Critic Reviews

Istanbul-born director Ferzan Ozpetek has outdone himself with this wise and ruminative mystery about memory, unfulfillment and yearning.

Ozpetek is an enriching director. More than a presentation of its contents, every scene seems also to be a distillation of the matters that led to it. He can take a somewhat worn device--moving the camera around his people as they talk--and make it savory.

The film is slick, beautifully acted and completely entrancing.

Gentle and life-affirming, if too sentimental in the end.

Poignant and carefully observed, the Italian drama Facing Windows portrays two consuming, illicit romances: one in the present, the other kept alive in faulty memory. The long-ago relationship holds far more intrigue.

Girotti is especially evocative, his face an alternating current that switches from emptiness to alarm and back again.

Ozpetek brings a straight love story and world politics into the mix, but it's his brilliant cast which completes the connection.

Facing Windows is rich stuff. Maybe too rich. But thanks to fine performances and a grounded script, the pieces of this intriguing little puzzle all manage to fit.

Some lovely photography and even Mezzogiorno's hot-blooded performance fail to keep Facing Windows from feeling fractured.

Ozpetek moves things along at a snail's pace and lays the sentiment down thickly. But it's a potent tale, wonderfully acted by Mezzogiorno and Massimo Girotti as the old man.