Valentín

This is a little story that you should avoid like the plague if your favorite directors are Ingmar Bergman, Todd Solondz, or Lars Von Trier. If you are like me and Lee, though, and enjoy a quiet little fable about a cross-eyed 8-year-old boy with Coke-bottle glasses who wants to be an astronaut, from a broken family with a terrible father and an abused mother, living with his not-so-nice grandmother who dies … well, you see where I’m going. It’s sweet. The boy is adorable, and a great little actor. The child narrates it, but from the perspective of an older man telling his story, and in fact the director says it is autobiographical. There is heartbreaking stuff and funny stuff. Particularly good is the interaction between Valentín and a gorgeous woman who is his father’s latest girlfriend, who Valentín desperately wants to be his new mother. He wants it so bad that he makes a bad mistake and, not realizing what he’s doing, lets her see what a shitbag his dad is, and she naturally dumps him. But she doesn’t dump Valentín, and even becomes his friend. You can see that, if they’d been contemporaries, she’d have married him in a heartbeat. Sad, how accidents of birth can put the right person forever out of reach.