Small Wonder

By RICHARD CORLISS

Perhaps we are all blind to the limitations of those we love. Dona Leonor (Luisina Brando), a proud widow in a South American town in the '30s, certainly loves her daughter Charlotte (Alejandra Podesta). She is beguiled by Charlotte's grace, her easy imperiousness, her ease with languages, her virtuosity at the piano. And she refuses to accept what is evident to all: that Charlotte, now on the cusp of womanhood, is a dwarf. The townspeople pretend to ignore it. But one fellow, the aging stranger Ludovico D'Andrea (Marcello Mastroianni), sees Charlotte's disability as a sweet eccentricity, like a birthmark or an overbite. Ludovico has been courting Dona Leonor in his fashion, and someday he will be a doting stepfather to the girl. He will propose, won't he? Of course he will ...

The first thing to note about I Don't Want to Talk About It, Maria Luisa Bemberg's Argentine film (which she and screenwriter Jorge Goldenberg based on a short story by Julio Llinas) is that this is no freak show. It is a poignant, often funny fable, unfolding like a cautionary bedtime tale. It skips delicately among the ruins of passion, obsession and propriety. As in the novel and movie Like Water for Chocolate, family matters are treated in a mode balanced between magic realism and tragic surrealism.

The superb cast is led by Mastroianni, whose world-weary charisma so comfortably bears every man's crimes and charms. But finally it is the film's images that seize the memory. You won't soon forget the bleached radiance of a seaside wedding reception, the shadows caressing Dona Leonor on her midnight raid to smash dwarf statues on a nearby lawn, the face of a girl who wonders if she is the pawn of a lady's possessiveness or the beneficiary of a gentleman's genial lust.