Giuseppe Piccioni is the Italian director whose early movie Light of My Eyes I admired when it came to the London film festival over 20 years ago; somewhat unjustly, he never became a fashionable festival name, like a Sorrentino or a Guadagnino. Now he has made a really involving, melancholy story of prewar fascist Italy, an old-fashioned romantic drama with the storytelling ardour and the melodramatic flourish of page-turning commercial fiction. It is extremely well acted by Benedetta Porcaroli (seen last year in Carolina Cavalli’s Amanda) and that blue-chip Italian male lead Riccardo Scamarcio, known in Hollywood for the John Wick movies and Kenneth Branagh’s Agatha Christie mystery A Haunting in Venice.

Scamarcio plays Luciano, a first world war veteran and restaurant manager in a small Italian town in 1938. Watchful and professional, in periodic pain from a wounded leg, Luciano clearly runs a tight ship and is alert to the needs of his many regular customers, including an ageing, morose law professor who is one of many in the town forced to bite his tongue at the new fascist enthusiasms. Scamarcio’s Luciano is a handsomely moustachioed man of a certain age with a dreamy, almost romantic side, gazing out of the restaurant’s plateglass windows with sad eyes at the piazza beyond, where a fascist girls’ athletic association regularly puts on a surreal rollerskating display – a display so weird that it could almost be happening solely in Luciano’s mind. The bizarre absurdity of this spectacle almost brings us close to Fellini, but not quite. The girls giggle and swoon around visiting fascist officials and there is something sinister in the way one rollerskater appears to fall, perhaps spitefully kicked over, and the rest fail to help her up.

Luciano himself has a kind of protected status and in fact expresses gratitude to Mussolini for restoring respect to military veterans like him. Local fascist goon Osvaldo (Lino Musella) likes to swagger into Luciano’s restaurant like a mobster with his pals; he was in fact a comrade of Luciano’s during the war and is in awe of him, having witnessed this mild restaurant manager single-handedly kill five Austrians with his bayonet. He knows – and we, the audience know – that coolly reserved Luciano is capable of much more ruthless violence than these blowhard blackshirts.

Everyone’s lives are upended when a penniless girl is seen skulking about outside the premises. Anna, played by Porcaroli, appears hungry and cold, and begs Luciano for a job, claiming that she once worked as a nursemaid in Rome. Kindly Luciano puts her to work in the kitchens, indulging what he takes to be a humble country mouse, but almost at once, Anna makes herself indispensable; she sees how the kitchens and the pantry could be more efficiently organised and even presumes to tell Luciano a better way to do his bookkeeping. Could it be that there is more to Anna than meets the eye?

Lonely, sensitive, driven Luciano finds himself drawn to this intelligent and beautiful stranger. Anna is capable of hurting feelings and Luciano is capable of hurting more than that – but these simmering truths are kept under the lid until almost the very end. Luciano, fundamentally decent, is clearly deeply at home in his restaurant, which is a refuge from the brutal truths outside, perhaps like the garden of the Finzi-Continis in Vittorio De Sica’s film and Giorgio Bassani’s novel. It’s a place where everyone comes to eat; good food dissolves political divisions and the sneaky deals in the kitchen underscore the worldly air of not taking anything too seriously, certainly not ideology or ideological bullies. This is a traditional kind of moviemaking, robustly made, but with excellent actors giving it their all.