MOVIE REVIEW : ‘Cross My Heart’ Offers Rare Take on Childhood’s End

Hollywood has periodically attempted movies about dewy schoolmates coming of age, but the French are unrivalled at this sort of thing. “Cross My Heart” isn’t a very energetic piece of movie-making--it dawdles respectfully at each life lesson. But it also doesn’t condescend to the children in the film and, what’s more unusual for this material, it doesn’t condescend to adults, either. It’s that rarity: a kids’ film with integrity. (Unrated; mild adult situations.)

In a typical American “kid” movie, particularly of the John Hughes stripe, children are the only protagonists for whom we are meant to have any sympathy. Adults, by virtue of being adults, are all demented and goofy and ogreish. Jacques Fansten, who wrote and directed “Cross My Heart,” recognizes that it’s possible to give children their due without at the same time turning adults into raging dunderheads.

Martin (Sylvain Copans), an eighth-grader in a provincial school, has been hiding a secret for several days. His mother, with whom he has been living alone, has died, and he is terrified to tell anyone because he thinks he will be carted off to the orphanage. As his classmates find out one by one, they cook up schemes to keep the secret hidden: Social workers are rerouted, signatures are forged, suitors are turned away at the door.

The ruses are so ingenious that the kids, many of whom are borderline dullards in class, come alive before our eyes. And their efforts to protect Martin bring out their innate humanity. Banding together, they cut back on the badgering and cruelty. Their mission turns them into little adults.

This is a sentimentalized view of childhood but, in the movie’s terms, it doesn’t feel false. Its pedigree stretches back to Truffaut and, before him, Jean Vigo. In this country, the same sort of scenario is often rendered with goopier strokes, in the “Stand by Me” tradition. In certain plot particulars, “Cross My Heart” is so close to that film that I’m tempted to call it “Stand by Moi.” It’s truer to the severity of childhood experience, though, and in a way that doesn’t skimp on its enchantments.

The enchantment is expressed primarily by the child actors. Given the somewhat pedestrian filmmaking, that’s a plus. Because there have been so many famous French classics in this mode--”Poil De Carotte” and “The 400 Blows” and “Les Mistons” and “Au Revoir Les Enfants” and “Zero for Conduct”--it may be unfair to expect a masterpiece. Those films did not merely describe the revelries of childhood. They seemed to have been made by adults who were ferociously in touch with the poetry and precocity of youthful imaginings.

“Cross My Heart” (at the Goldwyn Pavilion) doesn’t provide the kind of cinematic excitement that might have made it seem like an emanation of childhood. It works on a more modest level, and Jacques Fansten gambles that his young actors, most of whom seem relatively inexperienced before the cameras, will somehow bring a different kind of truth to his story.

The gamble doesn’t always pay off. Martin’s pain at his loss, for example, doesn’t register solidly. But the freshness of childhood comes through with these kids, so that even when their acting isn’t tiptop, we’re drawn in by their eagerness to playact.

In the movies, all filmed performances are, in a sense, documentaries. We are watching not only the actor playing a character but also a record of the person playing the actor. In “Cross My Heart,” the evasions and ruses and eagerness of the boys and girls involved are central to the film’s vision of childhood as a privileged time of life. It’s a vision of childhood as a vast secret society of co-conspirators against the adult world.

‘Cross My Heart’

Sylvain Copans: Martin

Nicolas Parodi: Jerome

Cecilia Rouaud: Marianne

A MK2 Productions USA presentation. Director Jacques Fansten. Producers Ludi Boeken, Jacques Fansten, Belbo Films. Executive producers Arlette Guibert/SFP. Cinematographer Jean-Claude Sallier. Editor Colette Farruggia. Costumes Helene Martel. Art Director Gilbert Gagneux. Running time: 1 hour, 45 minutes.

Unrated.