Valentin

posted to www.marxmail.org on April 8, 2004

When I received an announcement from a Miramax publicist that started as follows, "In a world of adults who don’t quite seem to know what they’re doing, eight year-old Valentin (Rodrigo Noya) sets out on a series of extraordinary missions to make his life a little better, becoming an unexpected matchmaker, macho confidante, philosopher, television repairman and, most of all, a spirited purveyor of hope and wisdom to those around him," I nearly read no further. Since my interest is in films with an explicit social or political theme, this ostensibly modest personal drama might not have been my cup of tea. I only decided to go after realizing that it was an Argentine film. I am glad that I did. "Valentin" is one of the most extraordinary films I have seen in the past 12 months.

Set in Buenos Aires in 1967, it is imbued with the local color that is as important to Argentine film-makers as Yoknapatawpha County was to Faulkner or Paris was to Balzac. We see the streets and shops of that period (faithfully recreated by director Alejandro Agresti) through the eyes of an eight-year old boy. Valentin lives with his grandmother (Carmen Maura, a Spanish actress and Almodovar favorite), who he adores no matter the occasional quarrel over whether he needs a haircut or not, etc. He is obsessed with space flight and spends every free moment constructing model rocket ships or simulating moon walks with weights on his shoes. When his uncle warns him that it is unlikely that Argentina would ever send rockets into space, Valentin replies that they would have said the same thing about Russia twenty years earlier!

Valentin's father (played by director Agresti who also wrote the screenplay) is a philanderer who drops in from time to time with a new girlfriend. After his wife left him, Valentin was put in the care of the grandmother so he could concentrate on his career and skirt-chasing. His latest flame is a perfectly lovely woman who takes Valentin out on an afternoon "date" so they can become better acquainted. He is so flustered by her charm and beauty that he spills two soda glasses in succession during lunch. During a walk in the park, he confides in her about his distant relationship to his father and how his father treated his mother. After she breaks off with his father, he rages at Valentin for "ratting" him out. It never occurs to his father that the relationship was fragile to begin with.

As much as Valentin loves his grandmother (a relationship evocative of the one between mother and son in "Goodbye, Lenin"), he is in search of a surrogate father. That figure takes form in the neighborhood piano teacher (played by well-known Argentine musician Mex Urtizberea) who takes him under his wing and teaches him both virtue and vice (how to play the piano and drink whiskey respectively). The center of gravity in the film, however, is Rodrigo Noya's performance, one of the most nuanced I have ever seen by a child actor. Valentin (and Noya, we would assume) is cross-eyed and peers at elders through oversized glasses, and is capable of searing observations about the frailties of adults. In this jewel of a film, the director seems to be saying that children are conduits of both innocence and experience. As William Blake put it:

'O my children! do they cry,
Do they hear their father sigh?
Now they look abroad to see,
Now return and weep for me.'

"Valentin" is a semiautobiographical film. Agresti, who was very much shaped by Argentina's turbulent past, was born in 1962. Although he chose not to make a political film, an important scene is highly political. Valentin's uncle takes him to church one Sunday to hear a sermon by a beloved priest. The priests speaks mournfully about an Argentine doctor who could have enjoyed the good life but gave away everything just to assist the poor. That man, he reveals in his conclusion, was Che Guevara--just killed in Bolivia.

Look for "Valentin" when it shows up in your city. It is Argentine film-making at its best.