Household Saints & sausages

On Nancy Savoca's mystical and mystifying movie, a multigenerational Italian-American fable

Liili Taylor, Christ’s devotee, and Michael Imperioli, bespectacled intellectual

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It’s almost customary when watching a film set in an Italian-American milieu to anticipate a lavish feast or at minimum a red, hot, home-cooked meal, but there is no such assurance, of abundance or appetizing, in Household Saints (1993). The formerly lost movie, now digitally restored, is mystical—and mystifying. Set on Mulberry Street in 1949, what starts out as one thing, a marriage comedy, becomes another—an inquiry into the possibility of sainthood in the secular world. But the solemnity of religious inquiry in Nancy Savoca’s film is constructively offset by dark humor and familial affection, and shot through with lots of (simulated) local color. Manhattan’s Little Italy was recreated on a soundstage.

Savoca is a trailblazing, and somewhat overlooked, female filmmaker of NY Independent cinema, and in Household Saints, her idiosyncratic warmth is a sort of counterbalance to the films of Scorsese and Coppola that also trade in Italian-American Catholic-life. Savoca though, has a penchant for unidealized woman and a knack for questioning societal norms with keen attention to historical context or the era’s zeitgeist. Her Sundance breakthrough True Love (1989), from what I remember, served a swaggering and rude awakening to the gender-roles of marriage. (It’s not on streaming, and I’m unsure of the DVD quality. Perhaps another restoration is in the works.) Meanwhile Dogfight (1991), starring River Phoenix with a jarring military crewcut and Lili Taylor with an extra 40 lbs (she gained weight for the role), offered a tender study of masculinity politics set against the backdrop of the Vietnam War.

Household Saints is unexpectedly unsettling (Michael Rispoli’s character is particularly tragic) but by the end of the film, as in the book—it’s based on a Francine Prose novel)—I presume, everything finds its rightful place. I wrote a bit more eloquently about it for Screen Slate, interviewed Savoca, and even asked her about trad caths. But here, I’m going to turn my attention to the food. Household Saints is out now at IFC and expands to other cities throughout the year.

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Nobody gets married for the food.

That’s what Catherine Falconetti (Tracey Ullman) yells at her father who orders her to prepare a meal so outstanding it’ll make the neighborhood butcher Joseph Santangelo fall in love. Many a culinary romantic (and the characters and creators of The Taste of Things) would vehemently disagree with this notion but the film’s initial scenes prove Catherine right. 

Joseph (Vincent D’Onofrio) has just won Catherine as his bride-prize in a pinochle game and is undeterred by her lack of culinary finesse. He and his mother Carmela (Judith Malina) are invited over to the less financially stable and supposedly cursed Falconetti’s for dinner, their first formal meeting is riddled with disasters. The oven malfunctioned and the roast is cold. The tomato sauce crisped and the manicotti sticks to the pan. The cold antipasto, the one dish that’s hard to mess up, turns up with someone’s hair. Director Nancy Savoca says filming these scenes was her version of a horror movie.

Despite the risk of salmonella, the stubborn, and brave, Catherine serves the meal, and everyone dutifully and painstakingly partakes. The conspicuous clatter of forks and knives pushing food around the plate and the absence of flowing conversation echo a spoken understanding. It’s BAD. The type of debacle that provides solace for those who have experienced their own dinner-party misfortunes. Joseph gives a polite love-blinded compliment, while his mother snipes with a lackadaisical manner of a sleepy geriatric. Her comments hang in the air like grease. Or a curse.

To be fair, Catherine’s problems started at the grocery: all the produce wilted from the summer heat wave—so excruciating it moved to her father to wager her for a blast of cold air from the meat-freezer, which sets the whole plot in motion in the first place. Catherine and Joseph grow closer, finding something like love, and eventually she learns to cook. With a graceful crane shot, the film seamlessly transitions from Carmela expertly preparing the sausages to Catherine stepping into the same role.

moldy peaches, oh marone.

Tracey Ullman described Household Saints as a movie about food and guilt, and that is not untrue. Within the narrative, the lackluster cooking (which, Catherine, refreshingly has no qualms with) becomes more than just a culinary shortcoming—it’s a foreboding, believed to embody misfortune and a familial curse. Throughout the film, sausages assume an ominous and unsettling presence. As the Santangelos come into the wealth and modernity post World War II, cooking and sausages become less priority as the Santangelos, though they do keep the butcher shop. The pork links become symbolic of a superstitious family past, yet one that they can’t seem to escape. At one point their daughter Teresa is discovered frying them up in a daze one morning.

Sausages should receive top billing in the movie, and they sort of do. Savoca hired a sausage consultant to make sure things looked real, and also create non-meat versions because Malina, who played Carmela, was vegan. Savoca also imported her own bread from the storied Terranova Bakery in the Bronx.

Despite what people may tell you, you don’t need to go all the way to Arthur Avenue to get good sausage or Italian specialist. But you do need to schlep up there for primo red sauce at the cash-only, website-less Dominick’s. My high school Italian class would take an annual field trip and take up all the communal tables. Pork stores are scattered throughout the city, particularly in neighborhoods settled by Italian immigrants. I’m headed to Bari today. Here are some others I have known and loved.

• Faicco’s of course

• Paisano’s in Cobble Hill

• United Meat Market in Park Slope

• Emily’s in Williamsburg

  

  Up next: Moono. Tatiana. a highly anticiapted new fried chicken restaurant. Mexico’s Oscar entry. a Singaporean Jules and Jim. and an anticolonialist Western—which you can see right now