PUERTO ESCONDIDO (Directed by Gabriele Salvatores. Stars Diego Abatantuono, Valeria Golino, Claudio Bisio)

Despite underlying tensions and a downbeat conclusion, it was undoubtedly the hippy values and feelgood sentiments of Gabriele Salvatores’ Mediterraneo that helped it become one of the foreign hits of last year. In Puerto Escondido he has produced another genuinely likeable, ramblingly eccentric movie, although one cannot shake the feeling that his viewer-friendly film-making works against his apparent higher purposes.

An episodic comedy-thriller, it follows the fall of a pompous, stuffy bank manager (Diego Abatantuono), who, having witnessed a murder by a psychopathic cop and become his next intended victim, is forced to flee to South America. At first happily colonial with his Cuba Libres and tequila slammers, the third world soon catches up with him and, linen suit in tatters, he falls into a life of incompetent crime.

Salvatores sandwiches his tale between shots of luckless African immigrants in Europe, and hardened Mexican peasants staring at the camera with baleful poverty. Yet as an essay on imperialism and cultural alienation, Puerto Escondido is fatally flawed. The lower the banker sinks, the more romantic his situation will seem to audiences, and on a dreary day in Dublin it is hard to have much sympathy for Mexican poverty, particularly when it is shot with such stylish, sunny exoticism.