Sworn Virgin

Skipping deftly between time frames while keeping her camera close to her protagonist - played with tremulous understatement by the remarkable actress Alba Rohrwacher - Bispuri traces a journey of delicate interior shifts and reversals.

Even though Rohrwacher never quite passes -- she looks too much like Barbra Streisand's Yentl -- the movie is on to a larger point, namely about the fluidity of sexual identity and our universal penchant for self-reinvention

The film obliges viewers to puzzle out the nature of the sworn virgin tradition, and even at the tale's end, it may not be clear. This can only be counted a virtue by those who count obscurity and bafflement as artistic assets.

...it nevertheless deflates Hana's journey of emotional weight.