To some extent, "directors' statements of intent guide comprehension of the film, while a body of work linked by an authorial signature encourages viewers to read each film as a chapter of an oeuvre."
(Lewis, 41)
This perhaps above anything else, helps to reinforce the basic
presumption of this discussion, which is that there is a knowing
relationship between audience and filmmaker-often based on a history
between the two-in which certain conceits of the genre or personnel tend to
reinforce the presence of a stylized illusion, in this case the machismo of
a Mafioso community. This approach is at the heart of filmmaking for
audience and filmmaker alike, with both parties desiring an end product
that sufficiently removes the former from the present recognition of the
distinction between the film's use of illusion and its attempt...

Its noir tendencies come through in the somewhat romanticized world of Mafia criminality, in the elegance of its
women and in the film's plot-driven bloodletting. Like a Hitchcock movie,
the killing is never incidental but is instead premised on the intensity
and darkness manifested in real personal relationships. In this way, it
embraces the macabre as an element of style and content alike rather than
one or the other.
The lesbian romance which drives this universe forward, by contrast,
helps to ground our story in the present, if only for the reason that its
theme might have seemed impossibly taboo only a decade.

Works Cited
Lewis, Jon. (1998). The New American Cinema. Duke University Press.