Le ali di Katja

I hated this movie. I could not make up my mind whether the clichés and stereotypical acting from children and adults alike, along with a narrative that only VERY young children will find anything but phony and unbelievable were unintentional, or if this was the director's premeditated attempt at expressionism or outright surrealism. To me this became an incoherent mess. Perhaps amateurish is a term applicable to this film.

The story is about a Danish girl of about 10 years who saves a falcon chick when the branch which supports the nest breaks off during a rain storm. The scene where the girl climbs about 30 feet high is actually quite suspenseful. To seek shelter from the heavy rains she climbs inside a large truck which is parked along the roadside. She falls asleep, and when she wakes up the semi-trailer has arrived in southern Italy. Anyone faintly familiar with Euroepan geography will, as I did, balk at this premise.

The girl's arrival in Italy seems not to trouble her in the least. In fact, she doesn't actually appear to realize that she is away from home and acts irritated at people speaking to her in a strange tongue and not understanding her words.

There she teams up with a band of Italian boys of between 5 to 12 years and gets involved in their "adventures". There are several minor story lines, all highly implausible.

The film has some nice Italian, dance-like feel-good music.

I was watching this film in a public library alongside two other people, a man and a woman of between 60 and 70 years of age. They enjoyed it immensely and smiled and shared approving glances throughout the film. I mention this just so that the reader will beware that others may "get" what I totally missed from this movie.

I watched Falkehjerte to see if it would be appropriate for my 11-year-old niece. After a slightly dull start, the movie began drawing me into its airy and light-hearted narrative. The Falcon aspect is sort of just a frame for a story of how a different culture is more stimulating to this kind of nerdy girl than her home life, where both of her parents are too busy to take care of her. It's sort of a fantasy movie, a dreamlike journey of boarding a parked truck in Denmark to seek shelter for the rain, and then waking up the next morning in a coastal town in Italy. Here, Katja is caught up in the local kids' gangs (incl. Some young mafioso!), and grow to have a life of friendship with them, until she has to get home to her parents, who after all miss her. The movie is a meditation on dreaming of belonging, in more exciting surroundings than a mind-numbingly boring modern suburban one with parents that are far too busy to stop and smell the flowers. It's well-made in every way, and the only reason I'm not giving it a higher rating is because I'm not exactly the target audience.

Don't listen to the other review here, from 2007 - it's clearly written by the kind of person who only rates movies 1 or 10 and doesn't see the nuance in between.