LAZY, HAZY, SCARY DAYS OF SUMMER

I'M NOT SCARED/IO NON HO PAURA: Golden wheat dances in even more golden sunlight. Heat haze hovers over parched clay. A beautiful young Italian child has a worrying encounter that heralds his coming of age.

If one wished to be wilfully and pointlessly unkind to Gabriele Salvatores's seductive fable, one might point out that it is just the sort of European film Miramax has made a habit of distributing. But I'm Not Scared, which is indeed brought to us by the brothers Weinstein, is a much more interesting film than that - or the knowledge that it is directed by the man behind 1991's sloppy, Oscar-winning Mediterraneo - might suggest.

Dealing with the eccentric ways that children, set loose from adult company, make sense of strange, frighteningly unfamiliar forces, the film has some of the restrained charm of Brian Forbes's Whistle Down the Wind and a great deal of the dreamy magic of Víctor Erice's The Spirit of the Beehive.

Playing one day in the fields near his rural home, 10-year-old Michele (Giuseppe Cristiano) stumbles across a hole covered by a sheet of corrugated iron. Peering into the murk he spies a foot sticking out from a sheet. He looks again and the foot is gone.

Eventually Michele works up the courage to investigate and discovers that the pit has been dug to contain a young kidnap victim named Filippo (Mattia Di Pierro), who is so traumatised that, blind and dishevelled, he imagines himself to be dead. The two strike up a very strained, very awkward friendship, but, after snatched moments of delight spent running through the fields, Michele, vaguely aware of the dangers of the adult world, ensures that his new friend gets back underground.

As events progress, Michele begins to suspect that his father, a small-time hoodlum with aspirations to rakishness, might be involved in the kidnapping. Still believing, as children often do, that everything in the world makes sense to the fully grown, he waits to discover just what, aside from greed, can have justified his Dad's actions.

Similar in plot to Andrey Zvyagintsev's recent The Return, I'm Not Scared does not have that film's originality or weight. But Salvatores has a brilliant eye for the pretty lunacies of rural life: a fat girl on a too small bicycle, combine harvesters creeping over the hill like grazing beasts. He manages to set horror and dread alongside moments of idyllic bliss without sounding any jarring disharmonies.

Some may find it a little too gorgeous for its own good, but even such begrudgers must admit that there are worse things to complain about. I'm Not Scared is, in short, the Miramax Europic at its finest.

- Donald Clarke