Customer Reviews

Secrets of the Heart

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

If you like European films, you'll love this one! I saw it a couple of years ago at an International Film Festival and loved it. This is type of movie that explores human emotions: deep, slow paced and sometimes funny. Filmed in Spain in a small provincial town in the 1960's, it tells the story of nine-year-old boy, curious about the secrets enclosed in a room that is always kept locked: the room where his father was found dead. Through his relationship with his immediate family: mother, brother, aunt, uncle, he comes up with the answer.

Worth seeing!

A pleasure to watch.The main character, a nine year old child appears in every single scene as he discovers sexuality in the adult members of his familiy. The VDV does not contain any features and the subtitles cannot be turned off.

This is an elegant and poignant tale of the mysterious and magical adult world as seen through the eyes of Javi, a nine year old child, growing up in a small provincial town in the 1960's.

Javi believes he can hear the voices of the dead and that they whisper to him their secrets, which were left unspoken in life. At his mother's house in the mountains, he is fascinated by the room in which his father died and which his mother carefully keeps locked. But, Javi learns that the living have their secrets as well.

As Javi begins to comprehend these secrets of the heart, he takes us on a journey where we are offered "The irresistible opportunity to see the world once again through the innocent eyes of a child."

There is no nudity in this movie.

I have watched--and collected--thousands of movies. This is one of my favorites, and I am sure it will be one of yours too, providing you get the oportunity to watch it. Highly recommended.

This Spanish film, set in early 1960s, tells a familiar story, about a nine-year-old boy's slow discovery of the mysteries of adulthood. It successfully recreates the puzzled feelings of fascination and revulsion that characterize preadolescent curiosity about what adults know and try to keep from children. The slow pace of the film nicely reflects that state of suspended animation - of waiting impatiently to learn what all the secrecy is about.

The pleasure of this particular story is watching the truth begin to dawn in the awareness of a particular boy, Javi, whose wide-eyed and open mouthed face often fill the screen in closeup, as like a sleuth he begins to put together the clues he finds around him in the behavior of the adults who rule his life - two unmarried aunts, his mother, an uncle, a neighbor, his sullen grandfather, and the mother of his close friend. During the few short months in which the story takes place, there is a suicide, a pregnancy, a wedding, revelations about the death of Javi's father, and intimations of sorrows and ecstasies far beyond his understanding. It is a satisfying journey to take with him.

I rented "Secrets of the Heart" because it had been an Oscar nominee for "Best Foreign Language Film". I have found that category to be a reliable source of great (yet largely unknown) movies. "Secrets of the Heart" is a prime example of what I mean. I expected a sort of haunted house plot involving young children from the brief synopsis I had read. This movie is so much more than that.

We are focussed on Javi, a young adolescent in Northern Spain who is living with his brother and his two aunts. A series of events challenge our young hero and the movie's greatness rests in how it shows Javi and those who surround him reacting to those challenges. So many potentially destructive (or, at the least, counterproductive) events take place challenging virtually all the cast to sink or swim and what swimmers they turn out to be (my appologies to those who may criticize my choice of words here). Amidst tales of fear, curiosity, love, loyalty, jealosy and many other emotions, Javi seems to unintentionally orchestrate a meandering path to redemption and renewal. My favorite character in the film was Grandpa whose disappointment in his extended family melts away when everyone starts making the right decisions.

This movie has a lot of emotional impact and a fair amount of humor. Some of the acting is excellent and some is merely acceptable (which is what kept me from giving it a 5* rating). The joy in "Secrets of the Heart" is watching everything unfold before us through the eyes of a child. Bravo!

this is a very cute movie. it is adorable to see how kids see life.. i love it!!!

Just as Mills&Boon's send their romantic fiction writers a list of guidelines to which they must strictly conform, so there must exist similar rules sent to countries hoping to be nominated for a 'Best Foreign Language film' Oscar. 'Secrets of the Heart' (which sounds like a M&B title) is just like every other derivative melodrama nominated by the Academy you've ever seen. It is a rites-of-passage narrative set during the Cuban Misile Crisis, centred on an 'appealing' young boy who lives with his spinster aunts (one uptight, the other an alcoholic) and an older brother with whom he attends a Christian Brothers school. His widowed mother lives at home with his uncle and grandfather, and there are dark family secrets that must not be mentioned. Tell a boy, of course, not to do something, and it's the first thing he'll do. He's like a detective uncovering the truth hidden by adult 'lies'.

The theme of secrets is initiated by his brother's story of a house neighbouring their school where a murder once took place. The Freudian symbolism of the house - with its web-like gate and the speeding train that interrupts the boys' spying - suggests that the real secret is sex. In his mother's house, in a Basque village they visit for Easter holidays, is a secret room in which his father shot himself, but the house's real 'secret' is that mummy and uncle enjoy each other's company. His brother is suspended from school for a fight with a boy over a girl who, in true rites-of-passage style, sells peephole abovetheknee views for a hefty charge. His alco aunt has an admirer from her past. So his initiation is into the world of sex, which initially seems violent, violating and bestial (when he witnesses the mating of dogs), then secret, shameful and distorted (the adults). His growth is predictably symbolised by a bridge of stepping stones he can't negotiate at the beginning - the currents they overlook claim one victim of adult sexuality, a wife who can't take her husband's abuse any more. The fairy-tale operetta the brothers star in adds a paralell narrative in which the hero (played by the young boy) negotiates puberty-symbolic dangers through Freudian motifs such as monsters in forests. There are even the obligatory scenes of the young boy learning to dance.

A film that has been preposterously compared to Victor Erice's incomparable 'Spirit of the Beehive', the hidden secrets of Francoist repression figure in 'Secrets', in the gloomily taciturn person of priest-hating grandad and his socially ostracised ex-chum.

All these predictable crises and trite reconciliations are bathed in the kind of queasily warm cinematographic glow, local 'colour' and tinkling music that makes 'Jean de Florette' look unforgivingly avant-garde.