THIRTY-YEAR-OLD Angela (Bruni Tedeschi) is sick with something more than love in this tale of star-crossed lonelyhearts. Sick with solitude, plagued by omens and obsessions, she fixes on a cello teacher she barely knows (Bentivoglio) as the love of her life.

The tone of this movie is somewhat baffling. Angela is clearly adrift. She doesn't work because her mother is rich, and she can't seem to finish her degree. Disturbed by an increasingly unbearable impression of being invisible to the world, she checks herself into a sanitorium. Yet her obsession with a strange man is portrayed as neither pathetic nor humourous. Instead, it is taken up in all seriousness as the workings of a mysterious true love.

Granted the film is generally light-hearted, if slightly brooding. But Calopresti could have tried a little harder to make us believe that Marco (Bentivoglio) is loveable rather than merely goofy (does he have to make googly-eyes at his pert student?) and that Angela is together enough to have a relationship. Bruni Tedeschi does give a finely nuanced performance as a highly introverted woman teaching herself to reach out to others, whether in anger or love.

The melodramatic escapades of most of the other women in this film poke fun at the heterosexual ideal, but I had the uneasy feeling by the end of the movie that Angela will be sorted out if she has a man in her life. Rishika