L'AMORE MOLESTO (68)

Directed by: Mario Martone

Starring: Anna Bonaiuto, Angela Luce, Gianni Cajafa

The Pitch: When her mother is found mysteriously dead, a rather prim young woman delves into the past trying to find out what happened, and has to confront her own repressed sexuality.

Theo Sez: As the premise kicks in - our heroine's mother, a thoroughly sweet-looking old lady, doesn't come home when she's supposed to, makes a series of cryptic, foul-mouthed phone calls to her increasingly hysterical daughter, and finally turns up dead the next morning - this gets its hooks into you more deeply than any film in ages ; unfortunately what follows isn't the expected Chabrolian mystery but a rather schematic (if intermittently excellent) psychological drama, drawing on two rather hackneyed devices - the truth coming out gradually through a series of meetings with a variety of people, and recurring flashbacks to a childhood trauma that turns out to be vital to the action (and is finally resolved, none too plausibly). Fortunately the meetings are subtle and artfully-drawn, and the flashbacks are pretty amazing just to look at, shot in an extraordinary kind of tinted sepia ; if you can imagine a Techine movie - same kind of insights, same moments of dreamlike transcendence - with a cruder resolution, and raucous Neapolitans instead of sleek French people, you wouldn't be too far off. Peripherals are perhaps more interesting than the main narrative, but the whole thing has an intensity to it that's quietly thrilling : it's the kind of film that can elevate a casual hand-job into a profoundly spiritual (and cinematically superb) experience.