Italian director/star Sergio Castellitto deserves great credit for toning down the melodrama in wife Margaret Mazzantini's novel and producing a very human story about chance, choice and consequence even if he does indulge his doctor character in a couple of unlikely moments of medical madness.
He also draws a sensitive performance from Penélope Cruz as the Albanian-Italian who provides his character with the passion missing from his outwardly perfect marriage. But while their chic-trash chemistry is appealing, it would still be something of a potboiler flashing back from Castellitto's anxious wait for news of his daughter following a traffic accident without its melancholic cinematography, which vanquishes much of the colour from the medic's conflicted world.