Francois Truffaut (The 400 Blows), John Boorman (Hope and Glory) and Louis Malle (Au Revoir, Les Enfants) are just a few of the master filmmakers who have employed precociously wise and watchful children as autobiographical alter egos. In the hands of lesser talents, however, this storytelling convention all too easily can come across as a self-indulgent cliché. In Valentin, his nostalgic memory play about coming of age in 1969 Buenos Aires, writer-director Alejandro Agresti occasionally wallows in the excessive sentimentality that often undermines movies of this sort. But even as he covers familiar ground, Agresti takes a few mildly surprising detours to chart darker undercurrents.
The eponymous Valentin (Rodrigo Noya) is a chronically curious 9-year-old boy who gazes at the world through thick, black-rimmed glasses. (He looks a bit like someone Woody Allen would cast as himself in flashback scenes.) While living with his cranky grandmother (Carmen Maura), Valentin sees nothing of his mother, whose absence is only gradually explained, and very little of his father, a wayfaring womanizer played by Agresti himself. Much of the movie is devoted to Valentin's aggressively heart-tugging misadventures as matchmaker for a shy neighbor and guardian for his sickly granny. But the most affecting scenes are those revealing Valentin's father as a hotheaded, mood-swinging lout who alternately enchants and terrorizes his son. Here and elsewhere, Valentin recalls the wisdom of Truffaut's warning against romanticizing youth as a state of grace: "Adolescence leaves pleasant memories only for adults who cannot remember."