EURO CRUZ IN CONTROL

REVIEWED - DON'T MOVE/NON TI MUOVERE: POOR, cursed Penélope Cruz, the apparent albatross to a lengthy series of US flops, has begun to take on a rather pathetic aspect. So it is a delight to see her gleefully rip up the screen as a fiery, misused women in this diverting Italian melodrama.

There is something dubious about any film that asks us to embrace a sexual relationship that begins with rape - though the audience is, perhaps, let off the hook here by the knowledge that the script and source novel are by a woman. But Cruz, clearly more comfortable emoting in the romance languages, invests her performance with such raw, sweaty energy that Don't Move proves hard to dislike.

Castellitto, hitherto more famous as an actor than a director, stars as Timoteo, a wealthy surgeon married to a stereotypically bourgeois ice maiden (Claudia Gerini, also Pilate's wife in The Passion of the Christ). The film begins with the hero discovering that his only daughter has been injured in a motorbike crash and, interrupted by occasional updates from the operating theatre, continues in flashback as the distraught father remembers guilty secrets.

Fifteen years earlier Timoteo's car broke down in some blisteringly hot locale and, after guzzling vodka while waiting for the mechanic to arrive, he forced himself upon a young woman who offered him the use of her phone. The couple embark on a turbulent relationship which contrasts starkly and crudely with that between Timoteo and his wife.

In truth, Don't Move, which is written by Castellitto's partner, Margaret Mazzantini, from her own book, is an old, old story: the middle-aged, middle-class man forced to reappraise his life at a time of crisis. But if you can forgive the hollowness of the female characters - Cruz's slovenly wastrel has no self-esteem for the usual, clichéd reason - it works reasonably well as high-class soap opera.