Word: sara
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...only girl who doesn't fall for Sara's Scheherazade routine is the jealous, obsessively hair-brushing Lavinia (Taylor Fry), whose machinations would fit right into "90210: The Elementary School Years," Sara meets Lavinia's jealousy with innocent incomprehension. Nor can she understand why the students why the students aren't allowed to talk to the Black servant girl, Becky (Vanessa Lee Chester). Sara promptly sets out to befriend Becky, despite the house taboo...
Many a kids' movie has met its downfall through cute but hopeless child actors. Luckily for "A Little Princess," incompetence is largely confined to the minor characters. Still, although Liesel Matthews is fairly good as Sara, she fails to maintain the delicate distinction between a girl that everyone falls in love with for her unaffected friendliness, and an ordinary Goody-Two-Shoes. Halfway through the movie, one simply gets tired of hearing her breathy voice and watching closeups of her preadolescent Molly Ringwaldesque lips, parted in sensitive confusion at the evils of the world...
...pinned on the acting, however, Sometimes, the dialogue positively reeks of adult intervention. A few lines would never pass thorough any 10-year-old's lips, like, "Father dear, I'm so proud of you." Then there are the gaps in credibility. It's very interesting that Sara managed to spend her interesting that Sara managed to spend her formative years in British India without seeing poverty or encountering racial prejudice. Her utter naivete when encountering these things in New York is ridiculous...
...course, the only India we are ever shown in the movie is the secluded resort-paradise jungle where Sara cavorts on the head of a sunken idol, under the gaze of her Indian nanny. Sara's memories of India are similarly one-dimensional, painting the rather confusing picture of a land where elephants and tigers lie side by side, inhaling the scents of Indian curries...
...lush opening shots of India and the ship to America, seemingly suspended in the velvet night. "A Little Princess" is practically shot through the diamond lens of a platinum camera, on gold-rinsed film. This movie positively drips wealth. Even the wooden planks of the bare attic where Sara is thrust after her fall from grace are examined in lustrous detail by the camera's eye, and of course the opulence that surrounds her before her little bout with poverty is absolutely sumptuous. Reality is suspended as surely as if this were an animated feature...