Respiro (Italy 2002, 90 min, dir: Emanuele Crialese, cast: Valeria Golino, Vincenzo Amato, Francesco Casisa.

Lampedusa is an isolated Italian island near Tunisia where the sun beats and the beat of hot sensuality rises above the ancient cliffs. Grazia (Valeria Golino) is a fisherman’s wife who some think mad, some think erotic, and all think is too much to leave alone.

The real life Lampedusa is a place of azure beaches where you are either a fisherman or a tourist. That is, unless you happen to be one of the hapless African immigrants trying to escape to Italy who wash up on its shores and make the international news. But this last aspect of the island culture is another movie yet to be made.

The Lampedusa of the film Respiro is limited to the story of Grazia’s (Valeria Golino) husband Pietro (Vincenzo Amato) and their three sons. The oldest, Pasquelle (Francesco Cassia) is the only one among the family or the village who understands his mother’s need to escape the judgment of a family and a town who sees her only as too free spirited.

When her husband decides to ship her to Milan for psychiatric treatment, she escapes into one of the caves in the cliffs that surround the island. Everyone looks for her and when they find her clothes on the beach, they assume she has drowned herself. Oldest son Pietro (Francesco Casisa) is devastated until he finds her hiding place. The he makes secret daily trips to her cave to supply food.

It could be an Italian opera: an elemental story of love, fear and tragedy where small human creatures play against a fantastic landscape. But director Crialese manages to pump up the sensuality to a point where you feel everything and everybody on this island exudes a basic sexual life force. Grazia always has that freshly fucked look except when she tears off all of her clothes in front of her sons to go skinny-dipping. And the sons rarely wear more than skimpy swimsuits; except when rival gangs attack them, strip off their suits, and send them running home naked.

Lampedusa reminds me of another remote island, Formentera, along the Spanish coast, where another sensual movies was filmed in a land where the sun beats: Sex and Lucia (MovieWithMe).

Don’t Move (Italy 2004, 125 min, dir: Sergio Castellitto, cast: Penelope Cruz, Sergio Castellitto, Claudia Gerini).

When a leading man directs, writes, and stars in his own movie the title should be “watch out.” But seducing Penelope Cruz to be your co-star counts for a lot, because you know she’ll upstage you.

Sergio is always wonderful and sympathetic. See him as Mario, the Italian sous chef and lover in Mostly Martha on MovieWithMe.com. Here he is as compassionate surgeon whose daughter is hovering between life and death in the adjacent operating room. While he paces, he reviews his life.

Well, not really his life, but his romantic life. There’s the daughter, and then there is the child he almost had with the untamed feral woman he really loved. Who could play that part? This gets to the real value of this movie: watching Penelope Cruz in yet another role where she manages to fill the screen with lips so wide they could swallow all of Italy.

Sergio is a movie star, and this is supposed to be HIS movie. But Penelope steals the show from the moment she appears. Someday someone will write an art book called “The Many Faces of Penelope,” showing how she moves from film to film making her hair, face and body into fine sculptured art. From Jamon Jamon to Open Your Eyes, to All About My Mother to Volver to Vicky Cristina Barcelona she is always a different Penelope. In Volver she even hoisted a fake ass to give herself the curves of a peasant woman. In Vicky Cristina Barcelona she perfected the slut look to bring life and energy of a movie even Javier Bardem couldn’t save.

Don’t Move is yet another look at those lips and those eyes. Even without makeup (or not much, at least) when she is dying, she looks damn good. (To be fair, it is a different face without the usual eye shadow. Eye shadow is to her eyes what flame racing stripes are to hot rods).

Don’t Move is her film, even though Sergio stars, directs, and wrote. Tough to go to the premiere of your own movie and see all the eyes turn and all the lips move to cheer someone else. But then, what lips, what eyes.

Facing Windows (Italy, 2003, min,102, dir: Verzan Ozpetek, cast: Giovanna Mezzogiomo, Massimo Girotti, Raoul Bova, Flippo Nigro, Serra Yimaz)

Most of us are secret voyeurs when it comes to watching the action in the window across the street, but do we ever think they are watching us just as intensely? A dull marriage is the best reason to take a look at the hunk in the apartment across the way while peeling onions. When Giovanna finally meets him and sees the view from his apartment, she understands his fascination for her too.

Let’s backtrack. Giovanna is played by Giovanna Mezzogiomo, daughter of the famous Italian director Vittorio Mezzogiomo and the actress, Cecilia Sacchi. She’s beautiful, luscious, sexy, and totally not working class. So you’ve got to separate this film into parts to appreciate it. The lustful part about a woman fantasizing about an affair with the neighbor across the courtyard, and his fantasy of her: is imaginative an titillating. The rest is problematic (that’s a nice way of saying not quite believable).

Feeling overwhelmed and stuck in a dull marriage, Giovanna begins refocusing her attention (or repressing her emotions) by caring for the Jewish Holocaust survivor her husband brings home one day. As Giovanna reflects on her life, she turns to the man who lives across from her and whose window faces hers.

Giovanna is married to Flippo, a truck driver on the night shift. She hates her life as an accountant in a chicken killing plant, and she has no passion for her husband. This is even more true after he picks up an old man (Massimo Girotti) wandering in the street one day who claims he can not remember who he is. Later we learn he is a famous pastry chef, and a holocaust survivor who lost his only true love (male) to the Nazis.

Why he keeps up the ruse of not remembering and how it leads into Giovanna trusting him as a substitute for the parent she never had is a mystery the screenwriter has not solved. Mr. Pastry also gives her guidance in her marriage (she is about to have an affair with Lorenzo, the man who lives across from her kitchen window and she is obsessed with watching), and her career (he shows her how to make great pastry and urges her to find herself.)

She makes pastry and plans the affair with Lorenzo. All goes well until she sees the view of her life from HIS window, where he has been obsessed with watching her too.Now she must choose between the lover (who is conveniently about to move away and invites her along) and the life of a chicken plucker accountant. I won’t give away the ending.

Amazingly, you forgive the inconsistencies and conveniences in the plot because Giovanna is so interesting to watch and her story, a woman’s story, seems to resonate so universally.

Title: The White Sheik
Year: 1952
Director: Federico Fellini
Writers: Fellini, Tullio Pinelli, and Ennio Flaiano. Story by Fellini, Pinelli and Michaelangelo Antonioni (!)
Stars: Alberto Sordi, Brunella Bovo, Leopoldo Trieste, Giuletta Masina

The Story: A young couple from the sticks comes into Rome for their honeymoon. The husband has everything planned to the second, culminating in a meeting with the Pope, but his shy young wife disappears at the first chance she gets–it turns out that she is secretly in love with the title character, who is the hero of her favorite comic book.

Why It’s Great: Fellini is beloved for his oddly uplifting movies about existential ennui, but this, his first movie as a solo director, was one of his few straight-up comedies, causing American critics to mostly ignore it. That’s a shame, since it’s a masterful and touching farce. Woody Allen named it as his favorite comedy of all time! It’s a romp, but also very ambitious, in that it manages to be wholly sympathetic to two totally conflicting points of view. We appreciate both the thrill of her liberation and the exquisiteness agony of his suffering, even though one is causing the other. It was this big-hearted munificence that would come to define Fellini’s world-view.

Three more reasons at Cockeyed Caravan…