Quo Vadis, Baby?

Giorgia (Italian rockstar Baraldi) is a downtrodden photographer, employed by her father's PI agency to snap incriminating shots of adulterers at play.

She lives in the shadow of her sister's suicide years previously, and old wounds are re-opened when a box of her sister's videotape confessions arrives on her doorstep.

Giorgia is compelled to delve deeper into the mystery and uncover what really happend to her tragic sibling.

Salvatores largely dispenses with traditional thriller trappings (a sub-plot involving a murderous client is resolved without suspense), instead focussing on Giorgia's investigation of her own past and a sexual re-awakening with a lothario professor.

This features committed performances from Baraldi, plus Zanella as the troubled sister Ada, Alberti as the professor and Burrunao as Giorgia's emotionally dead father.

While attention never flags, the plot (based on a novel by Grazia Verasani) is too scattershot to satisfy and ultimately the film doesn't seem like the work of an Oscar-winning director - Salavtores' Mediterraneo picked up Best Foreign Film in 1992.

Awkward too are the many movie references: the film's title is a quote from Last Tango in Paris and provides a vital but contrived clue, while major plot points from Fritz Lang's M are spoiled in the service of a perfunctory climax.

Adequate, but Hidden does it all better.

Rob Daniel