Grazia's Island

Not since "Y Tu Mamá También" has a movie so palpably captured the down-to-earth, flesh-and-blood reality of high-spirited people living their lives without self-consciousness.

Director Emanuele Crialese captures a stifling, dead-end rural culture awash in nature's beauty but seething with pent-up sexual frustration.

A cheerful, life-affirming film, strong in its energy, about vivid characters. It uses mental illness as an entertainment, not a disease.

The film doubtless works better for those able to accept it unquestioningly as a charming fable of the redemptive, healing power of love that it means to be.

Respiro scores high -– if strange -– marks, but I think it’s more in love with the quirky nature of life on a small island, which, unsurprisingly, echoes life in any small town, be it here or on some faraway Sicilian isle.

While Grazia's story is too reminiscent of such films as "Blue Sky" (1994), which also draws an all too easy connection between mental illness and the oppression of high-spirited housewives, the evocation of provincial life in a tiny village that's wholly dependent on the sea is splendid, and recalls a number of classic Italian films.

Its long-winded denouement, in which Grazia runs away rather than be sent to an institution, doesn't bring the story full circle. It just extends it.