Recco of the Week: Central Station

MIXED EMOTIONS: Central Station is one of those rare films that leaves you feeling both happy and sad at the same time.

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This weekend, watch a film that will touch your heart like few films have. It's a Brazilian film called Central Station that's on my list of top ten foreign films of all time.

The film, set in Rio de Janiero is about an elderly woman Dora, who runs a little stand in the local railway station where she writes letters for people who are illiterate.

Dora's one of those bitter, mean-spirited, cynical women who rarely mails any of these letters that people pay her to write, instead she stuffs them in a drawer in her house, and pulls them out occasionally to laugh over them with a roommate.

On one particular day, a mother and son use her services to dictate a letter to the woman's missing husband. Just moments later, the mother is struck and killed by a bus, and her 10-year-old son Josue knows only one person in Rio - Dora!

Very reluctantly and only after exhausting all other options, Dora takes the boy in and agrees to help him find his father who lives far away in an interior city.

From this point on, Central Station is a road movie, but it's really about the unlikely friendship between a 67-year-old woman and this 10-year-old boy.

It's not so much about the search for the boy's father as it is about Dora's reawakening.

What I think you will enjoy most about this film is the fact that it's got a very consistent tone, which never slips.

Dora is an insensitive, dishonest person and although the film is about the change her personality undergoes, the film never becomes sappy or sentimental.

Of course the reason why Central Station is such an engaging film is because it's held together by a tour de force performance by Fernanda Montenegro, the Brazilian actress who plays Dora.

I think you'll agree with me when I say that it's one of those performances that you can never forget because you've probably never seen anything as good.

Also, Vincius de Oliviera, the young actor who plays Josue, he's remarkable and he's so spontaneous, you'll never believe he was a shoe-shine boy who was discovered by the film's director Walter Salles at an airport some years ago.

Now Central Station is one of those rare films that leaves you feeling both happy and sad at the same time. It's got an inherent charm that's very hard to resist.

I'm sure you'll find the film on DVD at any good library that's got a decent selection of foreign films. Rent it this weekend, I promise you'll be smiling to work on Monday morning.