TREELESS MOUNTAIN ***
Directed by So Yong Kim. Starring Hee Yeon Kim, Song Hee Kim, Soo Ah Lee G cert, lim release, 90 min
UNBURDENED by anything approaching a plot, shot with unexcited languor, this tasteful Korean picture seems to think itself an unsentimental piece of work.

And it is true that its attitude towards childhood is closer to that of realist Iranian cinema than to Disney's live action pictures. Nobody is likely to confuse

Treeless Mountain

with

Freaky Friday

.

The film follows two young sisters as their mother, frayed and uninterested, sends them off to stay with a sharp-tongued alcoholic aunt. Before mum leaves she suggests that she will return when the kids' piggybank is full.

Making money by selling roasted grasshoppers as snacks, the girls quickly realise that if they change their cash into the smallest denominations they will fill the bank more quickly and facilitate the rapid return of their mum. Meanwhile, their aunt, who has neglected to enrol the kids in school, knocks back the rice wine and courts oblivion.

Such exercises stand or fall on the juvenile turns. Sure enough, Hee Yeon Kim and Song Hee Kim deliver the goods. Filmed in tight close-up while they squabble, plot and giggle, the two youngsters, their performances cannily edited in brief takes, offer convincing sketches of innocence straining against unfamiliar hardship. The world around them is pretty beastly, but they remain oblivious behind childhood's protective cocoon.

Is that cocoon a little too efficient? Though the kids have their traumas, their largely untroubled insouciance does seem to play to a view of childhood coloured by, well, sentimentality.

This slight hint of unreality does not, however, overly damage the film's plausibility or its psychological integrity. Treeless Mountainremains a charming if sedate exercise that reminds us of cinema's possibilities.