Amazon.com
This atmospheric tale of real love, set in 1944 Brooklyn and shot on a deliciously alive studio street, concerns a young Jewish boy named Alan Silverman (Lukas Haas) who is pressured into providing companionship for a catatonic French girl, Naomi Kirschenbaum (Vanessa Zaoui). The latter witnessed her father's death at the hands of the Gestapo and has been lost in herself ever since. A small crowd of Naomi's boosters, including Alan's parents (Michael Gross, Amy Aquino), hope that his frequent visits to her can resuscitate her old spirit. Poor Alan, however, with his mind on such crucial matters as improving his stickball game, is hardly in a position to understand Naomi's psychological wilderness, let alone penetrate it. Yet his essential decency wins over all else, and if his secrecy about the matter draws the disappointment and wrath of his bewildered best friend--an endearing, tough, Irish-Catholic pug named Shaun Kelly (a wonderful performance by Kevin Connolly)--then Naomi's progressive steps toward trust are worth it. Writer Jordan Horowitz and director Sterling Van Wagenen, working from the novel by Myron Levoy, lovingly create a nostalgia-glazed world of childhood innocence and distance from wartime horrors, a world that permanently changes with Alan's first experience of selfless love. Terrific acting by Haas, Zaoui, and the rest of the cast.
--Tom Keogh
