'The Salt of Life' could use more spice

Like the aroma of a meal you wish you'd eaten, "The Salt of Life" is the faint suggestion of a movie you wish you'd seen. This pleasant but barely there comedy would hardly be worth mentioning if it weren't the follow-up to the slightly meatier "Mid-August Lunch," a modest art-house hit in 2010.

That was the directing debut of Gianni Di Gregorio, one of those handsome, middle-age Italian actors who have been charming the pants off Americans since Marcello Mastroianni. Di Gregorio wisely cast himself as himself -- a vaguely Bohemian type living in Rome's shabby-chic Trastevere district -- and also cast other actors as versions of themselves, giving the movie an appealingly unscripted, just-us-Italians feel.

Di Gregorio returns to that formula in "The Salt of Life," bringing back the wonderful Valeria De Franciscis Bendoni as his mother -- though in a much smaller role -- and Alfonso Santagata as his rascally pal. The theme this time is sex, or the idea of it: Gianni is now married (Elisabetta Piccolomini plays his wife) but wonders whether he shouldn't get a mistress. Puffing away on his terrace, he observes that the streets are filled with bouncing young beauties and decides he'd like one.

So Gianni chats with his mother's perky blond caretaker (Kristina Cepraga), walks the dog for his sun-bronzed young neighbor (Aylin Prandi) and watches an ex-girlfriend (Valeria Cavalli) fall asleep after dinner. These half-measures don't amount to much for Gianni, and they're only faintly amusing for us. As for that wife, nobody in the movie seems much concerned.

Without a story to keep it going, "The Salt of Life" simply ends at the 90-minute mark, abruptly and rather randomly. It's as if Gianni -- the character and the filmmaker -- simply ran out of steam.

PLOT A middle-aged Italian man considers taking a mistress. Unrated (racy humor and mild sexuality)

CAST Gianni Di Gregorio, Valeria di Franciscis Bendoni, Alyn Prandi

SEE PHOTOSOur critic's top movies of all time countdown

LENGTH 1:30.

PLAYING AT Cinema Arts Centre, Huntington.

BOTTOM LINE A faint wisp of a movie, amusing and pleasant but little more.