Shot like a postcard but short on substance and surprise, The Best Man is the latest in a seemingly endless line of sappy Italian period films (see also Cinema Paradiso and Il Postino) to hit these shores in recent years. For anyone who thinks mozzarella just isn't mild enough, this Italian cheese should set your stomach, and mind, at ease with its soporific, soft-lit images and predictable course of events. Inés Sastre plays a reluctant bride set up to wed an upper-class asshole womanizer (Dario Cantarelli). At the ceremony, she makes eye contact with the best man (Diego Abatantuono, who looks remarkably like Orson Welles) and immediately falls in love. Refusing to consummate the marriage, she raises the ire of her tradition-bound family, who, though smitten with Abatantuono's newfound success as an American businessman, frown upon her incipient romance. Will she adhere to her family's wishes? Will she, indeed, wind up with the "best" man? Will music well up and wash over the sun-lit images as the two finally, against all odds, embrace? The Best Man is so by-the-book, it's almost surreal. Maybe a film like this one would have flown 50 years ago, but today, The Best Man just floats away like familiar fluff.