Any relationship of substance creates a tug of war between responsibility and independence. In The Last Kiss, the complexities of that push and pull are reduced to a single noise: the human scream. Sure, other noises accompany it—slamming doors, buzzing cell phones, the pounding of feet on stairs—but the scream trumps all in Italian writer-director Gabriele Muccino's take on the vicissitudes of modern romance. In a tense voiceover, soon-to-turn-30 Stefano Accorsi starts the feast of anxiety as he accompanies live-in girlfriend Giovanna Mezzogiorno to a dinner where they plan to announce her pregnancy. The baton is then passed to Mezzogiorno's mother Stefania Sandrelli, a woman who wonders if there's any escape from her marriage to unloving therapist husband Luigi Diberti. The discontent becomes epidemic as the film moves on to Accorsi's friends, all of whom enjoy the responsibilities-be-damned prolonged adolescence he longs to reclaim. An opportunity to make such a return arrives in the form of a frisky, guileless high-school senior (Martina Stella), a development which captures everything that succeeds and fails in the film: It's strikingly absurd, but any acknowledgment of its absurdity gets lost amid the slow-percolating hysterics. And then the screaming starts. Accorsi inches toward leaving his endlessly patient, merely gorgeous girlfriend for the inhumanly attractive Stella, while Sandrelli prepares to leave Diberti and everyone else plans to hit the road for parts unknown. Through it all, Muccino piles on one shrill confrontation after another. At times, he seems headed for the melodramatic turf owned and operated by Pedro Almodóvar, but where the young Almodóvar would have deployed a prankish wit and the older Almodóvar scraped toward the humanity beneath, Muccino just unleashes an endless assault of soap-opera theatrics. As Accorsi comes to his preordained conclusion, the film brings in a ribbon of sentiment to tie it all up, but if the film proves anything, it's simply Sartre's hell-is-other-people dictum. The opening credits deservedly include a separate credit for Last's steadicam operator, whose impressive, virtually constant work keeps the film swooping and swirling around its characters. Those troubled by nonstop movement might leave the theater feeling ill. Others might, as well.