On the Run From Terror

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

In movies this has been the year (possibly the decade) of the threatened child. The stories told about such children -- abused or abandoned, in some way forced to cope prematurely with life's terrors -- can be read in a couple of ways. They may represent a revival of interest by moviemakers in one of fiction's archetypes, that of the child alone and improvising in a world he didn't make and doesn't understand. They may also reflect our relatively new sensitivity to child abuse.

Whatever the case, no youngster has lately, or perhaps ever, been placed in more deadly peril than 10-year-old Vito (Manuel Colao) in Flight of the Innocent. And no director has more vividly realized the plight of an innocent than youthful Carlo Carlei (who wrote the screenplay with Gualtiero Rosella). One fine warm day in Calabria, in southern Italy, Vito's entire family (and a boy they have mysteriously sequestered in a cave nearby) is massacred, and Vito narrowly escapes execution at the hands of a scarfaced man who will stalk him (and his nightmares) for the rest of the film.

Neither Vito nor the audience entirely understands what's happening to him. All he (and we) know is that he must flee for his life. And therein lies the key to this film's success. For Carlei wants to thrust us into the mind of this almost completely silent boy. He gives us no more information than Vito acquires, in bits and pieces, as he flees to Rome in search of something, somebody -- we're not sure. Carlei's camera is often radically subjective, seeing through Vito's eyes as the boy rushes panicked through the streets. Equally often it is radically objective, tracking a small, lonely figure in landscapes mysterious and menacing to him.

These things we learn in due course: that Vito's sole surviving relative is a small-time crook in Rome; that the dead boy in the cave had been kidnapped by Vito's family and was being held for ransom; that the family's slayers were members of a rival clan (though their precise motives remain obscure). Vito catches glimpses of the dead boy's parents on TV, making anguished pleas for his return. Eventually he feels compelled to make his way to them, and attempts to crawl into their son's bed, into his very life. The moviemakers note that there have been nearly 700 kidnappings for ransom in Italy since 1986. They also observe that murderous clan warfare is a continuing fact of life in Calabria. But Flight of the Innocent is not primarily a sociological tract nor an exercise in save-the-children sentiment. Little Vito has no time for such abstractions. His life depends on the correctness of hasty impressions, silent intuitions of danger. The result is something much better than sentiment. It is something quite close to the high emotions classic tragedy is supposed to evoke -- quite close, that is, to pity and terror.