Licia Maglietta, a more loosely wound and comfortably upholstered Natalie Wood, warm and womanly, with a lived-in face and body but an undimmed sparkle, plays a Pescara housewife and intermittent klutz who gets separated from her tour group, including her husband and teenage son, while fishing an earring out of the toilet bowl at a rest stop. The occasion affords her an opportunity to go off on one of those nonradical feminist odysseys, in fact quite a conservative and conventional feminist odyssey, to Find Herself: hitchhiking to Venice where she has never been, landing a job with an incapacitated old florist, gaining lodging with a suicidal Icelandic waiter who speaks a torturously stilted brand of Italian (it comes out in the English subtitles like so: "What engenders such uncertainty?"). The novice private investigator on her tail, whose only qualifications for the job are the detective novels he devours and his trench-coat, is conventional as well, and he takes away too much time from the heroine. But director Silvio Soldini keeps the movie light on its feet, with a fill-in-the-blanks method of narrative that makes judicious use of blackouts and ellipses, and doesn't get bogged down in unnecessary details. (No need to spell out, for example, why the heroine might want to get away from her blowhard husband and withdrawn son.) And he moves in and out of dream scenes with a smoothness and seamlessness that surpass Fellini and approach Buñuel. Bruno Ganz, Giuseppe Battiston. (2000) — Duncan Shepherd
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