European Films

Love is probably the most disruptive force known to man, even more so than its counterpart hate. Love makes people do strange and inexplicable things and oftentimes people have abandoned everything they owned for love. In the Italian melodrama La finestra di fronte (UK title Facing Window, US: Facing Windows) from Turkish-born director Fernan Ozpetek, love is the driving force behind two-and-a-half interwoven love stories set in 1940s and present-day Rome. Love's disruptive force, however, is never in full sway, as the protagonists are either more cowardly or simply smarter than love’s recklessness and abandon.

Giovanna (Giovanna Mezzogiorno) and Filippo (Filippo Nigro) are a couple with two small children who have difficulties to make ends meet. Neither of them is very happy with their job and it strains their relationship and sex-life. Things start to unravel when they pick up a helpless man in the street (the late Massimo Girotti, in his last role) who does not remember who he is. Filippo, the more caring of the two, takes him first to the police station and then home, when the queue at the station seems endless. Giovanna is rather unhappy about having a stranger around and tells her husband so. Nevertheless, the harmless old man spends the night at their tiny apartment and prepares a copious breakfast for the entire family the next morning.

We will slowly learn more about the mysterious man besides his excellent cooking skills, as he becomes more and more of a burden on the relationship between Giovanna and Filippo. When the old man escapes from Giovanna’s car when she tries to bring him to the police station, Giovanna is helped out by the handsome Lorenzo (Raoul Bova), who lives in the apartment opposite hers. They have been secretly spying on one another and apparently both have been having fantasies of what it would be like to be with each other, away from their day-to-day problems.     

 

It turns out that the old man might be called Simone and that he has had a very sad love story of his own when he was younger. Wondering through the streets, his own flashbacks mingle with contemporary Rome, slowly revealing more of his dark past. Ozpetek and his writing partner Gianni Romoli wisely keep Giovanna’s struggles within her marriage and her impossible relationship with Raoul different enough from Simone’s own story, rather than going the easy route of telling the same story twice only in two different periods. Giovanna grows to even like Simone as she discovers his difficult past, but nevertheless, the two stories do no always sit well together in the same film. Simone’s story, for all its implied horror, grief and guilt, feels surprisingly tame and thus weightless when it is in fact the more interesting of the two stories; Giovanna’s could have been lifted out of any soap-opera, past or present.

Ozpetek surprises with his eye for detail (such as the shot of Giovanna’s hand coming off the staircase railing leaving a trace of baking flour) but generally the cinematography by Gianfilippo Corticelli never makes use of the possibilities the big screen has to offer. The literally sweet theme of cooking is also used rather bluntly and takes laughable proportions in the film’s latter scenes when Giovanna goes to visit someone she knows from an old love letter written by Simone. The cast of La finestra di fronte is serviceable but unremarkable except for Filippo Nigro (who is underused and underwritten) and the score is again rather sweet, making this intriguing film perhaps best suited for a viewing on DVD at home.

 

Buy the DVD at: amazon.com, amazon.co.uk, amazon.de, internetbookshop.it.

Browse: amazon.fr, dvdGO.es, nl.bol.com, allposters.com.