Starring Giovanna Mezzogiorno and Massimo Girotti. In Italian with English subtitles. Rating unavailable.

It's the same old story: a young couple is burdened by family and job woes until they take home an elderly Holocaust survivor. What, you haven't seen that one before? Welcome to the rarefied world of Italian soap opera, in which the mundane is superbly visualized and the terrible is tamed for purposes of melodrama.

If I sound a little hard on Facing Windows, that could be because the film promises so much. Directed by Turkish-born Ferzan Ozpetek (Turkish Bath) and written by him with frequent collaborator Gianni Romoli, Windows frames a tale of loyalty, lust, and haunted memories. The dutiful couple here is Filippo (Filippo Nigro) and Giovanna (Giovanna Mezzogiorno), who've been together forever and now only have their two young children in common. She's an accountant at a chicken factory and he's a struggling mechanic on the night shift, so they only see each other long enough to fight.

Giovanna thinks Filippo is too softhearted, and she's proven right--and wrong--when he is accosted by an old man lost on the streets of Rome. Soon, the well-suited fellow, called Simone (Massimo Girotti), is camping out on their sofa, seemingly with no place to go. It's not clear if he's suffering from Alzheimer's or something else, but gradually we learn that he is tormented by flashbacks to the German occupation of Italy and by his own failed attempts to live a life that couldn't speak its name.

Through all this, Giovanna nurses her obsession with the handsome fellow living in the building opposite (hence the title). And when Simone goes missing one night, the rock-jawed neighbour ends up helping her find him--and, shall we say, so much more. (He's played by Christopher Reeve--type Raoul Bova, also the illicit love interest in Under the Tuscan Sun.)

The movie is beautifully mounted, with many shimmering reflections reinforcing the imagery of regret and possibility. (Some of the lighting effects make this resemble an expertly handled stage play.) The supporting players give a colourful sense of daily life in a Roman apartment building, and the rarely smiling Mezzogiorno, similarly intense in The Last Kiss, keeps up enough pressure to make things feel real. But the fact that Simone turns out to be a world-renowned pastry chef while Giovanna secretly dreams of opening a bake shop--well, it's all a bit predigested, isn't it?

Of course, some emotional weight is added when you recognize the craggy, upright Girotti from early works by Luchino Visconti, Vittorio de Sica, and others, and then discover that he died of a heart attack right after Facing Windows was finished. Man, these Italians get to you one way or another, no?