After sleeping with her fiancé’s brother, Loretta floats into her mother’s Brooklyn kitchen only to hear that her fiancé has returned from Palermo (and his mother’s suddenly vacated deathbed) and is seeking her out.
“She was dying,” Loretta complains. “It was a miracle,” her mother answers in wry amusement. “This is modern times,” says Loretta, “there ain’t supposed to be miracles no more!”
“Well, I guess it ain’t modern times in Sicily.”
Thirty years ago everything about Norman Jewison’s Moonstruck rang true, including that line. Miraculous notions may have seemed possible – and meaningful – in the economically and socially backward ethnic areas of southern Europe and the like, but for sophisticated moderns on the Continent or in North America, prosperity, scientific discovery and secularisation had created a perfect trifecta of resistance to the idea that divine intervention still occurred in an educated world, or needed to.
