Last seen at Cannes in 1997 with The Prince Of Homburg, veteran Italian director Marco Bellocchio returns this year to the official competition for the fourth time with another literary adaptation. La Balia (The Nanny), based on the novella by Sicilian writer Luigi Pirandello (1867-1936), was conceived in response to an appeal to film-makers from national public broadcaster RAI to brush the dust off the Italian classics. It was produced by Bellocchio's Filmalbatros company and Italian state film entity Istituto Luce, with the director's son, Pier Giorgio Bellocchio, also serving as producer.

Pirandello has inspired many Italian films, including Mario Monicelli's The Two Lives Of Mattia Pascal, Paolo and Vittorio Taviani's Kaos, and the brothers' more recent You're Laughing. Bellocchio himself previously adapted Pirandello in his 1984 feature, Henry IV.

"Every film-maker has a story," says Bellocchio. "Everyone attempts to work on images grafted onto ideas and stories that seem far removed from their own experience. My aim is to graft my own way of seeing onto a story from another era in the search for a timeless human dimension."

The Nanny is set at the start of the century, when large numbers fled the Italian countryside for the cities, where unemployment and poverty led to violence and unrest, prompting the ruling classes to instigate a state of police repression. Against this backdrop of social ferment, a child is born to well-heeled Vittoria and her husband, Professor Mori, a neuropsychiatrist.

The mother's inability to provide milk for, or even love the baby undermines the stability of the couple's relationship and forces the professor to seek a wet nurse. He finds a suitable candidate in an illiterate country girl, Annetta.

Depressed after the birth of her son, Vittoria's already fragile equilibrium is further undermined by the girl's presence in the house and the ease with which she usurps her role as mother. When unable to read a letter from her husband in prison, Annetta asks the professor to teach her to read and write. The girl's instinctive manner gradually has a profound effect on him, uncovering a warmth and compassion long hidden beneath his clinical approach, which ultimately enables him to better understand his wife and re-establish harmony in his household.

"I read Pirandello's novella several years ago and the feeling stayed with me; a sensation that's difficult to define," says Bellocchio. "I was struck by the dialectic between the two women; the complex theme of breast-feeding and weaning; the presence of a male character who measures his own image against that of two women, trying to understand a secret within them.

"The presence of the nanny ignites the mother's inability to care for her newborn child, not only in terms of physical care but also an incapacity to give love," continues the director. "In this sense, the nucleus of the film is her problematic rapport with the baby."

True to the recurrent themes in Bellocchio's work, The Nanny examines unhappiness and mental frailty, weighing the influences of personal inadequacy, lack of affection, absence of love and emotional indifference.

In pursuing this subject, Bellocchio and co-scripter Daniela Ceselli have transformed Mori from a politician, as he appears in Pirandello's novella, to a psychiatric specialist. But despite his experience of working with madness, the professor remains ill-equipped to resolve his wife's emotional crisis.

While such cerebral concerns - invariably linked to the world of psychoanalysis - have always featured in Bellocchio's work, the director's recent films have focused more intensely on these themes, at the expense of the political undercurrents that ran through his early films, Fists In The Pocket, China Is Near and In The Name Of The Father. "Clearly, I have to reference my films according to my own ideas," he concurs. "These days, I prefer to shift my focus to psychic and interior realities, combining personal and artistic research." David Rooney