Italian Romance Falls Short of the Best

“The most extraordinary aspect of love,” says Pupi Avati, writer-director of “The Best Man”--playing at Edwards Town Center--is “the irrepressible, out-of-control, unexplainable impulse.”

Avati’s new film--set in a northern Italian village on the last day of the 19th century--is about a young woman who falls in love with a stranger on the day of her marriage to a bald, wealthy local Don Juan (Dario Cantarelli).

The girl’s pragmatic mother, Olimpia (Valeria D’Obici), counsels her daughter that love is merely an illusion. Her father (Mario Erpichini) is depending on the impending union to save the family from financial ruin. But Francesca (24-year-old Spanish actress Ines Sastre) feels destined for better things.

A better thing turns up at the wedding: Angelo (Diego Abantanuono), the best man, recently returned from the U.S., where he claims to have made a small fortune in business. (Avati has said he modeled this character on his grandfather, an emigre who returned to his native Sasso Marconi from America with enough money to buy the whole village.)

At the ceremony, Francesca’s sudden passion for Angelo is obvious to everyone. Gossiping townspeople and a mixture of religiosity and folk wisdom root the romance in the mores of a bygone era.

Times film critic Kevin Thomas writes that the film “has so much going for it--an attractive cast, an amusing story, gorgeous period locales, a sweepingly romantic Riz Ortolani score--it’s hard to understand why Avati allowed it to become so listless.” Despite “many exquisitely staged amusing moments, there’s not much substance to string them together.”

In Italian with English subtitles. Running time: 1 hour, 40 minutes. MPAA rating: PG for thematic elements; Times guidelines: adult themes.

Edwards Town Center, Bristol Street at Anton Boulevard, Costa Mesa. (714) 751-4184.

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The Oscar-nominated Russian film “The Thief” opens Friday at the Art in Long Beach. The life of a 6-year-old Russian boy, Sanya, changes radically when his widowed mother, Katya (Ekaterina Rednikova), takes up with Tolyan, a swaggering army officer (Vladimir Mashkov) with a tattoo of Stalin over his heart. Tolyan’s taste for petty crime obliges the family to stay on the lam. It is 1952, the year before Stalin died, a time of great hardship.

Times reviewer Thomas called Pavel Chukhrai’s film “at once intimate and epic, possessed of lyrical beauty and suffused with that mixture of warmth, suffering and rueful humor so characteristic of Russian films.”

Thomas praised the “shimmering floating quality, so apt for a memory film”--it is narrated by the grown-up Sanya--as well as its “emotional richness . . . breadth of vision [and] graceful cascading toward a grand climax.”

Chukhrai, who is in his early 50s--the same age Sanya would be today--recently told San Francisco Examiner interviewer Barbara Baer how he moved from city to city with his parents (his father is also a filmmaker) as a small child, living in communal apartments.

“Hardship and tragedy were all around us, yet inside we lived our lives and sometimes we were happy,” he said. “People survive in all circumstances.”

After the war, he said, there were many young women left alone with a child, and men impersonating soldiers “who took advantage of innocent people.”

Chukhrai auditioned 500 6- and 7-year-old boys for the role of Sanya before he found Misha Philipchuk, who had never acted before but had “the look of living through hard times” the writer-director sought.

“The Thief,” which won honors at film festivals in Venice and Miami, is Chukhrai’s eighth feature film and the first to be distributed abroad.

In Russian, with English subtitles. Running time: 1 hour, 33 minutes. MPAA rating: R, for some sexuality, nudity and language. Times guidelines: Too intense for young audiences.

Art Theater, 4th Street at Cherry Avenue, Long Beach. (562) 438-5435.

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“Metropolis,” Fritz Lang’s futuristic 1926 silent film about a wealthy young man who joins exploited factory workers in a mass uprising, is justly celebrated for its Expressionistic set and the epic scale of its special effects. Chapman University offers a free screening of the full-length, color-tinted 1984 print Monday at 7 p.m.

Argyros Forum, Room 208, Chapman University, 333 N. Glassell St., Orange. (714) 997-6625.