Cinema: Stranger Than Fission

La Fuga. Any electricity generated by this low-voltage Italian drama can be traced to Anouk Aimée, playing an interior decorator who is more beautiful than most, and more manly too. Anouk's boldest designs are reserved for Giovanna Ralli, a newer exotic, who smartly assumes the attitudes of a neurotic young matron beset by conventional woes. Her parents are a wretchedly selfish pair; she cannot concentrate on raising her young son; and her physicist husband is so preoccupied with the mysteries of nuclear fission that he seldom wonders what his wife thinks. Giovanna consults an analyst and discovers that she thinks mostly about Anouk.

Making his feature-film debut with La Fuga (The Flight), Director Paolo Spinola brings off one unabashedly lesbian love scene, but mostly his camera composes a critical essay on wealth, boredom, lovers, luxury flats, all the icons of fashionable corruption that Italian moviemakers love to hate. The rest of the movie is so elliptical that Giovanna's "tragic death," presumably by suicide, is never explained, and cues the physicist to recall more of her unhappy history in flashbacks pressed from a charred diary. Sad to say, the dead wife's darker secrets turn out to be less interesting, after all, than some of the projects under way out at the lab.