Don't Move

Directed by Sergio Castellitto. Starring Sergio Castellitto and Penélope Cruz. In Italian with English subtitles. Rated 14A. Opens Friday, April 15, at the Fifth Avenue Cinemas

If you've ever wondered what the big deal is about Penélope Cruz, be sure to see Don't Move, which represents a career high for her and everyone else in this carefully assembled drama that starts with a bang and never lets up.

The film-a stunning second effort for director Sergio Castellitto, who also plays the lead-begins with the aftermath of a motorcycle crash that finds an Italian surgeon jarred by the arrival of his own daughter with a bad head injury. The girl is just 15, and that's roughly how many years his mind covers while other doctors struggle to save her. Through his sharp-edged slivers of memory, we learn how, just before the daughter was born, Castellitto's Timoteo had a liaison with a young woman called Italia (Cruz) that threatened to derail his career and marriage to the beautiful Elsa (Claudia Gerini, who played Pontius Pilate's wife in The Passion of the Christ).

The initial meeting, which happens after his car breaks down during a trek from the hospital to his deluxe home by the sea, is anything but romantic. When Italia, a gum-chewing gamine with blackened teeth, bowed legs, and too much makeup, invites him to use her phone, he uses her instead. The encounter is brutal, but tenderness happens too, and it triggers something primal in both people. Soon Timoteo begins a double life, yawning through dinner parties with his wife's friends (with Leonard Cohen playing) and playing foosball with the yobbos near Italia's dusty hovel (where Europe's kitschy "The Final Countdown" provides the theme).

Castellitto, who adapted the screenplay with his wife, Margaret Mazzantini, from her best-selling novel of the same name, doesn't bother to explain why Timoteo feels he is living an inauthentic life, nor why this risky adventure frees him. But he makes it clear that success can mean little to a man who has only mastered a set of rigid rules, believing in nothing beyond his small world.

The world of the film is quite wide, however, at least in terms of Italian cinema. The hovel to which our hero keeps returning-a shack amidst an unfinished and impersonal housing project-recalls Anna Magnani's rundown apartment in Mamma Roma, and Cruz's iconically named character contains more than a few hints of Giulietta Masina's breakthrough turn as a simple-minded hooker in Nights of Cabiria.

Still, the enigmatic filmmaker, whom art-house regulars will recognize as the easygoing chef from Mostly Martha and the philandering theatre director in Va Savoir, is doing more here than honouring Pier Paolo Pasolini and Federico Fellini. He's dissecting a marriage, and what happens within and without it, in a manner that isn't exactly easy on viewers, regardless of how many stylistic references they get. To tell you why Cruz's performance is so devastating is to give away too much, so let's just say that the leads give added depth to the words sexual chemistry. It's the kind that can blow up in your face at any moment, and that's what you like about it.