A young life devoted to impossible dreams

Eight-year-old Valentin lives in Buenos Aires during the late 1960s, when two countries are racing each other to the moon. Valentin wants very badly to go but is told by one of the many spoilsport grown-ups in his life that Argentines are nowhere near joining the race. So what?

Valentin (Rodrigo Noya) is accustomed to impossible dreams. Like the one he has every day in which his mother, who disappeared from his life when he was younger, comes to see him in the cramped, cluttered apartment he shares with his grandmother (Carmen Maura).

Valentin the child and “Valentin” the movie have a lot in common. They are never more sure they’re being cute than when they’re at their least ingratiating. Both talk more than they need to and try too hard to force other people’s affections. Writer-director Alejandro Agresti’s autobiographical feature manages to endear itself only when it climbs out of its conceits and lets things happen.

Valentin the character isn’t content with that mode of being. Like most children, he wants to bend nature to his will until nature (or another grown-up spoilsport) tells him he can’t. If his mother doesn’t come back to him, Valentin at least wants his blustery, wayward father (Agresti) to marry somebody nice so he can have a normal family again.

Not that his grandmother -- played by the veteran Maura with a mercurial, barely credible blend of crust and moisture -- isn’t loving and attentive to a fault. But why can’t dad wise up and marry someone like blond, beautiful Leticia (Julieta Cardinali), who really knows how to listen to an 8-year-old over pizza?

His constant chatter may grate, but Noya does the wide-eyed wonderment thing very well. It helps, of course, to wear horn-rimmed glasses that seem as wide as salad plates. But you wonder how it is that Valentin, especially in his narration, carries such an expansive, worldly perspective on life and love while leaving other matters -- notably an inbred anti-Semitism within his family -- relatively unexamined.

What he’s most sensitive to, it seems, is the pattern of life in which “sourness” keeps creeping back in no matter how hard you try to keep it away. That’s a cycle to which we can all relate, especially these days.

*

‘Valentin’

MPAA rating: PG-13, for some thematic elements and language

Rodrigo Noya...Valentin

Carmen Maura...Grandmother

Julieta Cardinali...Leticia

A Miramax Films release. Writer-director Alejandro Agresti. Producer Laurens Geels. Cinematographer Jose Luis Cajaraville. Editor Alejandro Brodersohn. Music Paul M. Van Brugge. Production designer Floris Vos. Running time: 1 hour, 26 minutes.

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