Synopsis: A 14 year old girl spends the summer in a small town where she falls in love with a 41 year old widower and is doted upon by his 14 year old son.
Appraisal: This film belongs to what I define as the "those quirky villagers" subgenre. Historically this subgenre used to be practically universal and one could find films from almost any country that featured a small town with a population of free-spirited oddballs. However, lately it has apparently become more and more restricted to Eastern European countries, and my theory is that these are the only places that haven't been homogenized and sterilized by American Mass Culture or by any local Religious Fundamentalist regime. Of course, I don't really know whether the real people in Eastern Europe are really captivatingly odd or this is a fabricated image that has been carefully cultivated for cinematic consumption. Having concluded this brief sociological analysis, let's return to the film in review. It is a frustrating film, because it has so many potentially interesting ideas yet systematically refuses to explore them, jumping from one merely sketched situation to the next. It looks like they had only a draft script and decided to shoot it anyway. It would be better perhaps if the director had decided to cut down on a few superfluous subplots and added a few more inches of depth to the more significant ones. This film may be odd but is certainly anything but captivating.
Rating: 44
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