Facing Windows

Giovanna Mezzogiorno in Facing Windows.

Herald rating: * * *

This film, by a Turkish-born, Italian-based director, cleaned up at last year's Italian Oscar equivalents, taking home the best film award and both best acting honours and it's not hard to see why: it's a heartfelt story which precisely charts the unease of the modern urban middle-class while plugging into the Italians' uneasy relationship with past.

But in doing so, it seeks to lend some equivalence to twin plotlines, which unexpectedly intersect in the film's closing minutes. The intention is that each story illuminate the other - both, after all, are about repressed emotion and untold secrets but they are rather mismatched in terms of their emotional punch. For much of the movie, we are engrossed in a fraught domestic melodrama. But when a mysterious subplot is resolved (in a way best not revealed here) it's hard not to feel slightly embarrassed at the shallowness of the main story.

The title pays due respect to Rear Window but there is nothing very Hitchcockian about the setup. The facing windows belong to Giovanna (Mezzogiorno), an overworked accountant in a chicken-processing factory and a young, single man (Bova) whom she secretly observes. Her faintly obsessive romantic fantasies are further fuelled by her discontentment in her lacklustre marriage to the shiftless but good-hearted Filippo (Nigro).

The film's turning point comes when the couple meet in the street a well-dressed old man who has lost his memory. Filippo wants to take him home while they sort out where he lives, and Giovanna, who needs the extra stress like a hole in the head, is initially furious. But the new arrival ends up affecting her in ways she, and we, could never have imagined.

If what follows flirts with implausibility at times, it is sustained by an impressive emotional coherence. Ozpetek, a flamboyantly gay personality, has a sure sense of the complicated weft of human emotions that quite transcends the specifics of sexual orientation and anyway he has an ace up his sleeve in that regard.

For all that, the film settles on a denouement - "Don't be content merely to survive", Giovanna is told - that is faintly and irritatingly Pollyannaesque. Given the drama hinted at in the opening shot and explained at the end, it seems a little lightweight.

The movie is notable for the appearance (the final one, since he died before it was released) of the venerable Girotti, whose 120-film career stretches back to the 1930s and takes in Visconti's Ossessione and Bertolucci's Last Tango In Paris. Once a chiselled hunk, he is here an ancient sage in whose rheumy eyes we may see reflected the tragedy of an entire century. It is a masterful performance and a fitting farewell.

CAST: Giovanna Mezzogiorno, Massimo Girotti, Raoul Bova, Filippo Nigro
DIRECTOR: Ferzan Ozpetek
RUNNING TIME: 106 minutes
RATING: M (contains violence, sexual references and offensive language).
SCREENING: Rialto