SFIFF Dispatch. 5.

Pavel Giroud's satisfying debut feature (from a script by Arturo Infante) is the real "revolution summer" - although, to be precise, the seeds for the 1959 overthrow of Batista's government in Cuba began in the summer of 1953. The Silly Age [site] refers to a Cuban phrase for the period between 7 and 11 years for children, before adolescence, similar to the American "that awkward age." Samuel (the appealing Iván Carreira, who may remind viewers a little of Jesse Bradford when he was in Soderbergh's King of the Hill), a ten year old who, after his mother gets yet another divorce, goes to live with his slightly "out there" grandmother - but don't call her "grandmother" - in her creepy old Havana house.

If the film mines some very familiar coming-of-age territory - the sexually curious boy peeping on various women, troubles in school, his first kiss, rebelling against his mother - it at least has fresh characterizations and the uniqueness of the pre-revolution Cuban setting. And symbolically portraying a boy's coming of age during his country's own transformation is not a new idea either, but here it's gently depicted, not strained.

Veteran actress Mercedes Sampietro is wonderful as the grandmother, Viola, a portrait photographer who can't leave her Cuba behind. Her relationship with Samuel is the heart of the film, as she teaches him how she touches up pictures with a palette of colors; this is how her subjects would like to look, not how they really look. The scenes reflecting budding sexuality are, again, nothing new, but are handled with verve. In one, the school boys watch a local woman as she lifts her dress for them - in a window framed by a hand-painted television set. She calls her show "television."

The film may strike some as a sort of Cuban Truffaut, with its warm characterizations and sweet reminiscences shadowed by something darker. Giroud's directing is at times a little formal, overtly cinematic, but it makes a bit more sense when given some context; in a statement about the film, he talks about how he wanted to "use metaphor, veer towards poetry" to avoid the possibility of censorship. The Silly Age is certainly charming, and even if the coming-of-age story itself isn't all that remarkable, I still found the end profoundly moving. Viva la revolución.

Posted by dwhudson at May 6, 2007 3:46 AM