Off Key
| Off Key | |
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| Directed by | Manuel Gómez Pereira |
| Produced by | Andrés Vicente Gómez |
| Written by | Yolanda García Serrano Manuel Gómez Pereira Juan Luis Iborra Joaquín Oristrell |
| Starring |
Joe Mantegna Danny Aiello George Hamilton Anna Galiena |
| Music by | Bernardo Bonezzi |
| Cinematography | Juan Amorós |
| Edited by | José Salcedo |
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Release date
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| Country | Spain United Kingdom Italy |
| Language | English |
Off Key (also known as Desafinado) is a 2001 Spanish-British-Italian comedy film written and directed by Manuel Gómez Pereira. In it Joe Mantegna, Danny Aiello, and George Hamilton star as three celebrity tenors. Although they perform and have some good times together, they are rivals onstage and in their private lives. They also undergo intense scrutiny from the paparazzi and gossip press over their love lives and careers. The film was loosely inspired by the real life Three Tenors, Plácido Domingo, Luciano Pavarotti, and José Carreras.
The movie opens with a shot of a poster with three men in tuxedos under the name "Los Tres Tenores". Inside a theater in Mexico, one of the men, the dapper and refined French tenor Armand Dupres sings an operatic aria. Backstage, Spanish tenor Ricardo Palacios' wife tries to shoot him in the groin for cheating on her. Police take her away screaming, as Palacios and superstitious Italian tenor, Fabrizio Bernini, prepare to go onstage. Palacios hands his colleagues large Mexican sombreros and tells them to their disgust they must sing a mariachi number together. The concert turns into a disaster. A series of newspaper headlines follow their performance asking "Tenors or Clowns?" and explaining that his singing partners are suing Palacios for fraud. Paparazzi photographs follow showing Bernini kissing Palacios' wife and Dupres mourning his own wife's death.
The action shifts ten years forward as Dupres is preparing to marry Palacios' daughter. The Frenchman's butler is horrified and tries to sabotage the union. Bernini has also married Palacios' now ex-wife. The Italian tenor does not want to attend Dupres' wedding, but his wife wants to be there for her daughter. She chides him about his insecurity, as he questions her whether Palacios was a better lover. Palacios also plans to attend his daughter's wedding at Dupres' French villa, but he has additional schemes in mind. He hires a call girl to pose as his fiancée to convince his former partners and ex-wife how well he is now doing. While learning facts about his life (e.g. he was born on a boat to Mexico), the call girl tries to seduce him but he refuses, saying that sex has gotten him into trouble in the past. Immediately, an irate chef confronts the tenor about sleeping with his daughter, whom he insists now has twins who sing constantly.
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