Word: boys
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Appelfeld is one himself. Born in 1932 in a part of Rumania that now belongs to the Soviet Union, he was sent, with his father, to a labor camp in the Ukraine. The eight-year-old boy escaped and, during three years reminiscent of Jerzy Kosinki's The Painted Bird, roamed the countryside in the guise of a shepherd. He lived mainly alone and in silence, fearing what the peasants might do to him if they learned that he was a fugitive Jew. After the war, he made his way to a displaced-persons camp in Italy...
...European children ever have childhoods? Not in the '40s and '50s anyway, to judge from a bunch of recent movies. Death's shadow dogged a boy's heels; responsibility came early, and guilt tagged along. Kids grew up faster, tougher, with fewer fantasies and more urgent everyday nightmares. In wartime or in uneasy peace, childhood was no romp in the meadows of innocence; the evidence is on the screen. Two top contenders for this week's Oscar nominations focus on English boys growing up during World War II. In Steven Spielberg's Empire of the Sun, a lad gets shanghaied...
Another Oscar prospect, Lasse Hallstrom's hit Swedish comedy My Life as a Dog, teaches that pubescence is a messy uphill battle. And now two French films arrive to clinch the argument that in Europe, childhood is a daunting entrance exam for premature adulthood. Their plot is archetypal: a boy is sent away from home for a wrenching rite of passage. In Jean-Loup Hubert's The Grand Highway, the lad learns conventional wisdom, and the film evokes familiar smiles and tears. In Louis Malle's Au Revoir les Enfants, the Nazi occupation of France triggers a boy's crisis...
...aggrieved existence into perspective. Reading them helps Ingemar shrug off his own doglike life: "It could have been worse." So his Mom is ailing, and his beloved pooch is sent on a terminal vacation, and the town's toughest athlete is a gorgeous girl (Melinda Kinnaman). Even for a boy in 1958, it could be worse. He seems to know already that anyone who can survive childhood can thrive as a grownup...
...Paul Simon: Money. And, boy does he need it! Rivaling Gephardt for the number two spot in New Hampshire forced Simon to flood the airwaves with advertising and, in the process, empty his warchest...