Ricordati di me

Among the many pleasures of watching Italian actress Laura Morante is a certain astringency that seizes her face in moments of stress — her mouth contracts into a sour pucker, her cheekbones harden into switchblades, and her eyes ping-pong from corner to corner. Such an instance of fierce defensiveness comes early in Remember Me, My Love, when Morante’s homemaker awaits a phone call that could free her from a bourgeois existence, or sentence her to an eternity with her unfaithful husband (Fabrizio Bentivoglio) and two college-age kids.

Hardly an original scenario, but Morante (The Son’s Room) brilliantly undermines the movie’s middlebrow amiability, providing the story with a frazzled and slightly unstable centre of gravity.

As in director Gabriele Muccino’s previous angst opera L'Ultimo Bacio, Remember Me crosscuts its way through an ensemble: Dad gets reacquainted with an old flame (Monica Bellucci); son Paolo and daughter Valentina embark on separate but equally fumbling sex odysseys; and Morante’s matriarch tentatively resumes an aborted stage career.

But the 48-year-old Morante is the real thing; like Deneuve, Rampling, and Huppert, she graces middle age with both intelligence and a rumpled, lived-in sex appeal.