Gypsies, tramps, and tea.

Tea With Mussolini * Written by John Mortimer and Franco Zeffirelli * Directed by Franco Zeffirelli * Starring Cher, Judi Dench, Joan Plowright, Maggie Smith, and Lily Tomlin * Goldwyn Films

Franco Zeffirelli gets all misty about pre-World War II Italy--and drags great actors with him

Having only just dried out from an unbelievably rainy autumn visit to Italy, I yearn to have lived in Florence before World War II. According to Franco Zeffirelli, it was a world kissed by eternal sunsets, a postcard-perfect landscape where ladies in white lace could promenade beneath parasols secure in the knowledge that they would need them only to shield against the inconvenience of ultraviolet.

Tea With Mussolini, Zeffirelli's autobiographical memory piece, is exactly the vision of an embattled Europe you would expect from a man who gave Romeo and Juliet the 64-Crayola sparkle of an MGM musical. The Zeffirelli approach to history combines the time-marches-on urgency of an old Movietone newsreel with the sun-dappled sheen of an Italian Tourist Authority brochure, throwing in Chef as a rich Jewish art collector who sings "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes." Kitsch like this money can't buy.

If there were a true environmental recipe for How to Raise a Big Italian Opera Queen Designer-Director Who Reveres English-Speaking Nations and Badmouths Gay Rights, you could do no better then the nurturing offered Zeffirelli's young surrogate, Luca. An illegitimate child who is shrugged off by his father after his mother dies, he is taken in by his father's secretary, Mary (Joan Plowright), one of a phalanx of English dowagers (known by the locals as scorpioni) who have resettled in Florence in the 1930s.

There are the good scorpioni like Mary, who schools Luca in Shakespeare through toy theaters, and Arabella (Judi Dench), a would-be artist who touches up frescoes and exposes Luca to the galleries. There are the bad scorpioni like Lady Hester (Maggie Smith, dusting off her bitch mask), an ambassador's widow who defends Mussolini and dresses her son in drag. Adding brash Yankee color to the mix are a lesbian archaeologist (Lily Tomlin, swaggering about like some Mama Hemingway in jodhpurs and safari hat) and Cher as a blowsy Peggy Guggenheim type who turns out to have more class in one toenail than all these gals put together.

It's a dream cast filled with major dish potential, but Tomlin and Dench are wasted. Save for Lady Hester's knee-jerk snobbery ("Why shouldn't Mussolini have an empire? All the best people in Europe have empires."), Zeffirelli and coscreenwriter John Mortimer can't give these scorpioni enough sting. And the director's throbbing sentimentality mushes out what's there.

This is epic storytelling at its most cloddish. There isn't an eye blink that isn't telegraphed miles in advance: You know Cher's new lover will do her wrong from the first close-up of his smarmy puss, and they bang the kettle drums moments before the Fascisti bust up everyone's party. Dates are trumpeted on the screen--"December 7, 1941! Japanese invade Pearl Harbor!"--to give us that frisson of great things happening. By the time Cher and Maggie Smith reenact the sort of kiss-and-make-up scene that Bette Davis and Miriam Hopkins did in their sleep, we expect this on-screen flash: "July 5, 1943! Franco Zeffirelli sees his first and last movie!"

There's a neat dadaistic eccentricity in the scene that inspires the title (in which Maggie Smith trots off to make nice with Il Duce), offering a fleeting suggestion of the picture that might have been. But this is only one chapter in Zeffirelli's memoirs. Maybe he'll get it right with Elevenses With Idi Amin or Cappuccino With Quaddafi.

Stuart is theater critic and senior film writer for Newsday.