Periodically Nonna, in the 1989 English-Italian mixed language movie The Queen of Hearts, prays for her family’s “black souls” and pesters a poor priest by confessing to her large family’s list of problems, even after being told that’s not quite how absolution works. What does she have to pray about? Her loving but imprudent son-in-law who gets a prophecy from a talking pig’s head about how to win big in cards is just the beginning of it. This comedic family drama of immigration, love, and responsibility, directed by Jon Amiel, is both tragic and endearing. Told through the eyes of the Luca family’s youngest member, ten-year-old Eddie, situates the story in a place between magical-realism and childhood nostalgia.
    In an epic tale of Italian proportions, Eddie’s parents fall in love, sharing glances from their bedroom windows across street from each other. So when Rosa is promised to the butcher Barbariccia, Danilo flees with her through cobblestone streets and up a rickety bell tower where they are cornered by Barbariccia with a knife. After a leap of faith, they escape. Rosa and Danilo immigrate to England and Barbariccia swears revenge. Nonna sneaks away with them, refusing to leave her daughter. As years pass, they have four children in a leaky apartment until Danilo, working as a waiter, is called over by a wealthy couple and offered five pounds if he smiles for them. Amidst the blatant mockery, their uneaten roasted pig head tells Danilo the card he should look for in a Scopa deck (for Italian card games) in order to become “a man of property.” He follows the advice, the gamble pays off, and buys a café who’s crown jewel—La Macchina, a supercharged espresso machine—becomes the family’s keystone.
    That word was my first introduction to the movie. I never understood why parents would always laugh when they saw an espresso machine and dramatically call it “La Macchina” in an exaggerated Italian accent until I started learning the language in college. To get closer to Italian culture, my dad said I absolutely had to see The Queen of Hearts. My parents originally saw the film at the Ritz in Philadelphia and searched for a DVD ever since which took them nearly 20 years to find.
    The title is both literal, Rosa juggling two men’s hearts, and symbolic of chance, finding a single card in a deck. Fate and love culminate in the central question: how do we realize what is important and learn to fix our mistakes? For Danilo, it’s how to be a good father and husband. For Eddie, is the innocent illusion of a role model always bound to be broken? How do we make things right? The journey to redefine family is ignited when Eddie’s older brother Bruno takes issue with his father’s laisse-fare attitude and decides to leave while Rosa continues to run the shop and take care of the children. Eddie then watches his father gamble with their entire livelihood while his grandfather starts to fade away. The magic of his father’s shiny macchina dies when it is confiscated, and the magic box his grandfather guards and never travels without is soon buried after his death. Eddie loses everything.
This cumulative effect in the writing leads to a dramatic climax with a reveal of what the grandfather’s magic box contains and a brush with death that pulls the family back together to take back all they’ve lost to Barbariccia. It manifests in a child-like trick at the betting shop, Eddie wearing his grandfather’s hearing aid, his father and Bruno by his side in a triumvirate reconciliation with themselves and each other to bring the family back together. In this scene, Eddie is called a saint for his gambling guesses. In a way, each character is striving for their own kind of sainthood through the ability to succeed based on a guess, intuition, a prophecy, religious spirit, anything to claim some other interference influencing their choice.
At the end, Danilo makes a sacrifice to prove that family means more than money. Then we go to an atmospheric scene with the grandfather in heaven, a misty mountainous battlefield. In this transition, we find the answer to how to make things right—starting by being honest about what is important at the end of life. The grandfather is framed as the lone soldier, and the only sign of war is his soldiering uniform and single pistol. After trekking up a slope, he finds a farmhouse where a young woman comes out with wide arms, and as he runs toward her, his gun dropped and long forgotten, he turns into a child again radiating pure joy at being able to return home to his mother. He is only able to do this after he helps out Danilo and Eddie one last time so that everyone can return home to family. 
Even though this is a story about the Queen of Hearts, where is she? Rosa’s role is largely observational until two pivotal scenes at the end where all the men orbiting her are forced to see past her beauty to her steadfast love of family. She shows her maturity by knowing what she wants and following through with her choices. The two daughters further emphasize their commitment to family, one representing the role of a wife and the other of a mother, yet their milestones are twisted for dramatic or comedic effect with a catastrophic wedding and an out-of-wedlock pregnancy. Nonna continues this arc by insisting on speaking only English in the house to which the grandfather often pokes fun at, so while she is focused on her family’s evolution, he is dreaming of the glory days of the war. These generations of females prove to be the queens of their own hearts while their male family members are trapped in their own fantasies. 
The Queen of Hearts has three things most Italian stories do: marriage, money, and revenge. Through fantastic writing by Tony Grisoni, they are woven together by smart foreshadowing and a consistent emotional pull. Rosa and Danilo’s escape at the beginning runs as a silent vignette, acknowledging the Romeo and Juliet cliché-ness of the story that keys the audience into the characters and plot in just a few minutes while still being comedic. Above and below camera angles draw contrast between a child versus an adult’s point of view. The retreating god’s-eye-view at the end emphasizes older-Eddie’s final reflection on his childhood, how he can never find his way back to the same street where they all lived yet he’s still sure it all happened and wants to return. 
Slowing becoming one of my favorite movies, The Queen of Hearts is a hidden gem, full of unexpected laughs, a belief that everyone can be forgiven, and most importantly enduring family love.