‘Don’t Move,’ my dearest love

The emotional Italian temperament has always seemed ideally suited to telling tales of grand passion, and this is especially true for “Don’t Move,” a full-bodied, all-stops-out love story with a wrenching impact that makes most of today’s screen romances seem undernourished by comparison. Not surprisingly, the film won Donatellos -- Italy’s version of the Oscars -- for both its stars, Penelope Cruz and Sergio Castellitto, who also directed. “Don’t Move” has the potential to become one of the most widely appealing foreign films this year.

A 15-year-old girl, Angela (Elena Perino), is thrown off her moped when it is struck by a car. As she hovers between life and death, awaiting surgery to relieve pressure on her brain from a hematoma, her father, Timoteo (Castellitto), a surgeon at the very hospital to which she has been taken, waits outside the operating room. In this moment of crisis Timoteo is swept over by memories -- of his childhood, his marriage, his daughter’s birth, but above all by the great love affair of his life.

In some year before Angela’s birth Timoteo’s car stalls on the outskirts of town. He hikes to a roadside tavern only to discover it has no phone. A stunning woman, Italia (Cruz), offers him the use of the phone at her home nearby, an ancient, ramshackle structure surrounded by a vast uncompleted and abandoned apartment complex. In miniskirt and high heels, her unruly hair blond-streaked, Italia, a hotel cleaning woman, is an infinitely desirable earth mother. (Timoteo is in fact amused by her name.) Overcome in an instant with lust, Timoteo, who has Al Pacino’s dark intensity and looks, takes her aggressively and she reciprocates. “Come to me once a month or once a year, but keep me,” Italia murmurs, uttering the words that are music to an errant husband’s ears.

An affair of the utmost tempestuousness has ignited, and in Castellitto and Margaret Mazzantini’s astute adaptation of her prizewinning 2002 novel, Timoteo and Italia’s love affair gradually and ironically converges with the present. Castellitto creates an unflinchingly honest portrayal of a flawed man who pays a high price for trying to lead a double life. Of men, Timoteo remarks to a friend, “We’re all cruel, some more, some less.” In a performance that amounts to a breakthrough, Cruz’s Italia is as fiery as she is vulnerable, uneducated but possessed of the strength and wisdom of people who have survived an eternity of poverty.

“Don’t Move” has a rich, lyrical sweep and floats between past and present, reality and imagination, with ease. It is a richly satisfying experience, and it’s not too big a stretch to say that Castellitto and Cruz recall Marcello Mastroianni and Sophia Loren, who not all that long ago -- or so it seems -- might well have played Timoteo and Italia themselves.

*

‘Don’t Move’

MPAA rating: Unrated

Times guidelines: Adult themes, steamy sensuality

Penelope Cruz...Italia

Sergio Castellitto...Timoteo

Claudia Gerini...Elsa, Timoteo’s wife

Elena Perino...Angela, Timoteo’s daughter

A Northern Arts Entertainment release of a Cattleya production co-produced with Alquimia Cinema and the Producers Films in collaboration with Medusa Film and Telecinco. Director Sergio Castellitto. Producers Riccardo Tozzi, Giovanni Stabilini, Marco Chimenz. Story and screenplay by Margaret Mazzantini and Castellitto; based on the novel by Margaret Mazzantini. Cinematographer Gianfilippo Corticelli. Editor Patrizio Marone. Music Lucio Godoy. Costumes Isabella Rizza. Production designer Francesco Frigeri. In Italian with English subtitles. Running time: 2 hours.

At selected theaters.