i m david
Based on Anne Holm's novel, it is about a 12-year-old boy named David (Ben Tibber) who, in 1952, flees a Bulgarian forced-labor camp (set up to enslave those who oppose the new, post-war regime) and makes for freedom. He has been given an envelope whose contents are secret and told that Denmark is where he needs to take it.
David's first means of escape, however, is a ship bound for Italy. This is a slight detour from Denmark, but it does allow him more opportunities to meet strangers of varying degrees of kindness and to have a number of quaint Dickensian episodes as he makes his way back north: staying with a wealthy family, doing odd jobs for odd people, getting into tussles with pugnacious little boys, that sort of thing. Much of this material, in the mid-section of the film, feels like a sidetrack, marked by lovely European scenery but not much point.
It is not until David reaches Switzerland and encounters a kindly old woman named Sophie (Joan Plowright) that director Paul Feig -- best known as the man behind TV's "Freaks and Geeks" -- finds his way again. David has only known the cruel life of the labor camp, having been put there with his now-dead parents at an early age. Sophie, on the other hand, has lived several peaceful decades in a world where there is freedom and beauty. Heartbreakingly, David has learned never to trust anyone, making it Sophie's responsibility to help him see that there is good in the world, too.
The language on-screen is at all times English, once with a verbal warning that if David listens closely enough, he’d be able to pick up on foreign dialects, but the ability to do so here is a lazy resort. (As he stays with an Italian family for a brief time, the dining interlude suggests that the family has never sat down to eat together before.) Everyone sounds British and everyone speaks like the British, and is therefore never much of an awareness of the potential for cultural exploration and excitement. Much of the rest of the movie itself is a lazy attempt to replicate a base effect of this child’s perspective in a huge world; the progressive plot is straightforward and banal, the flashbacks are rudimentary, over-blown and over-emphasized, the characterizations are generic and cartoonish. Yet for all the reliance on childish elements and the storybook illustrations in place of scenes, the movie actually contains very little action to advance the winding course of the words that are so effortlessly spoken. The words creak with calculated composition (“You have to look at paintings differently than other things. More closely, listen what it tells you.”) that never sufficiently capture the foreignness of the situations or individuality of people.
Its a simple film which initially got potential to explode but unfortunately failed!