For A Lost Soldier

Rating:
Summary: a impossible love between two persons
Review: A lonely boy wants to belong to someone, and a lonely young soldier wants someone who belongs to him. Then an impossible relationship (love) causes a heartbroken which lasts for ever.

Rating:
Summary: powerful story about Love at its best and the pain gained..
Review: simply, a story of two people who teach each other the power of Loves fun side and the trauma as well. it is a story that challenges one to accp[et the beauty of human bonds between two people society would deny such a love to.

Rating:
Summary: First class and true story of a boy's coming of age in WWII
Review: This is the autobiographical story of a famous Dutch gay dancer's boyhood in WWII Holland. The young lad meets and falls in love with an older man, a Canadian officer. This man accepts the boy's love and introduces him to sex. There is a cruel aspect to the story in that the soldier suddenly leaves the boy without any farewell or explanation, which breaks the boy's heart. But as he grows up he never forgets the man who taught him about love. A sensitive treatement of the controversial subject of a loving, consensual relationship between a boy and a man. The movie is quite true to the novel. END

Rating:
Summary: deeply touched by this movie.
Review: I really like how the movie focuses on the main two charcters.Martin Smitt[the boy], was amazing in his role, I instanly fell in love with him. The soldiers part was great too. His affection for the boy and the boy for him touched me deeply. The intimate scenes were well done and I enjoyed them and saw them from a perspective that a repressive hystera oriented society could never understand.
The ending was heartbreaking for the boy, but it drove home how much they loved eachother. I think the perfect ending would be that the soldier comes back for the boy or leaves a way of contacting him, but knowing the military the soldier was probably rdered to leave on a moments notice and didn't have the chance to make a contact with the boy.
Still I love this movie a lot.

Rating:
Summary: fantastic
Review: it is one of the best films that i have ever seen.The story has that something special plus the feelinfs and emotions that have been shown by the actors are just so good.
i was quite moved by the film.
i recommend this film to one and all who are in love .

Rating:
Summary: Thought provoking!
Review: This film challenges many of our notions about relationships; in particular, intimate relationship between two people. The adult-child nature of the relationship is no more complicated than the same gender angle. And we see both in the film so that should make it doubly complicated to deal with. But the film eases through these complications by telling the story without passing judgments or making conclusions. It leaves viewers to form their opinions about the relationship the two characters had and probe at the inner motives of each. Was the soldier manipulating the child's emotions or did he truly felt love for the boy? Was the boy merely looking for a father figure or did he genuinely felt a natural attraction for the young soldier?

And that is where the film is most effective. A film that leaves me thinking long after I see it is a film that respects me because my opinion about it is just as important as everyone's.

Rating:
Summary: A boy has a classic crush on a gay man.
Review: US audiences must know that in Holland the age of consent (with parental permission) is 12. Dutch youth can go into prostitution at age 16 and be state legal. It's different over there and was even more so at the end of WWII. The boy and man have obvious feelings for each other, but the movie fails to show it as love. The man has obvious lust for the boy and the boy just does not get across how a boy with a crush feels. I've been there and if a boy has a crush on you, you'll know with out a doubt. The man here makes all the moves (which I think if inappropriate) and the scene showing the boy being penetrated is stereotyping boy-lovers as wanting to do this with young boys. It does not happen that way. The movie contains a short nude scene (bath time). The boy here does a presentable job of acting. The man seems to me to be treating this love affair just as if it were with an adult woman, which it is not. The movie is enjoyable and when you see it tell us what you think.


William


Rating:
Summary: Life, love and forbidden memories
Review: If we put aside the psychoanalytical nonsense and look at this movie from a perspective of whether or not this is a good movie and why, here's what we will have. This movie is about same sex intergenerational relationship and coming of age in the countryside during World War II. It is made in raw, true and natural way-pretty much nothing is sugar coated. All actors play their role well. The movie is well made and the plot is ok written, even though in the end one may be left with a feeling that the movie has been left incomplete. And Even though For a Lost Soldier clearly shows mutual affection between two main characters, one may want more of affectionate scenes, for there are very few. In the end this motion picture stands out as very unique.

Rating:
Summary: Great, Pure and Honest.
Review: If we were to put aside all the psychoanalytical nonsense, and look at this movie from a simple standpoint of whether or not it is a good movie, here is what we would get. Despite my never reading the book, based on what I have seen For a Lost Soldier is a story about two souls meeting and uniting for s short period of time, in the midst of war. For man as well as for the boy it is love from the first sight. Both want to be together and rip the rewards of sexual pleasure, as well as just being close with each other. It is one of those "coming-of-age-on-the-countryside" stories, that is presented in a pure and honest form. Plot is ok written, even though they could've expanded on intimate scenes whether sexual or otherwise. One may be left with the feeling that something was missing, or the work was somewhat incomplete. However, this is perhaps the best male intergenerational relationship story I've seen. Another one that come close and I wish to recommend is "The Flavor of Corn", which is hard to find and possibly not going to be available an Amazon.com Final word, movie is well worth owning, it is truly a treat, especially these days, when art in the form of motion picture is extremely rare.

Rating:
Summary: On Exploitation
Review: I've thought very hard about this movie after reading these reviews.
I couldn't, and no matter how hard I try, can't distinguish the soldier's behaviour towards the boy from pure self-gratification - an exercise in narcissism, projected from 1st person to 3rd.

The boy's regard for the soldier, I suspect would be entirely familiar to any boy who ever had a crush on an adult.

but Love?

I found it a thought provoking movie, because it used the cinematic conventions of a love story to tell a story about neediness. Sure, neediness is necessary to love, but sufficient? Hardly.

I don't have a problem with a movie portraying sexual exploitation, but felt uneasy that the treatment here skirted perilously close to sanctification and propagandisation. It was certainly not `portrayal' in any way I could make sense of.

It has an uneasy resonance, for me, with a strong tendency in the community of men who exploit boys: they mistake the undoubted readiness of certain boys to form attachments, and their curiosity about sexual development, for love and/or sexual desire. I believe this impression is largely formed and reinforced by powerful expressions, like this movie. The problem is that such expressions almost certainly represent the wishful thinking of adults, rather than the authentic experience of kids.
Even when the story is autobiographical, as I believe this to be*, it makes sense to me that the dishonesty could represent a sexualised variation on the self-replicating damage we see in schools and military institutions, where each incoming group "grows up" from being exploited and abused to perpetrate the same on the next intake. There's some sort of "empathy bypass" which seems to be inherent to the mechanism.

*From reading the review of the book on which the film is based, the film has definitely been sanitised and perhaps crosses the line into fiction : in the book, the soldier forces sex with the kid, and his general behaviour towards him is even less consistent with love than is depicted in the film. I didn't know this when I wrote the preceding, and I somewhat sickened to reflect that the movie's promos and reviews ever led me to believe this was a film which might uplift me.
The whole thing starts to feel like a triumph of romanticism over honesty, perhaps in the tradition of the "Olympia" films of Leni Riefenstahl, where the beautiful bodies and movement of athletes, and the considerable arsenal of artful cinematography, were conscripted in the glorious service of something horrible about to engulf Europe.

I don't require my movies to condemn. In fact, I prefer them not to make moral judgements of any sort. It disturbs me, however, when they use misleading packaging to inveigle me into taking an interest, and then once I'm inside, use an essentially dishonest "insemination by imagery" process to surreptitiously advance a moral judgement - in favour - of the frankly indefensible.

I defend your right to see this movie and make your own judgement, but I'm glad I can exercise my right to warn you about it.