The first to arrive of director Guiseppe Tornatore's follow-ups to "Cinema Paradiso."
It's an elegiac love story about a boy, 13, who falls madly in love with a beautiful young widow in his small Sicilean town during WWII. He is too young and too shy to approach the object of his infatuation, and she is too wrapped up in her own life drama to notice the young boy who intently stares at her as she walks by.
At one point the boy Renato says, "The only true love is an unrequited love." That statement bespeaks a lifetime of wisdom.
The scenery is divine, the acting superb, the story wistful and full of so many flashbacks and scenes from the imagination that you're never quite sure what really happened and what was just imagined. The woman is mistreated by the town's women though; they're jealous of her beauty and the magnetic hold she has on all the men. In the end her husband comes back from the war -- not dead, just missing an arm -- the town's women forgive her, and the boy moves on to girls his own age.
It's a coming of age story, it's the universal story of falling in love with somebody above your station, it's the awakening of a lifetime of ache for the opposite sex.
I rather enjoyed it.
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