Although Gasoline [Benzina, subtitled as Gas], feature début from thirty-two-year-old, Italian-based Californian Monica Stambrini, may invite comparisons to Thelma & Louise, Heavenly Creatures, the excellent noir Bound, Boys Don't Cry and others, this dark nighttime 2001 film stands on its own quite nicely.

There is growth in the character of Elenora/Lenora/"Lenni" (Regina Orioli), largely through her reaching peace with her dead mother (Mariella Valentini) who physically accompanies and "speaks" to her that "you're the most beautiful thing I have," but there is no trite gradual "bonding," because the young woman and "Star" Stella (Maya Sansa) are already understanding lovers from the beginning. Lesbian aspects have actually been toned down from the Elena Stancanelli novel, there is no voyeuristic exploitation, and the two are objects to gawk at only to a thrill-seeking, mixed-gender threesome who crosses their path. Finally, the plan of driving to Naples and shipping on to Tunisian idyll, is thwarted by insistent fate, so if this threatens in any sense another road movie, that road is circular, short, and leads nowhere but back to its now-explosive starting point.

Emotionally a child until she matures during this fatal night, Lenni asks that the selfsame story be retold, so in brief flashback she arrives at Stella's gas station where a sign offers café counter work and the two become instant lovers. The older, stronger Stella is unconvincingly wardrobed as a grease monkey in short-shorts, cowboy boots and one or two oil smears, but she, dog Clio and high-sneakered Lenni are happy. However, the latter's domineering, estranged, sexy mother shows up, ostensibly to hand over her daughter's twenty million lire, a slapping argument results, and the stylish older woman is accidentally killed.

Given the money in her purse, no one would believe it was unintentional. Spilled sugar at first resembles a drug fortune, and as when Macbeth's deranged lady marvels at the old man's having had so much blood in him, mother's, too, pours out in rivers. After a gruesome cleanup, the staring body is put in an automobile trunk to be disposed of. Unluckily, a camcording, ready-to-bet-on-anything group of three arrives and insists on gasoline and Gatorade . Wild and ready to party, they eventually get their demands and leave, but seeds of abuse, trouble and further death have been sown.

Accompanied by Clio the two girls set out, and Stella proposes not simply dumping the body, but escaping entirely, to a new life under African skies. Things, however, are not that simple, and the roads lead through an episode with a depressed hip-flasked priest, a police-protected illegal drug haven and Euro-disco club, a city dumping ground, and violent re-encounters with the threesome. Stella loosens up only in her first few words to the odd priest and a later Thank-You to a helpful gas-station attendant, while Lenni on the other hand becomes stronger after pathetically crowning her mother in the junkyard.

A dog left behind, a damaged fuel tank, and the winding road leads, not forward and away to the future, but back. Their loving but doomed world is of neon fluorescence and night, so colors are muted except for the opening airport and the bright flames and débris of closure. For brief seconds, it appears just possible but fitting to fix mother's death on the invading threesome, but the earlier cleanup, lack of time, and perhaps fate itself, all conspire. Lenni tokes a joint and knows that no one but she and her lover control their destiny.

Her last, deliberate act mirrors the romantic end of many an ill-starred protagonist. There is violence throughout, but the pistol is after all only a cigarette lighter, Stambrini is sure-handed enough not to overindulge, and the film is not luridly graphic in sex and gore. Rather, it pictures the absurd in life, the actions from within and without that lead anywhere but to the desired, anticipated end.

(Released by Strand Releasing; not rated by MPAA.)