A 50-year old dusty bailiff takes tango lessons across the street from his office when his doctor tells him to get a little exercise in the French independent hit Je ne suis pas là pour être aimé (Not Here To Be Loved). The second film from Stéphane Brizé (after Le bleu des villes) has been a critical success at home but is unlikely to show up in foreign lands; this quintessentially French item mistakes silence for profundity and has a strangely uneven performance by Patrick Chesnais at its centre (he was nominated for a European Film Award for his performance). It slight 89-minute running time incorporates numerous prolonged scenes of tango dancing by amateurs, thus unwittingly revealing there is not a whole lot of meat to the story.

In Roberto Faenza’s I giorni dell’abbandono (Days of Abandonment), prolific Italian actress Margherita Buy gives a performance that lends some sparkle to an otherwise convoluted and unoriginal story, which has been adapted by no less than four writers and the director from a novel by Elena Ferrante. Buy is a literary translator who has abandoned her hometown to start a new life with her husband in Turin (also Faenza’s hometown). Apparently happily married with children, her husband (Luca Zingaretti, who earlier played a mafia-defying priest in Faenza’s Alla luce del sole/Come Into The Light), one day announces that the needs to be alone because his life lacks meaning. Stunned, it takes Buy’s Olga a while to realise that her husband has simply dumped her for one of his much younger students.