KOLYA (56)

Directed by: Jan Sverak

Starring: Zdenek Sverak, Andrej Chalimon, Libuse Safrankova

The Pitch: In 1989, just before the fall of Communism, a Czech bachelor's free-and-easy lifestyle is disrupted when he enters into a marriage of convenience and the bride absconds, leaving him with her 5-year-old son.

Theo Sez: Why, you may wonder, does the hero of this likeable drama have to be a cellist (it's fairly irrelevant to the plot) ; can it be because it allows for regular interludes of classical music (mostly Dvorak), the arthouse world's equivalent of a musical montage set to a 60s pop song? That it tries at least to camouflage its cliches makes this an uncommonly shrewd movie, even if it isn't really much more than the genteel heart-tugger you'd expect given the premise : it may adorn the relationship between man and boy with some charmingly-observed everyday detail - crossing the road together, negotiating a bowl of hot soup or a newly-polished floor (all of it illuminated by the amazing young Chalimon, showing up the offensive fakery of Hollywood's precocious tots) - but it finally boils down to the standard bonding routine with its standard heartwarming indicators (you may roll your eyes when our two heroes take a bicycle ride through the photogenic Czech countryside). It's a patchy film with wonderful moments - even stylistically it alternates long drab stretches (though director Sverak is far more accomplished than in THE ELEMENTARY SCHOOL) with ambitiously flashy scenes like Kolya's feverish hallucinations. It's at its best when it concentrates only on emotion, filtering it through the child's astonishing expressiveness. The attempts at a political subtext, for example (it's all set on the eve of Czechoslovakia's "Velvet Revolution") seem generally incoherent - for one thing it's made clear that our hero is determinedly apolitical, so all the Czech-Russian tensions presumably mean little to him ; but when, in the middle of a brutal interrogation by the Communist authorities, the boy takes our hero's arm with tears in his eyes - not understanding what's going on but just reacting to all the hatred in the room, offering his support - it's not just a heartbreaking moment but also the film's sharpest political statement.