Not of This World

When a beautiful young nun (Margherita Buy) walking in the park discovers an abandoned baby, her quest to find the parents leads her to a lonely antisocial laundry and dry cleaner shop owner (Silvio Orlando) who may be the father. In other words, a woman of the cloth, feeling the tug of her maternal instincts, meets up with a man who washes cloth (his store insignia is a penguin), and seems not to have a paternal bone in his body. These inherent ironies could have steered Not of This World towards comic cliché (the nun and the nerd raising the baby as a hilarious odd couple), but while a halting friendship develops, ultimately forcing the pair to reevaluate their lives, neither character changes in quite the way you'd expect. Set in Milan and told with an eye towards urban realism, Giuseppe Piccioni's film becomes a meditation on faith and the need for human relationships, as Buy, her beauty hidden by frocks, goes through a thoughtfully rendered crisis of faith, while nebbish Orlando offers comic relief at first but later displays the show the loneliness of a man who needs to simply connect. Recommended. (D. Fienberg)