The Art of Childhood

By RICHARD CORLISS

WHAT: FIVE MOVIES ABOUT KIDS

WHERE: FROM THE U.S., EUROPE AND THE GREAT FRENCH NORTH

THE BOTTOM LINE: Hollywood can still spin a cute kids' fable, but a film from Quebec gets the magic and fear right.

America is the land of the perpetual teen. We want to stay young forever, to build longer-lasting bodies and minds nourished on fantasy. Let somebody else play grownup; we're all too busy being Aladdin, pledging for Animal House, romping in the backyard with a dog named Beethoven, living in Wayne's World.

In Europe kids grow up different -- earlier and tougher. Parents still wield authority; Papa could be Yahweh with a toothache, and Mama could sell her daughter into child prostitution. And because Death hangs around the house like a spinster aunt, the kids must ever be packed off to relatives for whom child care is just the latest of life's dirty tricks. Sometimes the kids run away and never come back. No wonder children in European films often look like stunted adults. Since birth they've been in a dress rehearsal for distress.

The proof of these dour bromides is found in five new movies about kids. Two are from abroad: Gianni Amelio's Italian drama Il Ladro di Bambini (Stolen Children) and Jean-Claude Lauzon's Leolo, from Quebec. Three are from Disney: Duwayne Dunham's Homeward Bound: The Incredible Journey, Mikael Salomon's A Far Off Place and Stephen Sommers' The Adventures of Huck Finn.

Blame it all on Mark Twain. His novels about Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn established not only the quest theme for 20th century American literature but also the matter and manner of kids' movies. Sommers' brisk, pretty version of Huck's wayward youth gets most of Twain's words right, even if the music sounds like a TV jingle. Huck (plucky Elijah Wood) eludes his troglodyte father (Ron Perlman, doing an uncanny Tom Waits impression) for an eventful honeymoon on a raft with Nigger Jim (just plain Jim here, in a nicely balanced performance by Courtney B. Vance). Huck's runaway mouth gets them in trouble, and his wit gets them out.

The other two Disney films have similar plots. Indeed, add a female character and the two pictures have identical plots. In A Far Off Place, three kids in their early teens -- a New York City boy (Ethan Randall), a white girl raised in Africa (Reese Witherspoon) and a Bushman (Sarel Bok) -- find that poachers have massacred the white children's parents, so they resolve to cross 1,300 miles of the Kalahari Desert to alert the law. The cutesy Homeward Bound is the same story, with three variations: the family is missing, not dead; the hostile terrain is the Western U.S.; and the intrepid youngsters are two dogs and a cat (voiced by Michael J. Fox, Sally Field and Don Ameche). Only the species have been changed to protect the copyright.

These and other American films about children are like a progressive preschool. In them, youngsters learn social skills through fantasy war games. Most of the favorite American kids' films, from The Wizard of Oz to E.T. and Home Alone, are rites of self-reliance. Children face adult obstacles (or rather, superhero torture tests) and in surmounting them become adults (or rather, Hollywood's ideal of adults, as kids with weapons). Real parents are redundant in fables for latchkey kids; all authority figures are oafish, evil or, mostly, absent. The lost child finds his own way home.

The downside of independence is isolation, and it's in this psychological Kalahari that non-American kid movies dare to dwell. Some of 1992's most ; provocative and poignant European films -- Toto le Heros, Olivier Olivier and The Long Day Closes, to be released in the U.S. in May -- are about children whom cruelty or circumstance forces to create a world of their own. Il Ladro di Bambini has this theme. The state has removed two children (Valentina Scalici and Giuseppe Ieracitano) from their mother's care, since for two years she has forced the girl, 11, to be a child prostitute. A naive policeman (Enrico Lo Verso) is directed to take them to an orphanage, where Rosetta is refused. Thus begins a road movie in which the cop becomes a playmate, then a father to the street-battered kids, and the children learn to trust people a little. A little too much.

This much lauded movie has some of young Scalici's sullenly vixenish charm. But Stolen Children is also a little too pat in its direction and characterizations and in its dramatic arc from bondage to liberation to mute acceptance of fate's bureaucratic whims. For a movie that worms inside a child's hopes and fears, that understands how kids can be both shaped by their family and in righteous rebellion against it, you should see -- immediately -- Leolo.

Leo Lozeau (Maxime Collin) lives in a Montreal hovel with his surpassingly strange family. Father (Roland Blouin) is a brute laborer; "wrinkles line his face and reveal nothing but the age that dug them." Mother (Ginette Reno) loves the boy, but she is obsessed with bowel movements as nature's prophylactic -- "Push, my love," she whispers urgently to the infant Leo, a captive princeling enthroned on a potty. His near mute sisters Nanette and Rita shuttle dully from fantasy to insanity, from home to the local asylum. His brother, musclebound Fernand (Yves Montmarquette), is so frail of spirit that he is prey for the scrawniest bully. His gross grandfather (Julien Guiomar) has tried to drown Leo, who can't wait to return the favor.

The rest of the family gets along well enough -- "at times," Leo says, "their lunacies harmonized" -- but he is an outsider, an orphan. These people think he is theirs. Leo knows better: "Because I dream, I'm not." He is half Italian: Leolo Lozone, conceived during his mother's fruitful collision with a sperm-soaked Sicilian tomato. A bright, lonely boy could not be the spawn of this horrid clan. Surely he is not destined to replicate their mean lives and dead-end careers or the madness to which they are all heir. And so, in this slum of bruised humanity that never seems quite human to him, where "the birds endlessly bitch about winter," Leo will scribble his thoughts about his family. He will erect a castle of words on the fertile ground of his imagination, on the fetid soil of his craving for love, revenge and escape.

Mostly love -- or lust, since Leo is 12 and increasingly preoccupied with "the tail that swelled between my legs." The two scents, sweet and acrid, mingle whenever he sees his dream girl, Bianca (Giuditta Del Vecchio), a dark- haired waif who lives nearby. He has visions of Bianca standing in a Sicilian glade, singing Italian love songs in her thin, pure voice. Through the bathroom keyhole he has other views of Bianca. He watches her adjust her underclothes, then sees she is not alone. Grandfather is in the tub, naked, handing her money. "Sex," Leo writes, "I discovered between ignorance and horror."

Can any child, isolated inside his best instincts, survive for long, when family, school, class, the whole sordid world conspire to crush him? Leo can't. But Leolo can; his autobiography is saved by the one stranger who might have helped him. Certainly Lauzon, who testifies that this grotesque family portrait is based on fact, survived and thrived -- to make a beautiful film. His story, in this boldly voluptuous telling, reminds us of two truths: no remembered childhood is so bizarre that it cannot have occurred; and the surest way to purge demons is to impale them on the page or screen -- to turn ignorance into understanding and horror into art.

Leolo finally declares, "And I shall rest my head between two worlds, in the Valley of the Vanquished." That is where we all live, suspended between childhood and its haunting afterimage. Hollywood wants us to think of youth as a ripping yarn, where every adventure has a happy ending. Leolo sees childhood as the acid test for maturity.