In his warm and witty follow-up to the 2010 sleeper hit Mid-August Lunch, writer-director-actor Gianni Di Gregorio has created another sparkling comic ode to the ladies in his life—but this time he plays a middle-aged retiree who has become invisible to all distaff Romans, regardless of age or relation.

In The Salt of Life, he contends with a aristocratic, spendthrift mother (again played by Lunch's great nonagenarian Valeria de Franciscis); a wife who is more a patronizing friend than a romantic partner; a daughter (played by Di Gregorio's daughter Teresa) with a slacker boyfriend whom Gianni unwillingly befriends; and a wild young neighbor who sees him merely as a dog walker.

Watching his "codger" friends snare beautiful younger women on the sun-kissed cobblestones of Trastevere, Gianni tries his polite, utterly gracious best to generate some kind of extracurricular love life—with both hilarious and poignant results.