Paolo and Vittorio Taviani's early-19th-century period piece, from a Goethe novel, traces the realignment of affections among a newly married couple and their two houseguests of opposite sexes. The application of the laws of chemistry, the rigidness of geometry, and the precision of mathematics, to the fathomless vagaries of human emotions, makes for a provocative framework. And the narrative imagination reaches heights of poetry accessible only to the Romantic with a capital "r. " Highest height: the newborn who bears the physical characteristics of the two members of the quartet who are not his parents. (Think about it.) Yet for some reason -- almost as unfathomable as the mysteries of the human heart -- the film bypassed the art-house circuit in America, or rather American art houses opted to pass over the film, and it went straight to video. Isabelle Huppert, Jean-Hugues Anglade. (1996) — Duncan Shepherd
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