For a moment at the beginning of Silvio Soldini's lightweight Italian romantic comedy, when a woman on vacation disappears at a highway rest stop, I got a creepy flashback to George Sluizer's The Vanishing (the 1988 Dutch original, not the dismal 1993 remake). Maybe it was wishful thinking, or nostalgia for a time when European films weren't just ersatz Hollywood products. Rosalba (good sport Licia Maglietta) has been left behind by her tour bus, and she sees this as an opportunity to take a break from her boorish husband, who's in plumbing supplies, and her crass family. So she hitchhikes to Venice, and that creepy opening feeling is sustained as she finds lodging with Fernando (the incomparable Bruno Ganz), an elegant but mysterious restaurateur who always seems to get interrupted just as he's about to hang himself.

Then, alas, the film opts to go Benigni. It shifts to Rosalba's tedious spouse, who hires a funny fat man in a hat to hunt down the errant wife. She, meanwhile, has gone the makeover route, collecting oddball characters for her new alternative family. Back at the film's promising beginning a tour guide at a ruined temple extols the fusion of Greek idealism and Roman pragmatism that created Western culture. Who knew the end product would be Hollywood kitsch? At the Avon.