Tornatore's Cinema of Misery

If you remember Giuseppe Tornatore as the director of "Cinema Paradiso," the 1988 ode to Il cinema that was immediately destined for those cheesy Academy Award montages, then the Italian director's new movie is not going to change anything. Last seen putting Monica Bellucci (and slavering audiences) through paces in 2000's "Malèna," Mr. Tornatore now delivers a protracted, forgettable revenge thriller. "The Unknown Woman," which opens Friday at the Angelika Film Center, turns the plight of an escapee from the sex trade into something preposterous.

The Russian actress Xenia Rappoport stars, heroically, as Irena, a determined maid in search of something (or someone) that belongs to her. A Ukrainian in the Italian port city of Trieste, Irena must overcome distrust in the building where she works and where several work-at-home jewelers live. Not long after we sympathize with her as she endures a round of anti-immigrant indignities, she introduces an old housekeeper to a nasty accident in order to secure a position with the right family, whose young daughter holds special interest.

This early development may be an attempt at complicating a character, but any gesture toward subtlety soon becomes buried beneath the hailstorm of Ennio Morricone's Bernard Herrmann-esque score and Mr. Tornatore's hair-trigger flashbacks to Irena's past. As a dyed-blond sex slave, she was mercilessly farmed out by a bald, gold-chain-wearing thug named Mold (Michele Placido) and subjected, as we learn in chaotic glimpses, to rape orgies with careful production design. There are also sun-streaked reminiscences of the strapping young lover who couldn't spirit her out of prostitution.

As Irena befriends her employer's child and pokes around, "The Unknown Woman" settles into its herky-jerky trot through plot holes that double as epiphanies and ginned-up moments of suspense. (At times you're not sure what you're supposed to take as surprising or important, a bit like politely listening to a rambling story told by a senile relative.) Curly little Thea (Clara Dossena), on whom Irena dotes maternally, becomes a particularly capricious device for jerking tears. The measure of Mr. Tornatore's paltry success in this comes with a bonding scene between the two that involves Irena binding the girl's hands and knocking her down repeatedly to teach her toughness, and that fails the laugh test within seconds.

It's a stretch to salvage the film as a pulp version of immigrant-worker peril through Irena's many obstacles — including the specter of violence from past associates, the building caretaker who leeches off her wages, the skeptical police, and beatings at the hands of street Santas. As for the particulars of Irena's benighted background, there's more thought and detail in a single still from David Cronenberg's "Eastern Promises" than in the whole of "The Unknown Woman."

The social-interest angle in the film's unmitigated melodrama clearly held appeal in Mr. Tornatore's home country, which flung awards in his direction when the movie made its premiere there in late 2006. Despite these plaudits, one gets the sense that the film would be more tolerable, and excusable, at a lower budget and in a bygone decade. As it stands, it's an ill-advised effort to weave a contemporary problem with genre elements into a change-of-pace vehicle for a director associated with taking the untainted point of view of a child.

Ms. Rappoport strides, head held high, through a screenplay that offers her character expositional pit stops with the catatonic housekeeper whom Irena replaced. Most of the rest of the cast is noncommittal, except for Mr. Placido, who makes a sufficiently revolting baddie, even before Mold gets a villainy boost late in the game for pushing human trafficking to one logical extension. Hairless Bobo (from "The Grifters") and Joe (from "Reservoir Dogs") would, I like to think, give this guy the time of day.

"The Unknown Woman" can't be much fun, both because of Irena's background and because Mr. Tornatore can't hold his suspense or intrigue together. In a final scene, the filmmaker attempts one last shot at sentiment after an ambitious time lapse, but by this point, even Ms. Rappoport looks a bit nonplussed.