W. Somerset Maugham in his famous potboiling mode: upper-crust Brits, an American Jew, and an Austrian refugee in Italy in the darkening days before WWII. A moral crisis, coupled with a ready-to-pounce Black Shirt, follows heavy foreshadowing and heavier coincidence and contrivance ("I took you for a goddess, and you're just a whore!"). Kristin Scott Thomas manages to fashion a semblance of a performance out of the tiny cracks in her china-figurine demeanor, and Anne Bancroft is a kind of dust devil darting over a barren plain; but the slumbrous sotto voce Sean Penn, unable or unwilling to bestir himself, seems to have the more accurate measure of the piece. Philip Haas (Angels and Insects, The Music of Chance) gets credit for the listless and graceless direction, and Belinda Haas (Philip's wife) hyphenates the jobs of Editor and Screenwriter, an unusual combination in movies, but perfectly usual in the movies of Philip Haas. With Derek Jacobi, James Fox, Jeremy Davies. (2000) — Duncan Shepherd
This movie is not currently in theaters.