Facing Windows

Turkish-Italian writer-director Ferzan Ozpetek's Facing Windows revolves around an unhappy Italian housewife (Giovanna Mezzogiorno) living in Rome whose unlikely friendship with an amnesiac octogenarian leads her not only into a prospective romance with the handsome fellow she's long admired through a window that faces his apartment across the street, but also towards the job she's always dreamt of as a pastry chef. So long as the film focuses on the old man, beautifully played by the late Massimo Girotti, it's fascinating and evocative: his past involves the Nazi roundup of Italian Jews in the latter stages of the war and a difficult choice he had to make between the needs of the community and his own personal desire (and even toward the close, when the man becomes a sort of fairy godfather to the housewife, Girotti pulls off what could have been a merely precious twist). Unfortunately, however, Ozpetek's writing and the rather monotonous performance of Giovanna Mezzogiorno turn the housewife into a surprisingly bland figure, and the same is true of the man across the way, a character to whom Raoul Bova (Under the Tuscan Sun) brings external attractiveness but little depth. Optional. (F. Swietek)