The last two Cinema Sundays have been dedicated to an Italian director, Gianni Di Gregorio. I've decided I like his style. He was compared somewhere to Woody Allen but that doesn't really do him justice. In both these films he takes the protagonist's role. In the first, 'Mid-August Lunch' he surrounded himself with elderly Italian ladies who had never acted before and, from what I could gather, he gave them very little in the way of dialogue so they were as much themselves as possible. The ' leading lady', the oldest, plays his mother who is a startling nonagenarian with grossly over-sunned skin, large grave marks, creases you could fall into and be lost for days, veins the size of the Urals , and a glamorous blonde wig. She should be appalling, but she is gracious, elegant, feisty and she is dressed in chic Italian couture. I vowed to buy myself some more long gloves after watching this though because hands as we get old - mine anyway - can be quite grotesque.

This redoubtable woman appears as his mother in the next film, 'Salt of Life', even more elegant as this time she is meant to have money, with a different set of card-playing cronies. In both she runs her son ragged as he tries his best to please her because he is obviously fond of her. The theme of the second piece is the middle aged man's despair at the onset of old age. He tries to hold it off by courting, hopelessly, ( his eyes drooping with melancholy, like a particularly loose-skinned Basset Hound) young vibrant women.. He sees his contemporaries doing this, and even older men, but it doesn't work for him. He joins the ranks of the old buffers sitting outside under the lime trees smoking and making comments on passers by. He thinks of topping himself. But it ends in a resigned sort of OKness.