CIAO BELLA

Liberty Theatre, tonight, 6.30 p.m. Speciality Cinema, Saturday, 9.15 p.m.

Raging teen hormones and the chaos they cause is the main theme of this Swedish effort which never really takes off despite some accomplished acting performances.

Mustafa is a Swede born in Iran coping with racism, and unhappy family life and the crushing weight of his enduring virginity.

Virginity is a distant memory for Linnea who is pregnant from a brief encounter with an Italian boy on holiday.

You might have thought she would have learned from this but seemingly she still has a thing for them as she hangs around the Italian squad playing in an endless football tournament near her home.

And by sheer fluke Mustafa has fallen in with the Italians who take him under their wing to educate him on the arts of dress taste, seduction and misogyny.

And hence Linnea hooks with Mustafa who is pretending to be Italian – at least he can't get her pregnant.

There are awkward sex scenes, awkward dinner dates and awkward scrapes with jealous friends.

And things aren't much better at home for Linnea whose youthful looking dad is going through a second adolescence leaving her as the de facto adult in the family.

Linnea therefore pins a lot of hope on her new relationship with Mustafa which seems to be heading for heartbreak until a slushy finale which actually comes as a let down.

While the pair seem to have nothing in common the 'love will conquer all' climax seems to go against the grain of the film which seemed to be about social realism, rather than naïve romance. The message seems to be – get yourself pregnant by a man who leaves you? A knight in shining armour will come riding to the rescue. Where the film seems to fail, and perhaps it is the translation, is the lack of penetrating dialogue.

You don't get a sense of anyone's motivation. Why did Mustafa suddenly decide to marry a girl he's only just met who is pregnant by another 'man', if that's the right word?

Just to finish off the film, I suppose. This movie just seem to grind on, covering little ground for its 91 minutes.

Weighty topics– such as divorce, single parenthood and abortion – have been raised but not intelligently dealt with.

There are some nice shots of summertime Sweden, almost set in sepia but ultimately I wondered why this effort hadn't been entered into the BIFF kids festival – although frankly I would doubt it would win any award there either.