Dir: Giuseppe Piccioni. Italy. 2001. 108mins.

In the run-up to Venice there were hopes that Giuseppe Piccioni might pull off the big one-two for Italian cinema, after Nanni Moretti's Cannes success. But the optimism soon evaporated. Not that Light Of My Eyes is a bad film; it's just that it fails resoundingly to fulfil the promise of the director's previous outing, Not Of This World (Fuori Dal Mondo), a finely-judged human drama which raised Piccioni from the herd of hopefuls to become the Italian 'Director To Watch'.

Light of My Eyes has redeeming qualities - not least the strong performances of leads Sandra Ceccarelli and Luigi Lo Cascio, who swept the Coppa Volpi prizes for best actor and actress (awards that are also to be read as consolation prizes for Piccioni). And in any case, Italian audiences take little notice of the critics: Light Of My Eyes opened in a strong fifth place on the same weekend that saw a slew of mainly negative reviews appear in the local press. Abroad, however, its prospects will be conditioned by its lukewarm festival reception. Not Of This World - a better film - failed to secure a UK release, and surfaced in the US only at a few art cinemas.

The plot revolves around two urban misfits. Antonio (Lo Cascio) is a chauffeur obsessed with pulp sci-fi novels; Maria (Ceccarelli) is a single mother who runs a frozen food shop in a grey suburb of Rome. The best thing about the film is its delicate charting of the relationship between these two mismatched, maladjusted people. Antonio is affectionate and generous but infuriatingly passive, while Maria combines a devil of a temper with a fatalistic belief in her own failure - as a mother, as a lover, even as a shopkeeper. And yet the two manage to build something together.

The film's real weak point is Antonio's sci-fi Walter Mitty-esque parallel world - expressed in voice-over - in which he imagines himself to be an alien space traveller. The voice-overs sound like bad Talking Heads lyrics circa 1982: 'There were enemies he had to fight by learning their languages and customs'. A sub-plot involving a local boss (Silvio Orlando) who runs, among other things, an accommodation and documents scam for illegal immigrants, is equally extraneous. With the right cuts at the script level, Light Of My Eyes could have been a contender.

Piccioni is a dragnet director, rather than a rod-and-fly man. He trawls along the urban seabed, and in amongst the old boots and useless dolphins are some lovely, appetising moments. A short scene in which an old woman loses a keepsake among the frozen clams has little or nothing to do with the plot; and yet it works on some subliminal level. And the combination of Ludovico Einaudi's Brian Eno-esque soundtrack with Arnaldo Catinari's stylish night photography gives a nice, mythical patina to the anonymous inner suburbs of an anonymous Italian city. But it's not enough to lift Light of My Eyes out of the 'nice try' basket.

Prod cos: Albachiara, Rai Cinema.
Int'l sales: Adriana Chiesa Enterprises.
Prod: Lionello Cerri.
Scr: Giuseppe Piccioni, Umberto Contarello, Linda Ferri.
Cinematography: Arnaldo Catinari.
Prod des: Giancarlo Basili.
Ed: Esmeralda Calabria.
Music: Ludovico Einaudi.
Main cast: Luigi Lo Cascio, Sandra Ceccarelli, Silvio Orlando, Barbara Valente, Toni Bertorelli.