Emotional Life of a 9-Year-Old Boy."Valentin" is director Alejandro Agresti's semi-autobiographical tribute to the emotional strength of children. Valentin (Rodrigo Noya) is a 9-year-old boy living with his grandmother (Carmen Maura) in Buenos Aires, Argentina, 1969. His grandmother loves him, but misses her recently deceased husband desperately and complains constantly of her remaining family. Valentin dreams of being an astronaut and longs for his mother, whom he has not been allowed to see since his parents' divorce. When Valentin's ill-tempered father (Alejandro Agresti) introduces his son to Leticia (Julieta Cardinali), the latest in a long string of girlfriends, Valentin takes to her immediately, and feels that his life is looking brighter.
If "Valentin" were a little older, this might be called a coming-of-age story. Instead, it is a story of this boy's ability to adapt, to find hope in the events around him, and to advance his own cause in his own way. Valentin is an opinionated child, sometimes to...
"It will get me to the moon"The charm that this heartwarming movie possesses is based on two factors, the outstanding screenplay by Agresti and the unbelievable performance of a small kid that makes his debut on the big screen, Rodrigo Noya. The film depicts a series of events in Valentin's life when he was eight years old, with the kid himself narrating these events. This characteristic provides the story with an unusual freshness and candor, with the plain language used by most kids being a salient feature of this production.
Valentin lives with his grandmother (Carmen Maura) in a modest house in a barrio of Buenos Aires. He is obsessed with being an astronaut and is already practicing holding his breath, walking in the absence of gravity and dressing up in the required attire; the scene in which he puts on his home made astronaut suit is enough to make this movie worth watching. The reasons for Valentin living with his grandmother are that his mother abandoned him and his father a while back and...
About a boy looking for a familyI liked "Valentin."
It walks through a few weeks of a boy's life, Valentin, as he navigates his days living with a suspicious, protective grandmother. His dad is caught up in his own life, his mother is apparently found some unnamed trouble, and so Valentin is in the care of his father's mother.
It has the sweetness and romance of "Cinema Paradiso," the charm of "The Wonder Years," the subtle dramatic humor of "Lost in Yonkers," and the uncanny real-time wisdom of "Simon Birch."
His father visits whenever he falls in love, and although Valentin loves his father, he knows the relationship is, at best, casual. The father is somewhat abusive, but the point made isn't that, but how he simply is not around.
When the father meets Leticia, a young woman half his age, he introduces them. Valentin falls for her completely, while Leticia listens carefully. To him, she is mother potential. He trusts her, but she is the wiser of the two, and finds that...
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