Queerguru reviews Loose Cannons (aka Mine Vaganti) an affectionate queer Italian coming out story

The Cantone family pasta business in Italy is ready for some new blood. Dad is getting old and looking to his two grown-up sons Antonio (Alessandro Preziosi) and Tommaso (Riccardo Scamarcio) to take over so that he can retire. Tommaso wants no part of it as he wants to be a writer and return home to Rome to be with his boyfriend Marco (Carmine Recano), and confides this all to his brother by coming out and telling him that he is going to ‘fess up to the family at dinner that night so he can be disowned by his strict catholic father and be free to have his own life. Antonio is happy enough to stay and run the factory, but professes to Tommaso, that he too is gay. And without warning him, steals his brother’s thunder by coming out to the family at the dinner table before Tommaso can even speak.

The father throws Antonio out of the house and then immediately has a heart attack and is rushed to the hospital. Tommaso now feels trapped thinking that if he now told his father he was a homo too, that would totally finish him off. So he stays at home and reluctantly puts on a brave (straight) face and starts to run the pasta factory, even making people believe that he has fallen in love with a local girl. This all starts to unravel when a group of his outrageous friends from Rome come to visit, and eventually, the family catches on to the reality that their wily old Grandmother, who had been a rebel in her own day, had guessed many years ago.

It’s a sweet old fashioned un-politically correct comedy that works because it is set in a patriarchal Italian family which is ripe for these situations even in these times. It’s gentle, warm and funny, and an enjoyable real feel-good movie. It is in fact the latest film from Turkish-born director Ferzan Ozpetek who’s credits include some remarkable good work with gay stories and/or sensibilities inc. ‘Steam’, ‘His Secret Life’ and ‘Saturn in Opposition’. There is a common theme through most of the movies that Ozpetek makes and that is family is what you make for yourself rather than something dictated by blood.

And even though ‘Loose Cannons’ was a very big hit in Italy his adopted country, it never made it to a Theater in the U.S. (shame!), but look out for it on DVD or VOD… you’ll be pleased that you did.