The husband-and-wife couple of Margherita Buy and Andrea Renzi look so happy in the opening scenes of Turkish-born, Italian-based director Ferzan Ozpetek's third feature, His Secret Life, that it practically announces trouble, even without the film's foreboding name. (The original title, which translates as The Ignorant Fairies, has been changed for obvious reasons.) Renzi's secret life is revealed in a hurry after he's killed in a traffic accident, leaving behind a painting with an anonymous love note scribbled on its back. Buy's investigation leads her to a bustling apartment owned by Stefano Accorsi and containing a busty transsexual, framed Mapplethorpe nudes, and–in a back room–an AIDS patient. "Do you need subtitles?" Accorsi asks when Buy still seems puzzled by the absence of a secret mistress. But once she puts two and two together, the shock doesn't last long. What follows is a well-acted, thoughtfully shot, less-than-kinetic film that finds Buy gingerly setting foot in her husband's other life, discovering shared passions and unspoken prejudices in the process. Buy and Accorsi make their tentative getting-to-know-you dance convincing, and his pansexual extended family makes for a charming supporting cast, but His Secret Life's languid pace and general aimlessness keep getting in the way. The story of happy, secret-life-free marriages may never make for compelling filmmaking, but the spectacle of friends enjoying each other's company doesn't really get the blood pumping, either.