In 1974, was a year removed from his breakthrough film—the semi-autobiographical “Mean Streets,” about a young man in New York’s Little Italy neighborhood who is sinking into the quicksand of Mafia life—when he presented a companion piece of sorts: a documentary featurette about a pair of second-generation Sicilian-Americans who also happened to be his mother and father. “ ,” which premièred at the New York Film Festival and later aired on PBS, sits at home with Catherine and Charles Scorsese on their plastic-covered sofa and at their dining table, and, for a spell, peers over Catherine’s shoulder as she stands at her stove, preparing her famous meatballs and tomato sauce, wiping surfaces as she goes. (Her recipe is included in the end credits.
) For the most part, the movie simply lets the couple talk—and interrupt and speak over each other and finish each other’s sentences—about their own parents’ difficult journeys to America from Sicily, about impossible numbers of people crammed into tenement apartments, about the technical nuances of at-home winemaking. “Italianamerican” is as homey and unglamorous as “Mean Streets” is kinetic and mercurial; what they share is a thrilling intimacy, an unmistakable rooting in place, and the confidence of an epochal young filmmaker announcing where he came from. Years later, Scorsese asked his mother to return to the dining table for an immortal and largely improvised in “Goodfellas.
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