The year is 1919 and Austria is recovering from the effects of World War I. And young Edmund (David Eberts), who is on the verge of adolescence, is a lonely boy who has been unable to make a single friend in the year he's lived in Vienna.
Edmund lives with his neglectful, workaholic father (John Nettleton), a very proper diplomat, and his doting, overprotective mother Sonya (Faye Dunaway). And he suffers from asthma that is getting progressively worse.
So Mom takes her boy to a sanitarium for treatments, a spa in the mountains, covered with snow and lyrical in its beauty.
There the boy is befriended almost immediately by Baron von Hauenschild (Klaus Maria Brandauer), a war veteran who is wounded in both body and spirit and who is also being treated at the spa, though his ailments are never quite spelled out for us.
The baron is obviously taken with Sonya, but his attention is aimed toward Edmund, who thinks he has found a friend at last. Unfortunately, it becomes painfully obvious before long that the baron is seducing the son to seduce the mother.
And once the baron has Sonya under his spell, Edmund not only feels he has been abandoned, he begins to see the truth and catches his mother in the baron's clutches not once, but twice!
Actually, "Burning Secret," told almost entirely from the boy's point of view, intends to build a solid metaphor for Edmund's loss of the innocence of childhood as he enters young manhood, as the film would have it. And much of the way it succeeds, though it is slow to move and ultimately plays its cards so obviously that the ending is a bit anti-climatic.
But there are really only two serious problems I had with "Burning Secret," though they were problems that lingered in my mind as the film wrapped up: First, it is far too plodding when there are many possibilities for wit and irony, and second, we never learn enough about Brandauer's character to fully understand his motivations. Is he simply a cad or so wounded by his war experiences that his reason is clouded?
To his credit, however, Brandauer does an awful lot with the character, and his unique delivery of simplistic dialogue, his twists of phrases and words that might have been a whole lot less interesting, show what a seasoned actor can do with material that is beneath his talent.
Dunaway is also good, as is young Eberts, but Brandauer is the reason to see the film. He rises above first-timer Andrew Birkin's often heavy-handed direction. Birkin also had the good sense to employ cinematographer Ernest Day ("A Passage to India"), whose work is gorgeous, and Hans Zimmer, whose evocative score is reminiscent of Ennio Morricone's early work.
"Burning Secrets" is rated PG for discreet sex and mild violence.