CATERINA IN THE BIG CITY

The more you know about contemporary Italian politics the sharper you'll find Paolo Virzi's social comedy. Still, if you don't know your New Right from your Communistas, there's Caterina's coming-of-age story with its familiar thrills and pains. She's a bright teen-age girl from the hinterlands who moves to Rome with her bitter, class-obsessed father. Caterina (Alice Teghil) tries on two competing cliques, with mixed results. One gang is made up of wealthy but grungy neo-hippies, the other is a pack of clothes-mad partiers -- and both are headed by compulsive, selfish and largely unsupervised alpha girls. It's Thirteen Italian Style, but without the prescient insight and shock value of that film. At times, it's a fun romp, though Virzi seems to suggest that Roma offers just two sorts of awful self-absorbed people, and that the goodhearted souls might just as soon return to the little fishing village to find humanity. In Italian, with subtitles. (AH)