“The moon brings the woman to the man,” an Old Man (Feodor Chaliapin Jr.) says to his old friends. Love is in the air in Norman Jewison’s Moonstruck, but that love has its complications and strings attached. The Old Man’s granddaughter, Loretta Castorini (Cher), gets a wedding proposal from a Mr. Johnny Camareri (Danny Aiello). She says yes, even if her father Cosmo (Vincent Gardenia), a rich plumber, has doubts about the man. Part of the deal involves inviting Johnny’s estranged, tortured younger brother Ronny (Nicolas Cage) to the wedding. Johnny has his own condition – that they, from Brooklyn, go together to the Met to watch an opera. Johnny trusts Loretta to do all of this while flying to Italy to say goodbye to his mother. But what will he do if he finds out that Loretta and Ronny end up falling in love?

This is the kind of movie that used to show up on cable TV back in the olden days, one with stereotypical Italian characters to make up for what I felt then as a pleasant experience. Too pleasant for me to have paid attention then, but watching it now reveals some delightful ambiguous morality. Surprisingly, Cosmo serves as the movie’s B-plot, getting people to shell out $10K as he sells copper pipes. He also sees Mona (Anita Gillette) on the side and his wife Rose (Olympia Dukakis) is sensing that. Despite that, he and Rose still have dinner with their friends, joking about Cosmo some generations back. Cosmo’s ambiguous morality reflects Loretta and Ronny’s whose quirky feeling is a ‘one thing leads to another’ deal. And yet, Moonstruck doesn’t want to punish Cosmo the same way viewers root for Loretta and Ronny’s romance.

I’m alright with what Moonstruck is selling, even if it’s the kind of movie with low stakes. It does, hilariously, require some suspension of disbelief, like when Ronny invites Loretta to the Met. Loretta, a Brooklyn woman, responds something around the likes of her not knowing what the Met is. There’s a lot of surprises waiting for her there, like running into Cosmo and Mona. The more one thinks of it, the binaries here make some good sense, Manhattan being a centre of classy sins. The other surprise waiting for her is Ronny showing that a gruff man like him can be sensitive too. This movie, then, serves as male propaganda and a case for Cage, both of which I’m willing to buy. MUBI, after all, has this film on their streamer to honor an actor, whose all out approach fits in rom-coms.

A piece about Moonstruck needs to address some issues about its legacy, mainly its wins at the Oscars. I still need to see the other three nominees for best actress that year but I have opinions. There are, obviously better performances that year that the Academy wasn’t brave enough to nominate, especially Solveig Dommartin. That said, Cher, playing a not-so-good woman within a good lens, still deserved to win that Academy Award. Glenn Close is rich, has three Tonys, stars in Lee Daniels films, and is, I assume, fine. Cher, a woman with a longer career and ‘peaking’ in a romantic comedy, found acting taxing after this. Popping in and out of films means that, at least, there isn’t a curatorial theme to her movies. Or at least there isn’t one that’s obvious, but someone at MUBI or any streamer will find something.

Moonstruck is available to stream on MUBI, which-