IF JOHN HUGHES were following politics, he might spy potential in the riveting high school drama that results when blond fascists launch into vitriolic shouting matches with grungy communists over their irreconcilable ideologies. But since his characters never did stray too far from the suburbs, that plotline had to wait for Italian director Paolo Virzì's Caterina in the Big City to hit the States. Caterina (newcomer Alice Teghil) is a small-town girl who moves to Rome with her misanthropic father and hapless mother. When she gets to school, she has to navigate the dicey terrain of teenage cliques and attempt to get in with the "right" crowd to help Dad climb the social ladder. Instead of limiting the story to the girl's predictable identity crisis, Virzì is willing to bring the class and political debates in contemporary Italy to the surface and posit them as a fundamental component of her family's troubles in their new hometown. Caterina's father, Giancarlo (Sergio Castellitto), represents the experience of the aspiring bourgeoisie, frequently running into the impenetrable wall of old money that surrounds the city's institutions. This frustration ultimately turns the movie inward, focusing on the emotional fallout that results from Giancarlo's failure to achieve the professional success he's so convinced he deserves. Caterina grows in the process of all of this, of course, but the movie's resolution is much more satisfying than many other loosely comparable films. (Rachel Odes)