Angelo My Love

Angelo My Love

The late Vittorio De Sica once said that everyone can play at least one role himself better than anyone else. De Sica demonstrated this belief in his 1940s neo-realist films such as “The Bicycle Thief,” and now Robert Duvall proves it again in the wonderful and unique new movie he has written and directed called “Angelo My Love.”

This is a film that could not exist without the people who are in it and how many movies can you say that about? It is about the lives, feuds, rivalries and dreams of a group of New York Gypsies, and Duvall has cast real Gypsies to play themselves. His idea for the movie came when he saw a young Gypsy boy named Angelo Evans conning an older woman during an argument on a Manhattan street corner. Duvall thought Angelo belonged in pictures.

After seeing the movie, I agree. Here is a street-smart, inventive kid of maybe 11 or 12 who has some of the moves and some of the cynicism of an old con man. (“He’s got his little macho moves down so pat,” David Anson wrote in Newsweek, “he’s like a child impersonator.”) Angelo is from a culture that teaches him the world owes him a living which he cheerfully acknowledges. What we sometimes almost forget is that Angelo also is a kid, vulnerable and easily hurt, and that much of his act is bravado.

Duvall wraps his story around Angelo. We meet his mother, father, sister and girlfriend; we meet also two villainous Gypsies who steal from Angelo a ring intended for his future bride (these people play themselves more or less; they really are Angelo’s family members; etc.). The plot of this movie basically exists to allow us to watch these characters live their lives but it’s the sort of plot, I suspect, that Gypsies might be able to identify with: It involves theft and pride and thwarted justice and revenge.

After the ring is stolen by the Tsigonoffs, there’s an ill-advised chase to Canada in order to get it back (and a delightful set-piece involving a Gypsy camp under attack by ghosts). Then there’s a trial scene in the backroom of an Irish-American bar in Brooklyn. All executed with great energy and seriousness even though by the end of the movie, the ring hardly seems to matter anymore.

Angelo also stars in several fairly self-contained scenes which amply illustrate why Duvall found him so fascinating. He makes a defiant mess of his one day in school. He tries to pick up a pretty country singer who has to be at least 10 years older than he is. He and his sister engage an old lady in a long ingratiating conversation in a cafeteria; they want her inside their mother’s fortune telling parlor, but she’s a New Yorker and wasn’t born yesterday. All these scenes have a certain magic because we sense they’re real, that they come out of people’s lives. “Angelo My Love” technically is fiction film.

but Duvall has been so close to his sources that it plays like a documentary; maybe because he is such a good actor, he has listened to them and really seen them instead of only seeing how they should move and behave.

There are some moments in this film when the camera waits another beat too long and some scenes that never quite fit into the rest, and I think Duvall left them in because they showed something about his gypsies which he had noticed and wanted to share with us. We leave the film asking a question the film does not try to answer: What will happen to Angelo as time goes on? Being cute and street-smart is one thing; trying to carry that along through life is something else.

Maybe Angelo can do it, but not this way; the movie doesn’t ask us for such romanticized hope. It would seem rather that Angelo, as Duvall obviously believes, is more than just another colorful Gypsy kid; he’s got possibilities as a person if only he can grow out from under those quick mannerisms and doesn’t get too deeply scared by his topsy-turvy upbringing. Who’s to say what may come? In 10 years there could be a picture called “Angelo My Friend.”

Watch Angelo My Love For Free On Gomovies.