Once Upon a Time... This Morning

As its title suggests, the film fuses the narrative dynamics of a fairy tale with an urgent social topicality: Vladimir Propp meets Ken Loach. A middle-class couple are separating and the three kids (the youngest still a babe in arms) are to stay with their bossy and resentful mother. Missing their beloved father, the kids run away to look for him - unaware that the baby's carry-cot contains a bag of pure heroin hidden by a street-kid during a police raid. Soon everyone is looking for the children: the distraught parents, the police, and the street-kids who courier drugs for bigger boys and face heavy reprisals if they don't retrieve the lost stash. The film works admirably as a 'family-in-peril' thriller - that is, an updated fairy tale - but it's equally smart as an evocation of middle-class kids getting an education in Thai street-level realities. (T.R.)