A torrid trans-alpine love affair is inconvenienced by the apparent death of an illegal immigrant in Francesco Amato’s sophomore effort, “Cosimo & Nicole,” which shockingly uses the plight of the African refugee as a sociopolitical coitus interruptus of sorts for a young, sexy Franco-Italian couple. The film’s ingrained, privileged-white-male p.o.v. also extends its casual bigotry to the femme protags, who are mostly relegated to providing coffee and/or T&A. An Italo feature award at the Rome fest suggests locals won’t object when the pic goes out Nov. 29.

Italian inamorato Cosimo (Riccardo Scamarcio, brooding monotonously as usual) meets sex-on-French-legs Nicole (Clara Ponsot, too good for this material) during the Genoa G8 riots — a politically charged episode now co-opted as generic local color in far too many Italian pics. An accident involving a personality-free immigrant (Souleymane Sow) awakens a credulity-straining sense of civic duty in the sexy duo, who don’t appear to have a political bone in their very fit bodies. Instagram seems to have inspired the film’s supersaturated look and shallow emotional depth; however, the music choices, often integrated as concert scenes, rock.