QUEENS LOGIC. 7Arts, 1991. Kevin Bacon, Linda Fiorentino, John Malkovich, Joe Mantegna, Ken Olin, Tony Spiridakis, Tom Waits, Chloe Webb and Jamie Lee Curtis. Written by Tony Spiridakis and Joseph W. Savino. Directed by Steve Rash.

   A perfectly ordinary film, but done with such sheer panache that I found myself charmed by the players and involved with the characters.

   “Panache” is perhaps a charitable way of describing the overall attitude here. The Italianate natives are uniformly portrayed as volatile, immature, and borderline violent. Their language is crude, civility sporadic, and faithfulness a matter of convenience. And that’s just the nuns.

   Sorry, just kidding. But I really have to warn prospective viewers about the ethnic stereotyping here. I found the characters sympathetic and amusing, but those closer to the milieu may justifiably see the broad brushstrokes as ethnic denigration. Viewer beware.

   The main threads of the plot involve a self-described Fishmonger whose wife literally throws him out of the house on their anniversary. He remembered the date, he remembered the gift, but he stopped off for a drink with the boys on his way home to take her out for Dinner and lost track of time — for several hours! This thread gets counterwoven (Hey, I invented a word there!) with another about an artist who gets the proverbial cooling tootsies as the day approaches for him to marry the Fishmonger’s sister.

   They’ve made plenty of movies with one or the other of these elements, but this one does the weaving so adroitly, I was barely aware of any plot structure at all; everything just seemed to be happening. Happening to a likeable and genuinely funny ensemble that includes Malkovich as a gay man who can’t relate to gay men, Waits as a spaced-out jewel hustler, and Curtis as a sincerely daft dowager with a dangerously innovative approach to problem-solving.

   I could go on: Bacon as a local boy returning after a stint in Hollywood, Fiorentino as a Wife and Mother that don’t take nothin’ from nobody….

   And it occurs to me now that when you talk about the characters here, you’re talking about the plot. Because in this instance, the plot is all about these people bouncing off each other, much as we do in what is sometimes called Day to Day Living. The artistry here is in making something so cohesive and consistently funny out of anything as messy as Real Life.