Between
Strangers (2002)
drama
directed
by : Edoardo Ponti
featuring
: Sophia Loren - Mira Sorvino - Deborah Kara Unger - Pete Postlethwaite
running
time : 1 hour 37 minutes
Three women living in Toronto find
themselves confronting emotional crises regarding the men in their lives
in this drama. Olivia (sophia Loren) is a woman who spends her days looking
after her husband, John (Pete Postlethwaite), who is confined to a wheelchair.
Olivia has long aspired to a career as an artist, but John, not emotionally
generous, refuses to hear of her wasting her time on such things. However,
Olivia does find encouragement from an unlikely source — Max (Gerard Depardieu),
an eccentric French gardener. Natalia (Mira Sorvino) is a news photographer
who, while on assignment in Angola, took a memorable portrait of a crying
child orphaned by war. Her father, Alexander (Klaus-Maria Brandauer), also
a well-known photojournalist, is understandably proud of Natalia when her
photo is used on the cover of a major news magazine, but she is haunted
by the knowledge that while she made the child famous, she couldn't save
its life. And Catherine (Deborah Kara Unger) is a woman whose father, Alan
(Malcolm McDowell), beat her mother to death when she was young. Catherine
has never been able to resolve her hatred of her father, and when Alan
is released from prison, she's willing to abandon her husband, her children,
and her career as a musician to track him down and kill him, unable to
accept the notion that he's a changed man. Between Strangers was directed
by Edoardo Ponti, whose mother happens to be Sophia Loren; it marks the
first time the two have worked together.