Guido (Filippo Timi, who played both Benito Mussolini and his son in Marco Bellocchio's terrific "Vincere") is a grizzled ex-cop in the northern Italian city of Turin, who has devolved for uncertain reasons to a do-nothing job as a security guard at a rich man's estate. Sonia (Russian actress Ksenia Rappoport, who's done several roles in Italian) is a hotel maid from the Balkans, just another Eastern-bloc blonde who has washed up in a Western metropolis. They meet at a gruesome speed-dating event presided over by an amusing mother-hen figure (Lucia Poli), and there's an immediate spark. Within days, they're strolling the city streets together at night and exchanging cautious confidences from their shrouded pasts. But this is the kind of movie where people's secrets will force their way out, and no love affair goes unpunished. When Guido invites Sonia to visit him at work, where nothing ever happens, of course that's the day when a group of armed thugs invade the premises, and the story takes a sharp left turn (followed by another one not long later).

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Just within the last two years, the recent outpouring of pictorial energy and formal innovation in Italian cinema is finally forcing itself onto the fringes of American culture. Matteo Garrone's bleak crime epic "Gomorrah" and Paolo Sorrentino's sardonic, operatic political saga "Il Divo" -- both available on DVD -- borrowed techniques from Italian (and Italian-American) filmmaking legends to bear on their scathing portrayals of contemporary Italy's social dysfunction. Luca Guadagnino's forthcoming "I Am Love," starring Tilda Swinton as a Russian trophy wife in a super-rich Milanese household, is a sumptuous, dazzling spectacle that recalls the best films of Visconti.

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