Chilean director Andrés Wood deals with his country's Subject A -- Allende -- but he deals with it from the fresh, the naive, the novel perspective of a freckle-faced little redhead (an autobiographical approximation, slightly more aged, of the filmmaker himself) who befriends a lower-class charity case at his exclusive Catholic boys' school, and who experiences a broad range of coming-of-age emotions: the stirrings of liberalism (the fall of Allende will be felt as the disruption of the dream of oneness), the stirrings of sexuality (a session of three-way kissing practice with a savvy girl of the streets and a can of condensed milk is a Freudian gold mine), the stirrings of morality (disapproval of his mother's extramarital liaison, compromised by his acceptance of hardback Lone Ranger comics as a bribe from his mother's lover). These emotions are explored with complexity and courage, an ample penance for the climactic act of childhood weakness. If the total package -- the autobiography, the Catholic school, the idealistic priest, the outsiders taken in, the traumatic finale -- brings to mind Louis Malle's Au Revoir, les Enfants, it needn't shrink from comparison. True, some of Wood's arbitrary desaturation of the color, even desiccation of it, seems a tad heavy-handed, but that's just to say that additional force was uncalled-for. The film possesses power to spare. With Matías Quer, Ariel Mateluna, Manuela Martelli, Aline Kuppenheim, Federico Luppi. (2004) — Duncan Shepherd