The child prodigy in “Vitus” can play the piano brilliantly at 6 and the stock market for millions by the time he’s 12, but he wants nothing more than to be a normal boy. Like “Pinocchio,” this is a fairy tale about breaking free from the entangling strings of conformity, about trying to be “a real boy.”
Vitus (pronounced Vee-tus) lives in Switzerland, which may explain why the movie so often seems to be stuck in neutral. The boy’s father and mother (Urs Jucker and Julika Jenkins) are loving parents in the modern sense: They lavish attention on him, as long as it doesn’t interrupt one of their phone calls.
At a party to impress the boss of the company where Vitus’ father works, his parents casually mention the child’s genius-level IQ. When someone expresses skepticism that a 6-year-old can play complex classical piano sonatas, the parents plop Vitus down at the keyboard like a trained monkey, their arms folded smugly. But in a bit of foreshadowing, he refuses at first to let the other adults see how clever he is.
Taking her stewardship of the little prodigy as a kind of grim mandate, his mother fires the piano teacher Vitus adores so that he can be trained at a conservatory. Then she discharges the cute babysitter (Kristina Lykowa) he has a crush on, vowing to take over his care herself. The latter miscalculation so infuriates Vitus that he throws books at his mutter, then locks her out of the house.
It does raise a provocative question: What do you do when your 6-year-old is a lot smarter than you?
But the movie’s point of view is unswervingly adult from the outset. We don’t know what Vitus is feeling; we just see his behavior and recognize it as abnormal, or possibly extraordinary. When the child finally does make a desperate lunge at normalcy, it’s as much a shock to us as to his parents to learn that he’s been so unhappy.
His brooding about the expectations that his parents have for him only becomes apparent after the movie jumps ahead to Vitus at the age of 12. The older boy is played by Teo Gheorghiu, an actual piano prodigy, and one whose gift for naturalism also is prodigious.
His only real ally is his grandfather (Bruno Ganz), who lives in the country and works with his hands, unmistakable movie shorthand for rustic wisdom, if not common sense.
From the time Vitus establishes himself as a normal boy, incapable of those leaps of greatness that made him so special, the movie is about hiding in plain sight. This may be his most daring feat of all, and his willing accomplice is his grandfather.
When the old man’s interest in flying turns into an obsession, and then a metaphor for freedom, you can see where the movie is going. It takes its time getting off the ground, as if implicitly asking whether we believe in fairy tales. Believing helps, although it may take more than that to convince you that Vitus, like Pinocchio, is a real boy.
“Vitus”
PG for mild thematic elements and language | 2 hours, 3 minutes | COMING OF AGE | Directed by Fredi M. Murer; written by Murer, Peter Luisi, Lukas B. Suter; in Swiss German with subtitles; photography by Pio Corradi; starring Teo Gheorghiu, Julika Jenkins, Urs Jucker, Bruno Ganz | Opens today at Landmark’s Chez Artiste.
