CINEMA: ABSOLUTELY FABULIST

It’s the year’s cutest meet: she throws up on him, and it’s love at first hurl. Victoria (Aitana Sanchez-Gijon) has reason to feel queasy: she’s pregnant but unmarried and is taking a bumpy train ride home to break the news to her very traditional family, proprietors of a vast Napa Valley vineyard. Paul (Keanu Reeves, whose blankness is used to good effect) has reason to be open to any romantic possibility: it’s 1945, he’s just been mustered out of the army and has discovered that his hasty wartime marriage was a mistake. Besides, A Walk in the Clouds being in the magic-realist vein, a playful fate seems to want them to get together.

After two more accidental meetings, he agrees to pretend to be her husband just for a night, to grant her respectability in the family’s eyes, then to disappear. That, you know, is not going to be easy. She is beautiful (and meltingly portrayed by Sanchez-Gijon), her relatives are entertainingly fractious, and he, we discover, is an orphan with a lifelong need for the kind of noisy warmth they generate.

Magic realism dictates, moreover, that they be archetypes: Grandpa (Anthony Quinn) is a lusty old windbag; Dad (Giancarlo Giannini) is an uneasy martinet; Mom (Angelica Aragon) is full of soft romantic sentiment. They also, of course, have a fierce, primitive, mystical relationship with the land that nurtures them. The stranger must embrace the acreage before he can embrace their daughter.

This movie (written by Robert Mark Kamen, Mark Miller and Harvey Weitzman) is slicker and neater than director Alfonso Arau’s widely beloved Like Water for Chocolate, but the calculated naivete of its fabulism can be just as irritating. Yet if you’re willing to be wowed, there’s also a kind of romantic grandeur about the piece, something inspiriting in its sweeping statement of broad, basic emotions.

–R.S.