'Fugitive Pieces'

Rating:

Hopscotching time on film is never an easy task, but Canadian writer-director Jeremy Podeswa handles it with skill and care in his lovely, absorbing adaptation of Anne Michaels' lauded novel about a circumspect writer haunted by his traumatic youth.

Podeswa shifts and crisscrosses between parallel paths to tell this affecting story. The first is set during World War II after little Jakob Beer (Robbie Kay) escapes from Poland to Greece with a kindly archaeologist named Athos (Rade Sherbedgia) after Nazis kill the boy's parents and abduct his sister.

The second strand, set in Canada during the 1960s and '70s, charts the adult Jakob (Stephen Dillane), still frozen by familial loss, as he searches for true peace and love. It's a tricky structure, but once you adjust to the film's deliberate pace and literary rhythms, there are innumerable visual and emotional pleasures to be had.

FUGITIVE PIECES (R). 1:45. At Lincoln Plaza Cinemas in Manhattan and Kew Gardens Cinema in Queens; coming soon to Huntington's Cinema Arts Centre.