones; a modern fairy tale performed by a host of great actors. Cher, in the role of the protagonist, Loretta Castorini, is perfect: sensual and ironic at the same time, manages to transform from "plain" in the first half of the film to "sexy bomb" in the second. For this performance, she was
awarded the Oscar for Best Actress, beating out names of the caliber of Meryl Streep. A very young Nicholas Cage in the role of Ronny Cammareri, and then Olympia Dukakis and Danny Aiello as Mrs. and Mr. Castorini, respectively.
The film is enjoyable, romantic, never banal nor vulgar; the actors are dubbed with a charming Sicilian accent, which contributes to making a comedy of errors even more amusing where the true protagonists are the moon and superstitions. To make the actors truly harmonious and give the impression of a real family, it seems that director Norman Jewison insisted that they all live together for a certain period of time in a large apartment, to create that familiarity, that uniformity of gestures and expressions, that harmony even just in glances, typical of a family: we could thus define Jewison as a sort of precursor of Big Brother, but with far better results: besides the already mentioned Oscar for Cher, Olympia Dukakis was awarded the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress.
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