骏采心驰 (1971)

About a young boy's passion for horses, his paralysis from polio, and subsequent triumph over his handicap by learning to ride. Village life of the period (just before World War I) is well evoked, and the boy's relationship to his wastrel father, anxious mother, and the somewhat scornful village kids is treated with some feeling. It's a whimsical, rather drowsy film, overlaid with an unfortunate technical tricksiness and an insistent music score. Unexpectedly, it improves enormously with the boy's illness and his feverish hallucinations in hospital. Later, treated with a nicely quirky sense of humour, neither his crippled state nor his determination to overcome it are trivialised. Altogether a bit of an oddity, pleasant and irritating in equal proportions as it avoids the obvious pitfalls and then falls flat where least expected.