"Childhood, Imported and Domestic"

...Eager to dispense with all gestures, she wants only to spend time with her Prince in his apartment, which she has swathed with fabrics in her effort to transform the mundane circumstances of their affair into the magical...

...Set in the 1930s, it is about a six-year-old boy who is at the center of a maelstrom, the object of grown-up manipulations...

...PS (pronounced "Pe-yeerce") is handed over to Vanessa with much protesting—"I'll kill her," he yells...

...Careful, He Might Hear Yow is blessed with the sort of uniformly fine acting that can increasingly be expected from the Australians...

...When his aunt presses to know why, PS says simply: "Because he's dead...

...She beheads one gremlin, fries another in the oven, and—in one of the movie's few genuinely inspired and funny moments—pops the worst offender in her husband's latest gadget, a super blender that actually works for a change, and purees away...

...Isabelle lands in the hospital in a near-coma, refusing to talk to anyone, and the man she has entrapped with her persistence sits behind the barred door of his apartment, abandoned to the havoc that her adolescent fantasy has wrought...

...Now it is PS's turn to step in on his own behalf...

...She closes the door on him...

...Frantic at her disappearance, her family puts an ad in the paper...

...How he manages to extricate himself from Vanessa's neurotic but compelling glamorous clutches makes up the heart of the drama...

...Eventually the custody battle reaches the courtroom...

...Bashful at first, she arranges to bump into Georges (Philippe Leotard) on the street and noses for information about him from his concierge...

...They go away to the seashore, where Georges' conventional notion of romance—dinner at an elegant restaurant —is disdained by Isabelle...

...Recognizing that rather than showing PS a finer life she is destroying him, Vanessa admits defeat...

...He can't standup," the little boy explains...

...These competing styles give the proceedings an erratic feel, yet only detract slightly from what is otherwise a stunning effort...

...Neither Lila nor George is too pleased with these changes ("What's he need a private school for...

...In time the pathology that is at the root of Isabelle's scenario takes over...

...Kramer, are given short shrift—issued a regulation Child personality, blue eyes and blonde hair, and then mostly ignored...

...Unlike that film, which kept its eye firmly on the comic aspects, this one explores the darker ramifications of a shared fantasy, the subtle shift from make-believe to tragedy...

...Vanessa dies suddenly in a ship accident on her way to England, and PS grieves: "She's out there all alone with no one to hold her...

...In the course of the film each admonition is duly forgotten or ignored...

...It was produced by Michael Fin-nell—with Spielberg, Franklin Marshall and Kathleen Kennedy as executive producers—and directed by Joe Dante from a barebones script by Chris Columbus...

...The game is disrupted by Isabelle's refusal to play by the rules...

...Georges becomes irate when he realizes that Isabelle cannot be stopped: She sweetly explains her appearance in a pub while he is having a drink with his fiance by announcing that he is her wayward father and she is there to bring him home...

...Having convinced Georges that she is an orphan with only an aunt to look out for her, Isabelle moves in with him and drops out of school...

...Then, so gradually that it is almost imperceptible, the mechanic starts to play along with the schoolgirl's game...

...yet they're not supposed to hate them entirely either, because these monsters are also cool little guys...

...By contrast, the non-American films about, and for, children project a vision rooted in a sense of historical continuity: Children are what we once were, and we are what they will become...

...he is too firmly grounded for so radical a flight into fantasy...

...X a Petite Sirene is, on its face, a variation on the Lolita theme, another tale of nymphetmania...

...Uncle George, arriving home from work, sees the little boy slumped tearfully outside the door and confronts his hoity-toity sister-in-law: "We don't ever shut him out," he says firmly, opening the door...

...In the last scene of the movie, as his relatives are sitting around having a cup of coffee, PS announces that he no longer wants to be called by his nickname...

...And although Philippe Leotard, with his crinkly eyed smile and undubitable virility, is immensely appealing in the role of Georges, there is something about the character that is half-baked...

...He learns to eat properly, to say "yes, thank you," and he is put into a private school where he is tormented by the other children and his accent is mocked by the teacher...

...The two of them briefly break off, then reconcile with greater intensity than before...

...although she is childish, even willfully so, Isabelle is also more sophisticated than Georges, and her rather imperious ways attract him as much as they disturb him...

...Nicholas Gledhill, as PS, has the most fathoming gray-blue eyes...

...The malicious creatures, cackling gleefully, proceed to wreak havoc on the picture-postcard town Billy lives in, killing off the town villainess, Mrs...

...La Petite Sirene, directed by Roger Andrieux, has a kind of unostentatious daring: It explores the consequences of an obsession without veering off into comedy or lyricism at just that crucial juncture where interior and exterior realities collide...

...The gremlin, christened Gizmo, comes packaged with several dire warnings: never put in direct light, never get wet, and never, never feed after midnight...

...Movies about children made in this country are aimed, almost exclusively, at the juvenile market...

...PS," as he has been affectionately nicknamed, is living happily with his aunt and uncle, Lila and George...

...Her lips painted a garish orange, her hair cut in a glossy bob, she is a picture of nubile sexual allure when Georges' pals come by for their weekly poker session...

...Deagle (Polly Holliday), as well as several hapless people in their path...

...Laura Alexis, who speaks French as if she were a native and whose pouting insouciance evokes both Leslie Caron and Isabelle Hup-pert, is American...

...his uncle harumphs...

...it frequently has the stately quality of a PBS production...

...The best thing about Gremlins is Billy's mother (Frances Lee McCain), who bakes gingerbread cookies and isn't afraid of anything...

...This movie will undoubtedly get far less attention than Indiana Jones or TheMup-pets Take Manhattan or The Last Star-fighter, so children won't be hankering after it...

...The story, for the few of you who may have missed it, is blushingly simple: As a Christmas present for his son Billy (Zachary Galligan), Rand Peltzer (Hoyt Axton), a failed inventor albeit generous consumer, buys him a doe-eyed, furry little pet that he finds in a Chinatown junk shop...

...If it was to be expected that Gremlins would gross more than $ 100 million within six weeks of opening (and thus prove, once again, that Steven Spielberg is indeed the biggest Wunderkind on the block), what does come as a surprise is the movie's unmitigated awful-ness...

...She winces at the way PS is taught to call his mother "Dear One," but Vanessa's ear for the declasse is about the only thing she has to offer in the way of genuine solicitude...

...Billy's science teacher, having evinced a commendable pedantic interest in his student's proliferating pet, is not only the first victim but, in a community of lily-white Norman Rockwell types, singularly black...

...Gremlins may well be the first campy movie made for children: Holly Woodlawn meets the Cookie Monster...

...It is perhaps most reminiscent of Bertolucci's Last Tango in Paris, but it is less insistently libidinized, more prosaic about the holes in the male character's psyche that make him vulnerable...

...adults, if they are figured in at all, exist as silent underwriters or long-suffering attendants...

...As far as I can see, this movie won't do any good and it might even do some harm: It could put a dent in any eight- or 10-year-old's moral development...

...Finally, just as the hamlet is about to be overrun, Billy and his girlfriend Kate (Phoebe Cates, looking rather demure after her Lace debut) save the day...

...he is, childishly, playing her for a fool while he is also responding to being humiliated...

...Should La Petite Sirene affect you as it did me, it will linger, casting ripples after it is over—like a pebble thrown into water...

...She begins to go after him in earnest, following him on his dates and plying the unwary, easygoing Georges with declarations of submissive devotion...

...George, her working-class husband, is keenly affectionate...

...Their directors and writers, from Bergman and Truffaut to the newer artists from Spain and Brazil, attempt to describe the riddles of the universe—love, sex, money, power, war— as perceived by the young ones who will inherit them...

...The film deserves the same fate...

...When PS chants, "Yes thank you Vanessa very very very much" after a lavish placating gesture by her, he is both victim and vic-timizer...

...They can't unabashedly love Gizmo and the rest of the gremlins, the way they did E. T., because there is evil lurking in those tiny hearts...

...After trying briefly and obtusely to sound out the child's opinion, the judge decides in favor of Vanessa and her money...

...The cuddly little creature, who sleeps at the foot of Billy's bed and makes sweet beepy noises, divides and multiplies, in a dramatic oceanic swell, into an army of fang-toothed nasties...

...As their relationship progresses, becoming ever more involuted, Isabelle bursts out of her awkward shell into a barely contained, smoldering-eyed eroticism...

...Georges spots it, and when Isabelle reveals that she is pregnant, he desperately knocks her head against his own until the blood runs...

...They're shown guzzling beer and playing cards with each other, break dancing and singing "Hey Ho, Hey Ho" along with Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs...

...She sends him back to Lila's dowdy mid-die-class euphemisms and his common playmates...

...No, thank you," William-formerly-PS says, refusing the world of adult seduction for the first time in his young life...

...The European and South American film industries have always presumed a fascination with the inner life of childhood...

...While discussing PS's new living arrangements—he is to spend the week with her and her aunt, Agnes, at their spacious, antique-filled home across the water, and weekends with Lila and George—Vanessa is annoyed to find PS eavesdropping...

...It reminded me less, though, of other movies about an older man obsessed with a pubescent girl —Pretty Baby or the more recent, sleazy Blame it on Rio—than of a favorite schoolgirl movie of mine, The World of Henry Orient, tuned several keys up...

...Consider Careful, He Might Hear You, an Australian movie based on the novel of the same name by Sumner Locke Elliot...

...I tried to figure out whether this coincidence spoke to some deeper meaning— something along the lines of the gremlins being regrettably all too human in their racial discrimination—then decided that I was mistakenly trying to grace the arbitrariness of Dante's choices with a logic they didn't possess...

...And so begins the process of growing up...

...But the deeper truth is that she wants Georges for herself, separate from the adult world he is increasingly less a part of...

...Her parting, desperation-tinged words stay with him...

...Into this plain but happy home steps the beautiful and willful Vanessa, Lila's sister, who has come to reclaim PS for the upper crust...

...Does anyone want to...

...Georges' gruff soulfulness has met no echo in the middle-class verities of job, friends, marriage...

...nevertheless, if they did go to see it, they would hear themselves talking...

...Isabelle (Laura Alexis), a quiet 14 year old who lives in an all-female household in one of those artistically decaying neighborhoods peculiar to Paris, develops a crush on a 40-year-old garage mechanic...

...The link is there...

...Dante, one of the "new breed" of directors—Laurence Kasdan (Body Heat, The Big Chill) is another—appears to have spent a large part of his waking hours watching films great and small...

...On the evidence of Dante's absolute disregard for the viewers' needing a consistent emotional tone—he began as, and retains much of the sensibility of, a comic book artist —one can only assume that Gremlins' sudden lapses into E. T. ish sentimentality were prodded by Spielberg, who stood by behind the scenes...

...What distinguishes all of them from the American model is that they are not segregated from adult concerns, cut off from the regular thoroughfare...

...PS gets sadder and sadder, until Vanessa finds him alone downstairs in the middle of the night, with his new toy donkey—a birthday present from her —on the floor...

...If one of the advantages of childhood is that you still see clearly, without the need for self-delusion, one of the disadvantages is that it is not always possible to act on what you see...

...Robyn Nevin and Peter Whitford pluck just the right doughty chords as Lila and George, and John Hargraves —looking a bit like Johnny Carson—is memorable in the minor role of Logan, PS's charming drunk of a father...

...Just as the situation seems to have been resolved, however, fate pulls one of its trick cards...

...his stoicism is as credible as it is touching and he manages to convey the panic beneath PS's very pretty and very stiff upper lip...

...Justin Henry (Kramer) and Ricky Shroeder (The Champ) were both winsome enough to water the eyes of the stoniest viewer on earth, but could anyone really tell them apart...

...Directed by Carl Schultz from a screenplay by Michael Jenkins, the film conveys the particularities of a child's viewpoint—its ingenuities and its bewilderments, the way children keep things to themselves...

...Although the vision of a Steven Spielberg or a George Lucas may be technically brilliant, it is entirely escapist, quite literally spacey...

...He plays with a stringy-haired little girl next door and goes to a noisy, friendly school...

...Still, it is unclear why Isabelle is as adrift as she is, given the fact that she has a family and home, or why no one notices her derangement sooner...

...Like Henry Orient, where two girls in private-school uniforms pursued a concert pianist (Peter Sellers), La Petite Sirene features the younger party as the aggressor...

...Or possibly it is Leotard's air of sunny sanity that made me doubt his involvement with the Little Mermaid—his way of seeming to steer clear of hoopla...

...Find out who you are," she told him," or you'll never be able to love anyone else...

...Then, just when you least expect it, the movie turns into O'Neilllike melodrama, with people screaming "Do something" or going loopy during thunderstorms...

...The truth seems to be that while we are willing to go to elaborate lengths to entertain our children, we are not all that interested in how they think or what they feel...

...Careful, He Might Hear You is marred at times by its own genteelness...

...Even the children that appear in movies designed for adult audiences, such as The Champ and Kramer vs...

...Half the country's on the dole"), yet they are intimidated by Vanessa's greater resources and her claim that she is fulfilling the stated wish of the child's dead mother...

...Wendy Hughes, whose beauty was disguised in another Australian venture, Lonely Hearts, but whose talent was highly visible, is superb as Vanessa, alternately flinty and vulnerable...

...His Uncle George is the only one who immediately realizes the little boy is deadly serious, but even he attempts to josh with him: "Have a piece of cake, Bill," he says...

...Lila, the sister of PS's deceased mother, is an earnest, good soul...

...Once she admits her wish to marry him, Georges makes a last effort to preserve his perspective and bluntly tells her that "fairy tales don't come true...

...He has inserted many sly allusions to them here (most noticeably, It 'sa Wonderful Life and Invasion of the Body Snatchers) and maintains a kind of snit-ty, de haut en bas attitude toward the base necessities—such as plot and character...

...With the model of "The Little Mermaid" from the Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale in her head, Isabelle is convinced that her "Prince" will eventually yield to her blandishments...

...The movies this effort has spawned make a list of works that are complexly rendered—sometimes playful, sometimes brutal, sometimes both: The 400 Blows, Forbidden Games, Cria, Padre Padrone, Pixote, Our Mother's House, Le Souffle au Coeur, Fanny and Alexander...

...I cannot for the life of me imagine what young children, whom Gremlins presumably is for, will make of this movie...

...The result is fare that is disquietingly simple-minded—tending either, like E. T., to be fluffy with sentiment or, like the numerous offerings in the sci-fi I horror I adventure genre, to snap, crackle and pop with fantasy...

...Isabelle is emboldened by her discovery that Georges is divorced and by his amused tolerance of her interest...