Le Fate Ignoranti is a clever stab at the twilight world of the heterosexual male but it doesn't twist the knife. The premise is quite delicious.

Ozpetek offers an AIDS subtext, skims over the realities of gay sex, and presents yet another tired old vision of the gay community as an all-inclusive world where uptight, middle class bores like Antonia can feel good about themselves.

It's a soapy, simplistic, but surprisingly affecting ambisexual melodrama that plays a little like Pedro Almodovar without the surreal frills.

At once overly old-fashioned in its sudsy plotting and heavy-handed in its effort to modernize it with encomia to diversity and tolerance.