Having a famous mama and a slew of top class actors doth not great a film make, as director Edoardo Ponti shows in this his first feature. This is a pity since it's rare to get such an interesting mix of acting talent thrown together - Sophia Loren (the director's mum), Mira Sorvino, Deborah Unger, Gerard Depardieu, Klaus Maria Brandauer, Pete Postlethwaite and Malcolm McDowell.

Actually, they are not really thrown together. This is in fact three completely different films tenuously threaded together by an quasi-mystical plot device. In the first, a kitchen drama, Olivia (Sophia Loren playing glum) is trapped in a soul-destroying marriage with a cantakerous and wheelchair-bound John (Pete Postlethwaite). Worn out by looking after this miserable and ungrateful old fart, she tentatively takes to drawing as an outlet for her depression. Egged on by a gardener friend, Max (Gerard Depardieu laying the gallic romanticism on thick), her talent and her horizons expand.

In the second, a daddy's girl, Natalia (Mino Sorvino), realises that she must follow her conscience rather than follow in the footsteps of her famous photojournalist father. Some superficial ideas about the way photojournalists operate are trotted out and she ends up "doing the right thing".

In the final and most effective story, Catherine (Deborah Lar Unger in quiveringly good form), an acclaimed cellist, is holed up in a darkened apartment in the throes of psychological torpor. She listens to her children's pleas to call them on the ansaphone and ignores them. Her distressed state of mind is something to do with her ex-con dad (Malcolm McDowell playing a gentle hard man role) who she meets on his first day out of jail with a pistol pointed at him.

The first story is dull, the second is weak and the third is shrouded in too much mystery. The only connection between the three stories is made through a little girl who appears for a few seconds giggling and smiling in each of the woman's lives at various points of the film. You are not quite sure what this girl is meant to be or represent until in the painfully contrived, not to mention weird, ending you realise she is the plot device for pulling the three women/stories together.

The actors, left with little choice but to act their socks off to save face, sporadically energise the plodding script but there are many dull stretches. As for Sophia Loren, the big pull of the film, she still looks strikingly beautiful after all these years. But it would have been nice to see more of the Italian firebrand of earlier years rather than the subdued and subservient housewife here. Then again if you were directing your superstar mum in your debut wouldn't you want to tone done her part from the start?