On the eve of the final Off-Broadway performance of the long-running musical "The Fantasticks," filmmaker Eli Kabillio takes a wistful look back at the show's genesis with composer Harvey Schmidt, author Tom Jones and original cast member Jerry Orbach.
Adaptation of the award-winning stage musical. The story takes place entirely in a bedroom dominated by a couple's four poster bed, taking them through fifty years of marriage, through happiness and sorrow, through good times and bad, through childbirth, parenthood, and the eventual sadness from the absence of their children. In the end, they face the future together, while remembering their past.
Set in Ancient Greece, a street clown Cockian is hired by a Roman Commander to impersonate an imprisoned Christian leader in order to learn the group's secrets, but the clown begins to take his role to heart.
Neighboring widowers plot to romantically unite their son and daughter by pretending to feud and forbidding the two children to associate with each other. Their scheme works and the two youngsters fall head-over-heels in love. To end their "feud" the fathers hire a bandit and his henchmen to fake an abduction and allow the son to rout the assailants. The plan works, but the two love birds discover that requited love is much less exciting than forbidden romance and they break off their relationship. Matt, the son, resolves to see the world and receives a severe buffeting, while Luisa, the daughter, has an unhappy romance with the bandit, who steals her most precious possession, her mother's necklace. Matt returns, sadder but wiser, and the two former lovers reunite.
The film is an attempt to evoke, through paintings, the world of a small Texas town in an era long gone. The paintings are freely based on photographs, letters, and postcards, discovered hidden in a cigar box in the family barn by director Robert Benton, and dealing entirely with a courtship between his grandfather's brother, who was the local mailman, and a young woman who came to visit her relatives in Waxahachie, Texas, in the summer of 1909. They met, fell in love, got married, and shortly after the marriage, she died.
