A strange sleuth

Italian Gabriele Salvatores won an Academy Award for Best Foreign Film with Mediterraneo in 1991 and has since struggled find his best form again, though this psychological thriller is one of his most convincing attempts.

He owes a substantial debt to Angela Baraldi for her performance as Giorgia, an unkempt private detective, who lives in an untidy flat and eats out of tins.

The no-longer young investigator works for her father's agency in Bologna and spends most of her time photographing adulterers with her telephoto lens.

One day she is sent a batch of tapes made by her aspiring actress sister, who committed suicide nine years earlier.

They suggest that she too led a messy life and it soon becomes clear that the two women are inextricably linked to trouble.

Giorgia tries ever more desperately to find out what made her sister kill herself - if indeed she did.

An atmospheric, if complicated, structure mixes her sister's tapes with her own life, involving a lover and a father who both seem implicated in her sister's death.

Baraldi holds everything together at the centre of the film, as the ragged, obstinate heroine of a kind that Hollywood would never contemplate.

Quo Vadis, Baby?
Cert: 15