The Station

Stars: Sergio Rubini, Margherita Buy. Co-written, directed by, and starring Sergio Rubini, The Station is a romantic comedy that turns into a 4th-quarter sudden death thriller. Rubini plays Domenico, a type-A-bachelor-living-at-home-with-mama whose life is his work as a night clerk at a railway station. When the beautiful heiress Flavia (Margherita Buy) suddenly appears one night after having a fight with her boyfriend, Domenico awkwardly pitches woo at her for awhile. Eventually, the angry boyfriend comes around and Domenico is forced to go from bureaucratic nerd to Superclerk very quickly. While the light banter between the principals over the first 3/4ths of the film hearkens back to the golden romantic comedies of the 30s and 40s, the finale--which is characterized by suspense, profanity, and violence--represents such an abrupt shift of tone in the film that the effect is disconcerting overall. Rubini is very good as the harried clerk but The Station has little sense of rhythm: it lurches along slowly for the most part until slamming the pedal to the metal at the end. The Station won a Donatello Award at the 1990 Venice Film Festival. Audience: Foreign film fans will want to see, but this is not a major foreign release.