Directed by Gianni Di Gregorio.Starring Gianni Di Gregorio,Valeria de Franciscis Bendoni,Elisabetta Piccolomini Club, IFI, Dublin, 89 min

CALL IT Mid-August Lunch 2: The Fightback. As it happens, Gianni Di Gregorio's follow-up to that quietly charming 2008 film is not quite a sequel. Once again, the middle-aged protagonist, played with sombre desperation by the director, finds himself coping with a domineering, crafty mother. He resides in a modest but attractive apartment in central Rome while she lives an easy life – playing poker, drinking champagne – in a rambling mansion.

Whereas Gianni was single in Mid-August Lunch, he now has a disobliging wife (Elisabetta Piccolomini) and a mildly dissolute daughter. The hero is the most agreeable of men. He walks the neighbour's St Bernard. He engages in conversation with his daughter's useless boyfriend. He drops everything when summoned by his fearsome mother.

The picture details Di Gregorio’s passage through a belated midlife crisis. Using locations to good effect, always at home to the bustle of crowded rooms, the director finds any number of ways to position his hero near young women. He notices his mother’s nubile carer. He and his best pal attempt (pathetically) to romance blonde twins.

The film sometimes strays into ideologically insecure territory. While the older women are allowed a degree of nuance, the objects of Gianni’s desire are little more than that: repositories of queasy lust.

But the picture has such a secure sense of place, and Gianni is such an attractive presence, that it becomes hard to work up too much righteous anger. Salt of Lifeis a small thing, but no less lovely for that.