Ferzan Özpetek, a Turkish director trained and living in Italy, made his impressive debut in 1997 with Hamam, in which a handsome middle-class Italian and his pretty wife inherit an old Turkish bathhouse in Istanbul that spectacularly transforms their lives. His elegant, deeply romantic films since then have mostly been set in Rome and evoked comparison with Pedro Almodóvar. But his new one, Loose Cannons, takes place in Lecce, the capital of Puglia, a southern, culturally conservative city in the heel of Italy. Tommaso, an ambitious would-be novelist long absent in Rome, returns to his wealthy family determined to break the news that he is gay. Unfortunately at the dinner party he's chosen for his bombshell, his brother Antonio, who manages the family's world-renowned pasta factory, gets in first to announce his gayness. Dad has a heart attack, Antonio is banished, and Tommaso has to take over the firm.

It's overlong but often touching in an acceptably sentimental way and always amusing in a predictable fashion, most especially so when four gay friends from Rome drop in and have to act straight. Loose Cannons is one of those pictures (like La cage aux folles and others that followed it) aimed at middle-class audiences, in which being gay is presented as quite normal and homophobia as something old-fashioned conventional folk must get over. The movie's most shocking episode features the death of an elderly diabetic, a suicide one assumes, as the result of an immense overdose of delectable patisseries. Is this possible?