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OWL AND THE SPARROW

Written and directed

by Stephane Gauger

Starring Pham Thi Han,

Le The Lu and Cat Ly

Classification: PG

***

Although made and shown on the film-festival circuit well before Slumdog Millionaire, it's hard to see how Owl and the Sparrow (2007), which opens today in Toronto and next week in Vancouver, can avoid comparisons to the recent Oscar winner.

Both films are, in part, celebrations of the resilient spirit of street dwellers in cities where the economic boom for the few hasn't filtered through to the masses. (And that was before the global bust.) If Slumdog is an only-in-India tale that references its wildly popular Bollywood tradition, then Owl and the Sparrow is uniquely Vietnamese in that it comes from a country whose stories are only recently being told in film - to a small but growing international audience.

Directed by Vietnamese-American Stephane Gauger as a marriage between a low-budget, arty movie and a mass audience-friendly emotional spectacle, Owl and the Sparrow is romantic, socially astute and sweet enough without turning saccharine. It also features the finest performance by a child that I can recall since Anna Paquin's Oscar-winning turn in The Piano in 1993. Dakota Fanning: Take a lesson, sweetheart.

Pham Thi Han plays 10-year-old orphan Thuy, who lives with her uncle and works in his bamboo factory. When the proto-capitalist uncle berates Thuy for sloppy child labour, she packs her knockoff Barbie bag and runs away to nearby Saigon. There she makes a living as one of many street children who sell flowers to customers in street cafés and all-night noodle shops.

Thuy's story is spliced with two other narratives of lost souls in the big city. One is flight attendant Lan (a quietly effective Cat Ly), a young woman whose search for love leads her to a dead-end affair with a married man. The final story is of zookeeper Hai (Le The Lu, who tends to overact), jilted by his fiancée and emotionally attached to a baby elephant in his charge.

How the three stories connect and what role Thuy plays in this family love triangle is how Gauger, in his directorial debut, builds both tension and tenderness into his film. Owl and the Sparrow is not exactly seen through Thuy's eyes, but almost everything in it hinges on her sense of her new place in the world. The title, which refers to the adult lovers, suggests a fairy tale that's at once being authored by and read to this child.

I'd be remiss if I didn't add that Gauger isn't at times unguardedly melodramatic. With the Dickensian spectre of street children and crowded orphanages, you half expect the cast to break into a song-and-dance routine about Noodle, Glorious Noodle. Yet it's more revealing to watch the director temper the urge to overplay the story's weepy narrative with a detached documentary feel in his own low-key cinematography.

Since much of the action takes place at night and in cramped spaces - even the space between animals and spectators at the zoo looks awfully tight - Gauger allows his film to be more than a tug at the heartstrings. This is about a big city, and one that's "growing fast" as one character notes - without, Gauger editorializes, a clear grip of how big it'll get or how fast the change is coming.

Foreign-language films are almost automatically classified as art-house movies, but the graciousness of Owl and the Sparrow makes it as mainstream as it gets. Perhaps the two birds in the title are code for the two extremes of art or money that Gauger hit with one directorial stone.