JANUS' LIMBO

Rome in 1959 just before the release of Fellini's La dolce vita: the nobles of old and the arrivistes the snobs and the beautiful people the cinema and the bigots the pseudo-intellectuals and the artists. And Giada Rovi-Sanlupi the moody unconventional daughter of a papal aristocrat. And Germaine Kenneth the sophisticated bisexual Shakespearian English actress evocative of Canova's Venus Victrix. And the pushy promiscuous showjumper Bea Alemanni. All come together in a psychological piece of fiction where the mal marié Cristiano Belisario its 'internal focalizer' has completed a film dramatization of Pauline Bonaparte's life only to discover that his individual freedom both as an ambitious screenwriter and as a passionate man is like the large looking glass of a small drawing room: it merely gives an illusion of space.