Thin may not be in, they say, but Rubens girls seem hardly about to grace catwalks, and with anorexia and willowy young things getting the ink, less still is more. Kirstie Alley bares her bulge, couples break up over one or the other’s excess pounds, and now here’s a movie, “based on true events,” that carries this international obsession to a semi-logical conclusion and beyond.

Showing at Lincoln Center and the Museum of Modern Art’s joint New Directors/New Films, First Love/Primo Amore is a fifth feature from Matteo Garrone, who also co-wrote story and screenplay. Too claustrophobic and writ small for my taste, on its severely limited stage the film does point to larger concerns of relationship, love, manipulation, possession and subjugation. Despite overwrought mannerisms, it does not become mere docu-story of one individual’s destructive desire for stylish skinniness in a partner, and touches on the sad mutual dependence in depravity that countrywoman Liliana Cavani explored thirty years ago in The Night Porter. (Of Italian and German fascism, make what you will.)

Vittorio (fiction writer Vitaliano Trevisan, who also co-scripted) runs a two-worker goldsmith’s ship inherited from his father, designs jewelry of pencil-thin women with spiral bellies, is alone because “I just am,” and meets twenty-five-year-old Sonia (theater actress Michela Cescon, in her first film) through the classifieds. Thirty-something, his balding head close-cropped into skull-likeness, he eyes a slender young lady at the bus terminal, but she is not correspondent Sonia, who works in a Free Trade shop, poses as an artist’s model, is attractive and weighs over fifty-five kilos (121 lbs.), ten more than he had pictured.

After awkward silence over coffee, she reverses initial inclination and stays despite his surly silent disappointment. She more passionately than he, they make love, and she keeps returning even though he at times does not answer the doorbell. What she see in, feels for, the odd chap is a reflection more of her own needs than his obscure charm, though he does later plead, “Don’t ever disappear,” and cajoles her into sharing the isolated square-tower villa he purchases overlooking the Verona of star-crossed Romeo and Juliet. Perhaps it is his surprise visit to watch her model nude and appraise her figure, or her own scrutiny of the academy students’ sketches of her, or the slimmer bikinied blonde at poolside, but she keeps to the Kafka “art of fasting” diet he sets and dutifully writes on the weight chart above their scale.

Vittorio’s throughts come through his voice-over diary and conversations with a doctor who prescribes pills but is concerned over the patient’s conviction that he does not seek a soul mate for a meeting of the minds but wants psyche “to come together” with body. The goldsmith sees himself as being far ahead of his girl, “in the mind.” He can already envision her at forty kilos, at which point, like Ben Jonson’s Subtle Alchemist’s “Nature doth first beget th’ imperfect, then/Proceeds she to the perfect,” all impurities will be smelted out so that they two can begin as pure quintessence.

Down to fifty-one-and-a-half, then forty-seven, then forty-two-point-eight (94 lbs.), hollow-eyed but anxious to please her Pygmalion, she becomes faint, impossible for her co-workers and a concern to the robust taxi-driver brother (Roberto Comacchio) with whom she had previously lived and who does not take to her boyfriend. Impractically dreaming of an expo marketing deal for his thin jewelry designs, Vittorio absents himself from work, alienates workers once devoted to his father, runs the business into the ground, and is forced to liquidate. Recalling a thieving ex-employee, he scrubs down the empty shop, distills out the gold, and talks of again becoming, of all things, a jazz drummer.

Raiding an empty refrigerator or greasy frying pan, licking up crumbs or hiding in a restaurant kitchen, she cries and sometimes rebels but submits meekly to his self-righteous lectures and punishments. In their sadomasochistic Veneto hills retreat, they lose reality, and tension builds to breakthrough. In a surreal, overexposed, angled, off-focus boating dream sequence, the two resemble bleached skulls with enormous shadowed eyes, as body burns to nothingness in this quest for essence on which to rebuild.

Something must snap, and against dungeon-basement stone walls, in front of purifying fireplace-kiln, it will. Strong chiaroscuro backlighting and oddly monotone colors in the midst of a seeming bright palette, reinforce the isolation of these two beings who need, and warp, one another. 

(Released by Strand Releasing; not rated by MPAA.)