THE Best Of Youth spans four volatile Italian decades, from the helter-skelter 1960s to the present day.

Director Marco Tullio Giordana crams those 40 years into 383 minutes - six hours and 23 minutes in old money - and now you are recommended to spend a chunk of the next week watching this ambitious, monumental foreign-language work with subtitles.

There is some good news: those kind folk at City Screen will be showing the sprawling Italian canvas in two parts, hardly bite-sized but certainly Lord Of The Rings sized.

You can see part one today, tomorrow, Sunday, Monday or Thursday; part two tomorrow, Sunday, Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday. Or, you could go for the five-course and one more wafer-thin mint option by watching both tomorrow, Sunday or Thursday, starting your marathon task at 3.15pm each day.

So what happens in those six epic, combustible yet slowly unfolding hours? Giordana fuses together historical fact and fictional domestic drama in the story of the divergent dreams of two brothers.

Free-spirited, expressive Nicola (Luigi Lo Cascio) travels the world in a last ray of youthful, innocent hope before settling on a career as a psychiatrist; the introverted, melancholic Matteo (Alessio Boni) signs up for the Italian police.

One brother wants to help those who are not right in the head; the other wants to right society's ills.

Giordana takes his time - he has plenty on his hands after all - to depict romantic entanglements, family fall-outs and spiritual quests, set against the political landscape of each era. You acclimatise to the measured, slow pace, and come to welcome the painterly directing, the questing political commentary and the fully rounded characters.

The Best Of Youth is not a soap opera, more a melodrama with Dickensian detail and a novel's ebb and flow. In the summertime, when blockbusters dominate film listings, The Best Of Youth is a haven, a different rhythm of film viewing that rewards those who are prepared to wait.

Updated: 15:39 Thursday, August 19, 2004