The old story -- "inspired by actual events" -- about someone who goes away and someone who turns up some years later and who may or may not be the same someone who went away. (As in The Return of Martin Guerre, we can see with our own eyes that the someone who turns up is clearly not the same someone who had gone away: in short, it won't wash on screen as well as it might in oral legend or on page twenty-two of the daily paper. ) Unswallowable but not unpalatable, the movie enters the characters' lives with complete ease and familiarity, and without stiff or tentative exposition, making us immediately at home with the needy, fraidy-cat little boy, his older sister and her torturing fright tales of extraterrestrials, the indulgent mother (Brigitte Roüan, director and co-star of Overseas, and gauntly eloquent here), and the overtaxed father, with an invalid mother of his own in the wings. The period right after the boy's disappearance -- last seen wearing a red baseball cap astride his bicycle -- is emotionally messy and squalid: the remaining family pulls apart rather than together. But after all, director Agnieszka Holland (who, just off Europa Europa, really ought to have resisted another echoic title) prefers things messy, not tidy. And following the six-year time-jump and the surfacing of a homeless homosexual street hustler in a beat-up red baseball cap, things get a great deal messier before the highly satisfying conclusion. Highly but not entirely: several unanswered and unasked questions remain. (1993) — Duncan Shepherd
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