Director Uberto Pasolini (“Machan”) has a gem in Marsan, a virtuoso actor who plays the role delicately where another might have laid on the pathos too thick.

Its fixation on life's quotidian aspects gives way to a less imaginative focus on an inevitable and overly familiar romance.

The plot begs for a jolt of the Charlie Kaufmanesque — it's so pillow-smothered by tedium that even the uplift of magic realism in the film's final shot seems cold and stiff.

While Still Life remains relatively successful at sustaining its plainly downbeat atmosphere—and at conveying the deep silence and stifled yearning of days and nights spent profoundly alone—it brooks too little subtlety in navigating many of the plot’s larger-picture developments.

The inescapably precious Still Life doesn’t deal in anything as truthful, complex and difficult as empathy; its only currency is pity, and that is the basest coin of all.