Reviewed - Facing Windows (La Finestre di Fronte): The fourth feature from Ferzan Ozpetek, the director of Ignorant Fairies, Facing Windows opens on a prologue set in Rome in 1943, depicting a fight between two young men which ends in a stabbing.

The movie cuts to the present as a young married working-class couple, Giovanna and Filippo (Giovanna Mezzogiorno and Filippo Nigro), find an amnesiac elderly man wandering the streets in a confused state, and they give him a temporary home as they try to establish his identity.

Meanwhile, Giovanna has to cope with dissatisfactions in her marriage, her discontent with her job in a poultry factory, and her ambitions as a pastry chef. And she is becoming more and more interested in the good-looking young banker (Raoul Bova from Under the Tuscan Sun) whose window faces on to her apartment and who regularly undresses without drawing the curtains.

While Ozpetek relies rather too heavily on chance and coincidence, his ostensibly opaque movie is resolved with clarity and finesse as its divergent strands are drawn together. This stylishly photographed film is played with conviction by its core cast, in which Mezzogiorno (The Last Kiss) is radiant.

The film's outstanding performances comes from Massimo Girotti, one of the most gifted actors from the era of classic Italian neo-realist cinema, as the enigmatic older man who, it transpires, survived confinement in a Nazi concentration camp. Girotti's touching portrayal was the last of his career and he died last year at the age of 84, shortly after completing the film, which, appropriately, is dedicated to him.