Not Of This World (Fuori dal Mondo) sounds kind of fancy, certainly loftier than The Detective Nun And The Detected Dry Cleaner.

But that's sort of what you get in this measured-but-uneven comedy-drama (in Italian, with English subtitles) from director Giuseppe Piccioni, who made this picture in 1998.

Required for viewing: Patience and a penchant for being preached to.

Why?

The nun (Margherita Buy) in the yarn is as pious as she oughta be, determined to seek salvation through devotion and isolation. And not necessarily in that order.

The Milan dry cleaner (Silvio Orlando), a self-absorbed anxiety-prone loner, is as stressed as he should be, with high costs and low profits.

Together, they are quite a pair, brought together by an odd hybrid of compassion and compulsion.

Solemn walks

In the beginning, the nun's holy commitment and slavish programming are interrupted one day during one of her solemn walks in the outside world of Milan.

This occurs when a peculiar jogger presents her with an abandoned baby, wrapped in a grown-up sweater.

A few things happen, shortly afterward, when the nun takes the child to a hospital for proper care and attention.

Overwhelmed by some sort of maternal emotion, the nun finds herself yearning for the child, and eager to solve the mystery of where he came from.

Meanwhile back at the convent, she also finds herself on shaky ground in the domain of being hopelessly devoted to you-know-who.

This lack of faith is troubling for the nun and the Mother Superior, but she needs answers of a secular sort, first.

To that end, she arrives at the dry cleaner's shop with the sweater, which has the cleaning company's tag conveniently still on the label. Conveniently, too, the shop owner just so happens to admit to owning it.

From there, the nun and the dry cleaner form a peculiar confederacy in their search for some answers. Their goal is to secure the baby's future. They end up defining their own.

Along the way, director Piccioni also introduces us to the baby's scared mother (Carolina Freschi), a desperately lonely office worker (Marina Massironi) and various fringe personalities with their own life-is-like-that mini-yarns.

Jumbled up in the slow but steady tale are sub-themes on relationships. They're typical but cloaked -- like the mother-daughter thing, the father-son thing, the child-is-the-father-to-the-man thing, and of course, that old standby, the man-woman thing.

The nun-God-baby thing is obviously the symbolic crux of the matter in Not Of This World.

And thanks to Piccioni and the finely tuned acting talents of Buy and Orlando, the piece is not nearly as soppy or melodramatic as it could have been.

(This film is rated PG)

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