Disorder And Early Sorrow

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

TITLE: OLIVIER OLIVIER

DIRECTOR and WRITER: AGNIESZKA HOLLAND

THE BOTTOM LINE: A bleak film offers a discomfiting vision of family values.

Tragedy cures dysfunction. So made-for-TV movies teach us. Death and disease, addiction, abuse and abduction -- shattering though these may be at first, all eventually cause fictional (or, more likely, fictionalized) families to draw closer together, to discover new strengths in the final reel's final analysis.

Agnieszka Holland, the Polish woman who made Olivier Olivier in France, has obviously not seen a lot of American TV. So she is free to imagine the force of domestic disaster as centrifugal, not centripetal. The result is an awkward film that moves one not toward pity but toward dark reflection on the unbearable chaos that always shadows -- as we tend to forget -- ordinary being.

The Duval family of Provence is introduced as a disaster waiting to happen. The father (Francois Cluzet), a country vet, is angry and impotent. The mother (Brigitte Rouan) is vague and forgetful, unhealthily doting on her younger child Olivier. Olivier's elder sister Nadine (Marina Golovine) thinks entirely too much about extraterrestrials. When Olivier, wearing his red cap, disappears while taking food to his grandmother's house (the fairy-tale parallel is obvious), grief becomes his family's excuse to surrender to their separate pathologies.

What the Duvals require is a miracle, the restoration of Olivier, the sunny source of their little universe's gravitational power, and after the passage of a few years, Holland provides them with that astonishment. He appears in the unlikely form of an adolescent Parisian street hustler (Gregoire Colin). But the Duvals, even skeptical Nadine, are not inclined to question him closely. If he is a lie, he is the saving lie they all need, and in the end he does accidentally provide the definitive answer to the mystery that has riven them.

Holland does not cloak that riddle as well as she might, and her variation on the Martin Guerre (or Sommersby) theme is predictable. But as she showed in last year's Europa, Europa, she also has a way of administering jolts from the blue that usefully subvert our narrative and moral expectations. The value of this bleak film, which says that the family, like any other institution, requires agreed-upon fictions to sustain itself, derives from that talent.