The Family Friend (15)

The closing line of Paolo Sorrentino's The Family Friend is, "There is a limit, Dad... I don't know it." Well, if ever a film refused to recognise limits, The Family Friend is it: it has creepy sex, line-dancing, twin hoodlum pizza chefs, centurions strolling around modern-day Rome, and a central character who tantalisingly declines to explain why he has his arm in a sling. Still, you can't blame Neapolitan writer-director Sorrentino for wanting to let his hair down: his last film The Consequences of Love, about an exquisitely bored man languishing in a Swiss hotel, was a coolly controlled study of repression.

So in his follow-up, Sorrentino is fairly champing at the bit. The Family Friend starts as it means to go on, opening with an extreme close-up of a praying nun, then pulling out to show that she's buried up to her neck in sand. It takes a while to figure out what's going on, and who is the mysterious figure seen forlornly gazing out at us, a kerchief tied round his head like a crown? Eventually, but only after Sorrentino has had us sweat a while, we discover that he's Geremia de Geremei, a small-town tailor and loan shark; oh, and his kerchief is a potato poultice, good for headaches. Unsightly and goblin-like, Geremia is by his own admission "the least charming man in the world", though Sorrentino and actor Giacomo Rizzo make him surprisingly compelling company. More than willing to terrorise defaulting clients, Geremia nevertheless considers himself a "family friend" to his customers, attaching himself to his prey like a fussily avuncular leech.

Well into middle age, Geremia makes a fortune from his loans, yet lives in miserly squalor in the aquarium-like flat he shares with his obese, bed-ridden mother. When not thinking of money, Geremia has his mind set on women: he gazes from his window at girls playing volleyball in eternal slow motion and, in a bizarre scene, keeps bumping into (or hallucinating) near-naked beauties who distract him from his rounds with a metal detector.

Then along comes Rosalba (Laura Chiatti), the devastating local princess whose parents are Geremia's latest customers. She's tough, independent, smart and cynical; but when Geremia pounces on her while she's fixing her wedding dress, she yields, for reasons never quite made clear, then remains mysteriously, and disturbingly, available to him. The coupling of this Botticellian belle and a malicious pixie will seem to many viewers as implausible as it is unpleasant and even exploitative. But the film is a perverse modern-day fairytale, not so much Beauty and the Beast as a horror story in which Snow White enters into an obscure sexual pact with Rumpelstiltskin.

Anyone still reeling from David Lynch's Inland Empire might well feel primed for Sorrentino's universe, which is Lynchian in its own way (in Geremia's pawing of Rosalba, there's something of Frank and Dorothy's nightmare relationship in Blue Velvet). While The Family Friend isn't nearly as perplexing as Inland Empire, Sorrentino nonetheless does his best to baffle us with sub-plots, non sequiturs and bizarre juxtapositions. Geremia's right-hand man Gino (Fabrizio Bentivoglio) is a would-be cowboy who lives in a trailer decorated with a fake horse's head: hence a sudden and gratuitous line-dancing sequence. The setting is similarly recherché: a town built in swampland by Mussolini, providing monumental De Chirico-style perspectives for Geremei to scuttle around in his monkish coat, plastic bag dangling from his arm.

Admittedly, style dominates. It's foremost in the dream-like sequences such as Rosalba's entrance, dancing to glazed robotic disco; and in the geometric abstractions of Luca Bigazzi's photography, which makes twin fishing rods droop symmetrically towards the horizon. The soundtrack too is wilfully eccentric: ice-cool electronica, screeching saxophone, and Teho Teardo's violently dissonant orchestrations for cello and scrunching synthesisers.

This is a film to love or loathe; for me, Sorrentino's inventions are so charged with exuberance that they make you sit bolt upright and forgive at least some of his excesses. But excesses there are: in making a film about a lecher, Sorrentino is prone to wildly over-indulge his own penchant for cheesecake.

We're never fully drawn into the tragedy, as we were in Consequences: The Family Friend is far too disorienting and distancing to engage our sympathies. Yet Geremia himself is an enormously affecting presence, thanks to the charismatic, fabulously eccentric performance by the little-known Giacomo Rizzo. With hair slicked back, and Bruce Forsyth chin jutting defiantly at the world, Geremia isn't exactly likeable, but he has his pride, and his style - an oddly androgynous Rat King panache. Some viewers will come out of The Family Friend scratching their heads, or fuming, or both: but lovers of the energetically outré will get a bracing jolt from its provocative invention. With Italian cinema largely sleepy these days, this caffeinated hit of punk Fellini is more than welcome.

j.romney@independent.co.uk