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VENICE -- Sprinkled with surrealist touches and involving some pleasant music, writer and director Roberto Faenza's "The Days of Abandonment" offers reassurance to abandoned wives that while there may be some pain, they will come to appreciate life better for the experience of being unceremoniously dumped.

The attractively made film, screened In Competition at the Venice International Film Festival, is based on a novel with the same title by Elena Ferrante. It allows Margherita Buy to display her considerable dramatic skills as a wife whose husband leaves her for a younger woman but the predictable story is an unexceptional addition to the many on the topic that have gone before. It is unlikely to make a box office splash.

Buy plays Olga, a contentedly married 40-something with two great kids and an engineer husband named Mario (Luca Zingaretti) who provides a beautiful home in Turin, is loving and attentive, and walks Otto the dog dutifully. Until one day he doesn't.

Explaining that he has found "a lack of meaning" in life, Mario says he needs to be alone to reflect upon it. Olga's best friend Lea (Gea Lionello) urges her to ask her errant husband what the lack of meaning's name is.

It turns out to be Carla Gaia Bermani Amaral), a beautiful young student Mario has been tutoring. This information is slow to emerge, however, and in the mean time, Olga goes to pieces and at one point physically assaults Mario and Carla in the street.

Into her life, however, come a bushy-haired musician named Damian (composer Goran Bregovic, who also scored the film), who has previously just been the annoying neighbor downstairs, and a vaguely threatening young bag lady (Alessia Goria) camped across the street.

The story winds to its mundane conclusion with Olga's children, the tramp, the musician and Otto the dog each playing a part in the woman's discovery that life goes on. As indeed it does.