Hot-shot Rome designer Francesco (Italian film legend Vittorio Gassman's son Alessandro, resembling a sensitive Ben Affleck) chafes at having to leave his tight schedule and prickly relationship with wife and partner Marta (dark and lanky Francesca d'Aloja) to travel to Istanbul to sell a property willed to him by his estranged Aunt Anita. Once there, he's intrigued to find his inheritance is a derelict steam bath, or hamam, and is further drawn in by the family overseeing it -- including the nubile Füsun (Basak Koklukaya) and, especially, her boyish brother Mehmet (Mehmet Gunsur).

As Francesco restores the bath and reads his aunt's letters about how the city and the hamam transformed her life, his own life alters with strange desires and a stranger's memories. In the background lies the threat of a basilisk-eyed entrepreneur who wants to raze the place to build a soulless development, and the caressing vapors of this tantalizing new world slowly form into a climax of Borgesian irony. Startling in its originality and imaginativeness, Steam is an unexpected treasure.