Giuseppe Tornatore’s uncharacteristic stab at a giallo, an erotic thriller Italian-style, or, as the genre was ingenuously known in its Sixties and Seventies heyday, a “sexy-thrilling.” The film begins in a fog of intrigue — a comely Ukrainian immigrant, bedevilled by brief, almost subliminal flashes of flesh and rope, worming her way into the position of nanny for an accident-prone little girl — and the fog thereafter only thickens. What’s she up to? What has she been through? Any tentative hypotheses you might form are sure to fall short of the full story. And yet the plot twists are not so loopy as to overpower centripetal force and to send credibility hurtling off into space. It requires a tight rein. At times Tornatore could stand comparison with Hitchcock (in lieu of his usual point of comparison, Fellini), though the Bernard Herrmann-esque score of Ennio Morricone, in the pulsing, revving, driving vein of North by Northwest, Vertigo, Psycho, invites more of this comparison than the director can truly stand. All the same, the high polish of his technique goes far to counteract the luridness of the material: the couple of strong-arm thugs in Santa suits, the veteran character actor Michele Placido as a hairless ogre called “Mold,” the gradual fleshing-out of those fleshy flashbacks, tawdrier and tawdrier. (The fog finally clears.) And the Russian-born leading lady, Ksenia Rappoport, with her haunted and hunted look, starved face and bug eyes, smoldering fire and subtle shading, makes a very strong showing. Claudia Gerini, Clara Dossena, Pierfrancesco Favino, Margherita Buy, Angela Molina. (2006) — Duncan Shepherd
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