A guilty father (Kim Rossi Stuart) is reunited with the disabled son he abandoned years earlier in this low-key but genuine Italian drama by Gianni Amelio (Lamerica, Stolen Children). The boy, now 15 and living with his late mother’s family, is scheduled for rehab at a Berlin hospital, and the father, remarried with a new baby, has agreed to chaperone him. The drama is hampered by a vague screenplay that takes its sweet time explaining the characters’ past and never specifies the nature of the boy’s palsy and apparent retardation. But Charlotte Rampling is characteristically crisp and knowing as a woman who befriends the father in the hospital, and Andrea Rossi, in his acting debut, gives a startlingly direct and assured performance as the difficult son. In Italian with subtitles. 105 min.
