Reviews

This is one of those rare movies that can still make you feel sad when you wake up the next morning.

The story revolves around the story of a man and his three sons, enriched with the indians living with them and a girl coming home as the fiancé of the youngest son. And yet, the focus is on Tristan (beautifully played by Brad Pitt) who is the untamed young boy, suffering from a guilty conscience after not being able to protect his younger brother during the war. As the oldest son falls for the departed brother's fiancé, who is passionately and one-sidedly in love with Tristan; it becomes eventually impossible to keep their unity and the family begins to dissolve.

One of the greatest Turkish directors ever, Ferzan Ozpetek has long proved himself as a director who doesn't only make good films but also makes them his own. With the elegant cast, the wonderful soundtrack and a cleverly knit story, La Finestra di Fronte is no exception to his brilliant movie-making.

Beginning with the suffocatingly ordinary life of a young couple in Rome and developing as the couple host a stranger, an old man in their house and the lead actress' "improper" attraction to a stranger about whom she knows nothing; the story unfolds into the impossibility of two parallel love stories. The story of two young men during the Nazi suppression; and that of a man and a married woman; two relations both of which are considered highly immoral in their respective environments.

Through the flashbacks, we are taken back to how love finds a way in a country under occupation and we see how the young woman sees her own love's fate in the old man's sad story.

Worth seeing, and seeing again.