The Cyclone (1996)

The Cyclone arrives from 1996 Tuscany with the serene confidence of a film that has no argument to make. Leonardo Pieraccioni directs, co-writes, and stars as Levante, an accountant sleepwalking through small-town routine until a busload of Spanish flamenco dancers takes a wrong turn and lodges with his family among the cornfields. The plot is a romantic pursuit, several drunken dinners, and a great deal of wistful gazing at Lorena Forteza. It exists to amuse, and it does, with the ease of a picture that never once considers the possibility of a message.

The one thread worth a second look belongs to Selvaggia, Levante's sister, who is openly lesbian and begins a dalliance with the dancer Penelope while her on-and-off girlfriend Isabella simmers in the background. The film handles this with a shrug, which is its own kind of achievement. No speeches, no lesson, no ceremony. Selvaggia simply is what she is, and the household absorbs it without comment. In a decade of Italian comedy that rarely bothered, that quiet matter-of-factness registers as the film's only point of forward motion.

Elsewhere the sensibilities are thoroughly traditional. The dancers are photographed as decoration, the women function as objects of desire or comic complication, and the cast is a uniformly white Italian ensemble with a handful of Spanish performers, diversity arriving by accident of premise. There is no engagement with race, no environmental conscience, no critique of money or class, no interest in bodies beyond the conventional glamorous kind, and no historical argument to press. The concerns are romantic, domestic, and resolutely private. It is a breezy Tuscan sex comedy that preaches nothing, and after two hours of such relentless harmlessness, the absence of sermonizing lands as something close to relief.