Edoardo Winspeare is returning to Salento — a region which has always featured in his films, from Pizzicata to Il miracolo — with a project with avowedly continental ambitions. Screened in BIF&ST and hitting Italian cinemas on 9 April via Draka Distribution, Vita mia looks to be an intimate story about care and female friendship, and a reflection on European memory, the weight of history, and the scars left by Nazism and by the cold war on Eastern European families. It’s a heartfelt, personal project – born out of observing the relationship between the director’s ailing mother and her Salentine carer – but it struggles to bear the weight of everything it attempts to carry.

The film opens in 1964 with a celebratory prologue: young Transylvanian duchess, Desideria, known as Didi, arrives in a small town in Salento to marry duke, Ruggero, welcomed by the local band. It’s an elegant beginning which establishes the distance – geographical, cultural, class-based – running through the entire film. Fast-forwarding to the present-day, we find Didi (Dominique Sanda) elderly, suffering from Parkinson’s, and forced to accept the help of a carer after falling down the stairs of her old, wonderfully frescoed mansion. This is when we meet Vita (Celeste Casciaro), a woman of humble origins with a strong character, a brother with an intellectual disability to care for, and a mean lawyer lover (Ninni Bruschetta) she just can’t escape. Two opposing worlds, two different ideas about dignity, and two different kinds of body language.

This confrontation is central to the film, and when Winspeare makes room for the relationship between these two women — in their domestic routines, their mutual distrust and subsequent shared confidences, and Didi’s photos from the past which she shows Vita – the camera is at its happiest. Celeste Casciaro, Winspeare’s muse (and wife) and a familiar face in Salentine cinema, is perfectly at ease in her role as a tenacious woman of substance. Dominique Sanda – the iconic Micol from The Garden of the Finzi-Continis and Lou von Salomé from The Night Porter – lends the character a regal bearing which needs no improvement, conveying the emotional coldness of someone who’s traversed history and who hasn’t come out unscathed.

The second half of the film shifts the action to Transylvania, a country which Didi is looking to return to for her father Istvan’s beatification, as a Christian martyr persecuted by the Communist Secret Police. Embarked upon against her children’s advice, and with Vita by her side as an unexpected lady-in-waiting, the journey brings old wounds to the surface, linked to the Nazi occupation and survivors’ guilt. The film borrows from the great European family sagas of the twentieth century, both literary and cinematographic, and makes no bones of this. But the ambitious screenplay, penned by the director and Alessandro Valenti, starts to show cracks: the content begins to accumulate, the themes come thick and fast, and the final twist lacks the emotional punch characterising the film’s first half.

The dazzling shots of Salento, Didi’s dinner with her aristocratic relatives which Vita is allowed to attend as a lady-in-waiting from another time, and the noble family who return to Apulia to sell the mansion which has been theirs for five hundred years, are all moments in a story which becomes a mirror for wider history. But rather than delving deeper into the story, Vita mia remains at surface level, failing to enthral us in the way we’d expected. One or two stereotypes also rear their heads  – relating to the aristocrat obsessed with ghosts or the woman hailing from the South – but the two protagonists’ noteworthy performances leave a heartwarming, lasting impression.

Vita mia was produced by Stemal Entertainment and Saietta Film together with Rai Cinema. World sales are handled by Beta Cinema.