Directed by Ferzan Ozpetek. Starring Riccardo Scamarcio, Nicole Grimaudo, Alessandro Preziosi, Ennio Fantastichini 15A cert, Light House, Dublin, 110 min

TOMMASO Cantone, the youngest son in a pasta-manufacturing dynasty, plans to drop several bombshells at his homecoming family get-together: he wants to be a writer, he’s moving from Lecce back to Rome, he’s gay and he’s proud. He’ll be disowned for sure; his unenlightened father has “nothing against the ones with wives and children at home, it’s the one’s who insist on going around telling everybody.”

Imagine Tommaso’s surprise when older brother Antonio beats him to it, leaving the younger sibling to deal with the old man, who promptly has a heart attack at the dinner table. As the chauvinist patriarch recuperates (under the watchful gaze of his glamourous wife and a bouncy mistress), his son is subjected to a series of anti-gay rants and a barrage of unwanted new responsibilities at the family spaghetti factory. How ever will he escape? And will a surprise visit from his gay Roman chums give him away completely?

Loose Cannonsstarts out looking like one of those grand Italian white telephone movies they've been churning out since Mussolini was in power: observe the glitterati talking and eating in their palatial home.

It's hard to fault the director's fabulousness. Look here, it's an improvised homoerotic musical number by the shimmering azure sea. Look there, it's a tearful bride, mascara halfway down her face, loaded pistol to hand, legging it across a windswept landscape and so artfully distressed she might make the cover of Confettimagazine.

But Ferzan Ozpetek’s comedy is a mischievous thing. The farce and ramshackle fun soon coalesces into a bemused study of hypocrisy with eurotrash pop tunes and hidden claws. Who could have imagined such black uses for petit fours?

Tread lightly, impressionable viewers: there are so many push-up bras you may dream of basketballs for weeks.

Opens December 27th