THERE is so much that is profoundly distasteful about the Italian melodrama Don’t Move that it is difficult to know where to start. But I suppose the rape scene is as good a place as any.

The central character, Timoteo (Sergio Castellitto, who also directs), is a successful surgeon. A cynical, aloof man given to operatic displays of self-pity, he finds himself stranded one day in an urban wasteland with car trouble and nothing to do but wait and drink. A destitute young woman called Italia (an unconvincingly dowdy Penélope Cruz), who lives in a semi-derelict building nearby, offers him help. Overcome by a liquor-fuelled head rush, Timoteo forces himself upon her, then stumbles off, wracked with even more self-absorption.

It’s not the rape scene itself that offends but rather what follows. First we have a sullen Timoteo, forced back into the role of dutiful husband, scraping out a confessional message on a beach in front of his oblivious wife (Claudia Gerini, the most restrained, dignified performance in the film). “I raped a woman” is the message; the subtext is: “And it’s partly your fault because I’m so stifled being married to you. Poor me.”

Worse still is the film’s romanticised treatment of the relationship that develops between Timoteo and Italia after their second violent, squalid encounter.

The put-upon woman is a familiar motif in Italian cinema — Fellini’s Cabiria is probably the most famous. But unlike Cabiria, filled with childlike charm and vulnerability, Italia is not the main subject of this picture. She’s just a victim of her predatory lover’s dissatisfaction with his comfortable, middle-class existence.

Italia may end up dead after a botched abortion but it’s Timoteo’s histrionic anguish that is the centrepiece of the story. Remarkably, it seems that we are supposed to care about this man.

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