Dir: Silvio Soldini. It-Switz. 2001. 118 mins.

An Italian director makes a film set in Switzerland with mainly Czech actors and dialogue, based on a novel by a Hungarian refugee who writes in French. Sounds like a recipe for an indigestible Europudding. In reality, however, Brucio Nel Vento is Silvio Soldini's best work to date, and one of the most powerful films to have come out of Italy in recent years. Two years ago, Soldini's sensitive feelgood comedy Pane E Tulipani (Bread And Tulips) was a surprise box office hit in Italy and a few overseas territories such as Switzerland, Germany and, to a lesser extent, the US. Suddenly, a director whose first two films had placed him on the arthouse fringe became a bankable commodity. Despite its sombre theme and mood, Burning In The Wind will not lose Soldini his wider audience. It is compelling viewing, and success at Berlin, where Soldini has revealed the film is in competition, should help secure a raft of distribution deals.

After a brief, Campion-esque dream sequence, the camera homes in on the sculptural, possessed face of Tobias. We can see that he is in a factory, and we hear the rhythmic stamping of the machine he tends. It is only much later that we are told, in an aside, that he makes metal parts for clocks and watches, which are assembled elsewhere. His life too consists of unresolved fragments. There is his traumatic childhood in "a village without a name, in a country without a name" somewhere in Eastern Europe, where his mother was the local whore and his father the schoolmaster; his present, mind-numbing factory job in a Switzerland of dirty snow and bus stops; the writing he does in the evenings; the group of beery, suicidal Czech immigrants he hangs out with; his relationships with women - all sex and no love, which for some reason depresses him; and his search for an ideal woman called Line. When Line turns out to be real, the film moves, with the hero, away from the dispersiveness of his former life and towards a more focused passion.

The Czech connection was determined, it seems, purely by the casting of Ivan Franek as the hero. Franek rewards the camera's obsessive dwelling on his tormented, Byronic good looks with a finely controlled performance; and the supporting cast is a good advertisement for the Czech dramatic tradition. The film also proves that a director does not necessarily need to speak the same language as his actors - or even understand that language - to get solid performances out of them.

Cinematographer Luca Bigazzi exploits the widescreen, super35 format to good effect in the grey, washed-out snowscapes and tired old interiors of this small town Switzerland. The sawing, viola-dominated soundtrack also touches the right chords. Some of Tobias' poetic voice-overs ("in the unbalanced evening, a bird takes oblique flight") seem designed to trigger fits of giggles, but mostly Soldini avoids pretension, alternating dramatic catharsis (such as the scene in which Line recognises Tobias - one of several nods at the conventions of Greek tragedy) with lighter moments.

It is, however, the amalgam of character, story and dramatic structure - convincingly distilled from Kristof's novel by Soldini and co-scripter Doriana Leondeff - that really carries the day. The director wouldn't have given two hoots for a happy ending at the start of his career, but time has mellowed him, and the book's frustratingly downbeat finale is here rewritten. It feels like Soldini is giving the two protagonists - and his audience - a prize.

Prod cos: Albachiara, Rai Cinema, Vega Film
Int'l sales: Adriana Chiesa
Prod: Lionello Cerri
Co-prod: Ruth Waldburger
Scr: Doriana Leondeff, Silvio Soldini, based on the novel Hier (Yesterday) by Agota Kristof
Cinematography: Luca Bigazzi
Prod des: Paola Bizzarri
Ed: Carlotta Cristiani
Music: Giovanni Venosta
Main cast: Ivan Franek, Barbara Lukesova, Ctirad Gotz, Caroline Baehr, Cecile Pallas, Petr Forman, Zuzana Maurery, Pavel Andel