Alfonso Cuarón seemingly follows carefully the attractive pattern of Agnieszka Holland's Secret Garden, starting from a lesser known work of the same novelist, Frances Hodgson Burnett. It opens similarly in India in 1914, where the prepubescent heroine has earnestly learned from her father, the oxymoronic Captain Crew(e), the lesson that "all women are princesses." And it similarly proceeds to the mythic terrors of abandonment and dispossession, this time in New York City in the very boarding school attended by the departed mother -- Miss Minchin's Seminary for Girls. On paper, Eleanor Bron may have seemed a reasonable substitute for Maggie Smith, but on screen she vastly overplays it. And the girl (Liesel Matthews) is nowhere near as problematic a personality as the pampered and spoiled one of The Secret Garden: she straightaway exhibits sisterly feelings for the black servant girl, the chubby bespectacled pariah, the tantrum-throwing orphan; and, with her mesmerizing oral (and stiffly illustrated) renditions of Indian folk tales, she effortlessly steals the limelight from the sniffish egotist whose only hold on the other girls is the privilege of watching her brush her hair. Just about everything else is at least a cut below, usually several cuts below, the prototype. The plot development is slower. The metaphors are less resonant. The cast comprises more children, and so inevitably more bad actors. (1995) — Duncan Shepherd
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