One of the things that the narrative arts (fiction, drama, and cinema) at their best do is to take us to a wonderful magical world, where life is much more vivid and interesting and meaningful than the world we live in. And as we experience this from art enough times, many of us start to impute that feeling of magical wonderfulness to the very art medium itself. We have the romantic illusion that the making of movies or the putting on of plays or even the writing of fiction is itself a wonderful magical experience.

One of parts of children's theatre which children find most exciting, for instance, is the time after the end of the play when the cast is standing out in the lobby in their costumes to be looked at and spoken to.

Even though this belief that the process of creating art is magical and exciting is in large part a fallacy (the making of movies, for instance, is largely a great deal of very boring hard work), from my own experiences working backstage in college theatre, I can say that there is indeed a certain element of truth to the fallacy. Even though putting on a play is a lot of very unexciting hard work, there is nonetheless something wonderful and magic about being involved in creating a magical illusion for an audience.

The film Illuminata is a very romantic (and therefore quite unrealistic) portrayal of this wonderful experience of putting together a play. To me, at least, the net result is a wonderful enchanting comedy.

Critics have compared Illuminata to Bullets Over Broadway and Shakespeare in Love. The more apt comparison some critics have made is with Ingmar Bergman's Smiles of a Summer Night, because of the light tone and the incredible amount of bed-hopping. (One might also think of Bergman's Sawdust and Tinsel, a.k.a. The Naked Night).

Bullets Over Broadway and Shakespeare in Love were wonderful films. But they are films which use the theatre as a background for a story in which the theatre is only one facet. The actual process of putting together a play is not what these movies are about.

The movie I think of which comes closest to Illuminata is the classic French film about the theatre, Les Enfants du Paradis (Children of Paradise, directed by Marcel Carne and written by Jacques Prevet). I also think of the movie Sympathy for the Devil, which shows the process of the Rolling Stones starting with a rather unimpressive little song with some interesting lyrics (i.e. ``Sympathy for the Devil''), something that Peter Paul & Mary might have sung, and rehearsing it over and over again, trying different things, shaping it and tweaking it until it finally turned into the rock masterpiece we all know, as well as Francois Truffaut's film about movie-making, Day for Night, although that's a much more realistic piece than this.

Illuminata (based on a play by Brandon Cole, who co-wrote the screenplay, and directed by John Turturro) makes no attempt at being realistic. It is a period piece, set at the turn of the Century nominally in New York, but with a very French flavor. Christopher Walken in fact plays Oscar Wilde, except that in this play Oscar Wilde is a theatre critic named Bevalaqua. Susan Sarandon, in what is almost a cameo role, plays an actress named Celemine who is obviously French, despite being American. Consider some of the other character names: Tuccio, Simone, Dominique, Flavio (wonderfully played by Ben Gazzara) , Astergourd, Marco, Piero, Beppo, Pallenchio. There is nothing American about this story. Rather it is in some sense genericly European. Or rather, it is set in a magical fairy-tale world of theatreland. The movie is, after all, a movie of Brandon Cole's play about a play, and at points the movie gives up being a semi-realistic film and frankly becomes a play, with the cast suddenly bursting into song.

Another conceit used several times is that a scene begins, and we think we are witnessing a conversation between two of the characters in the film, but then it turns out that they are actually rehearsing their lines from the play. The interactions between these characters who are in the process of rehearsing their play are exactly like the interactions in the play which is being rehearsed. The film stops just short of a Pirandello-like conceit that the characters in the film are rehearsing a play which is in fact the very play that we are seeing as a film.

John Turturro, the director, is a wonderfully quirky actor who has been seen in independent films for quite some time. He has played key roles in most of the Coen Brothers films and previously directed one other film, Mac (1992), which I haven't seen.

James Berardinelli's review ends with this statement: ``For those who enjoy theatre and live performances, Illuminata is almost a must see. The more a viewer knows about what goes on behind the scenes, the more s/he will appreciate Turturro's film. For everyone else, the movie has a more limited capability to entertain, and certain aspects may seem obtuse. Illuminata is not a conventional motion picture, and for that we can be thankful to Turturro's courage and conviction as a director.''

The Honolulu Weekly did not like the film. Their critic, David K. Choo, writes, ``It plays like a series of acting exercises haphazardly stitched together. Individually, there are some interesting moments, but together --- zip.'' I almost agree with this, but I didn't see it as a negative. If a movie can give me lots of interesting moments, and lots of challenging interactions between characters.... That's enough for me.