For a Lost Soldier
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Canada
Movie Reviews of For a Lost Soldier
Movie Review: Great Movie - Poor DVD
Summary: 3 Stars
The film is a very tastefully realised depiction of a difficult and controversial subject and deserved 5 Stars alone, but the DVD is most disappointing. The picture, to me, seems worse than VHS - very indistict and grainy. Sound is no more than OK. When the letterbox widescreen picture is enlarged to view on a widescreen set the subtitles are cut off at the bottom of the screen!Movie Review: Not in English
Summary: 3 Stars
The movie is OK, but they don't tell you it is not in English. Amazon lists the langauge as English, and there is some, but most of the movie is in Dutch or German with subtitles.Movie Review: On Exploitation
Summary: 2 Stars
I've thought very hard about this movie after reading these reviews. I couldn't, and no matter how hard I try, can't distinguish the soldier's behaviour towards the boy from pure self-gratification - an exercise in narcissism, projected from 1st person to 3rd.
The boy's regard for the soldier, I suspect would be entirely familiar to any boy who ever had a crush on an adult.
but Love?
I found it a thought provoking movie, because it used the cinematic conventions of a love story to tell a story about neediness. Sure, neediness is necessary to love, but sufficient? Hardly.
I don't have a problem with a movie portraying sexual exploitation, but felt uneasy that the treatment here skirted perilously close to sanctification and propagandisation. It was certainly not `portrayal' in any way I could make sense of.
It has an uneasy resonance, for me, with a strong tendency in the community of men who exploit boys: they mistake the undoubted readiness of certain boys to form attachments, and their curiosity about sexual development, for love and/or sexual desire. I believe this impression is largely formed and reinforced by powerful expressions, like this movie. The problem is that such expressions almost certainly represent the wishful thinking of adults, rather than the authentic experience of kids.
Even when the story is autobiographical, as I believe this to be*, it makes sense to me that the dishonesty could represent a sexualised variation on the self-replicating damage we see in schools and military institutions, where each incoming group "grows up" from being exploited and abused to perpetrate the same on the next intake. There's some sort of "empathy bypass" which seems to be inherent to the mechanism.
*From reading the review of the book on which the film is based, the film has definitely been sanitised and perhaps crosses the line into fiction : in the book, the soldier forces sex with the kid, and his general behaviour towards him is even less consistent with love than is depicted in the film. I didn't know this when I wrote the preceding, and I somewhat sickened to reflect that the movie's promos and reviews ever led me to believe this was a film which might uplift me.
The whole thing starts to feel like a triumph of romanticism over honesty, perhaps in the tradition of the "Olympia" films of Leni Riefenstahl, where the beautiful bodies and movement of athletes, and the considerable arsenal of artful cinematography, were conscripted in the glorious service of something horrible about to engulf Europe.
I don't require my movies to condemn. In fact, I prefer them not to make moral judgements of any sort. It disturbs me, however, when they use misleading packaging to inveigle me into taking an interest, and then once I'm inside, use an essentially dishonest "insemination by imagery" process to surreptitiously advance a moral judgement - in favour - of the frankly indefensible.
I defend your right to see this movie and make your own judgement, but I'm glad I can exercise my right to warn you about it.
Movie Review: Disappointing
Summary: 2 Stars
The problem seems to me to be that the director wasn't quite sure what he wanted to say. The story is of a young lad who is evacuated from Amsterdam to a fire-breathing church place-of-safety and is befriended first by a slightly older but physically maturer boy and then by a young Canadian/American soldier who is also lonely and out of place. Quite how these two identify each other as in need of affection is not revealed. Nor does the relationship between the two boys get going much apart from them both being thrown together, with the one full of hormones and the other very much a child. But the young soldier, we are told, falls in love with this young boy, and I don't believe a word of it - the older man speaks no Dutch and the boy has almost no English and their behaviour is little more than that of a mildly misbehaving comradeship, with hints that a sexual act may have taken place - or maybe not - and not a smouldering or lustful and lascivious look between them! Meanwhile the pastor rants on about sins of the flesh and the young women flirt and maybe do wicked things with other young soldiers that may bring down hellfire and damnation. There are some symbols thrown in: a crashed plane (with bodies and eels in it), an ID tag, a pair of dark glasses, a scarecrow and a thunderstorm. And at last Mum comes to fetch the boy home with a "my, how you've grown". And all this is food for a nostalgic dance production celebrating "freedom" 25 years later! Oh dear (yawn), it's all too one-dimensional and trite. Bit of a pity really...Movie Review: Appealing only to those who actively seek such media
Summary: 2 Stars
The ostensibly "tender" portrayal of a 12-year-old boy's (Jeroem) sexual relationship with a Canadian soldier (Walt) in World War II. Apart from barely developing the kid as a believable character, there's hardly any redeeming quality to Walt. The man is openly a predator, using candy and promises of adventure to seduce his way into Jeroem's pants. There's only one real "sex" scene between the two, and the director handles it with as much taste and class as one can handle a grown man deflowing a preteen. In a scene where Jeroem's adoptive father confronts Walt about what he knows is going on, the man wilts under the fact that he owes his freedom partly to the Canadian army's driving Nazis out of their land, and his resolve crumbles. All in all, it's a pretty bland and full of half-hearted narrative excuses. I will give the film one kudo, tho: they didn't fall back on the cliché of abusive father-figure driving the boy into the pedophile's "loving" arms.