Andrew Pulver 

Quo Vadis, Baby?

Andrew Pulver: Irritatingly smug and self-satisfied.
  
  

Quo Vadis Baby?
Baraldi turns the emoting up to 11 ... Quo Vadis, Baby? Photograph: PR

A portentous, pretentious thriller from the Italian director of I'm Not Scared, which largely throws away an intense central performance from Angela Baraldi in a welter of see-it-a-mile-off plot twists. Baraldi plays a private investigator specialising in surveillance who receives a box of videotapes in the mail, made by her long-dead sister, which precipitates in her a burning desire to understand the murky circumstances surrounding her rebellious sibling's demise. With telephoto lenses and handicams well to the fore, Salvatores administers a painful dose of well-worn movie-sex themes - voyeurism, anonymity, fantasy - that confusingly seem to issue from a pre-internet age. Baraldi turns the emoting up to 11, but her encounter with a professorial movie-buff character (helpfully informing us of the dialogue from Last Tango in Paris that makes up the title) only makes the whole movie appear irritatingly smug and self-satisfied.

 

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