Do you remember the late great philosopher-genius Buckminster Fuller, inventor of the geodesic dome? With half-inch-thick lenses eerily magnifying his eyes to triple size, he looked like a kind of benign insect. Once I asked him if his near-blindness had hindered his work. Yes and no, he said: "From childhood, I couldn't see the details, only the large shapes and outlines of the universe -- just the Big Picture."

		'Valentin' Rating: PG-13 in nature for sexual themes. Starring: Rodrigo Noya, Alejandro Agresti, Carmen Maura, Julieta Cardinali. Director: Alejandro Agresti.

"Valentin" -- the film and its title character -- reminds me of Bucky. Cross-eyed Valentin (played by 9-year-old Rodrigo Noya) was abandoned at birth by his mother and largely ignored by his father. Charmingly (and annoyingly) precocious, he lives with his grouchy grandmother (Carmen Maura) in Buenos Aires and sees that hectic urban world through huge glass goggles.

It's 1969. Valentin is obsessed with the Apollo moon walk and yearns to become an astronaut. "You can't be an astronaut -- you have to be an American or a Russian!" some adult tells him.

"Russians are cosmonauts," he corrects.

Adults know so little.

Even more than the stars, Valentin yearns for a family life. Rather than wait passively, he plays Cupid behind his dad's back to advance the maternal candidacy of an enchanting blonde named Leticia (Julieta Cardinali).

Valentin's problematic father is played by Alejandro Agresti, as if he didn't have enough to do: Agresti also is the director and writer of this film, based on a tumultuous year of his own life in the '60s. Considered a leader of the Latin American "New Wave" in film, Agresti proves it in "Valentin." His direction is at once sharp and gentle, whimsical yet deftly realistic in blending the comic with the dramatic.

Above all, he knows how to elicit lovely performances. Maura and Cardinali -- two generations apart -- make nary a false move.

But the brightest screen gem here is our pint-sized star, a shooting one -- straight to your heart. Noya brings fearless energy and conviction to a lonely but unself-pitying child who engages in philosophical challenges and hilarious disputes with his elders while scheming to overcome their dysfunctionality. The TV is broken? He'll try to fix it himself. He'll fail, but he'll sure as hell try. Everybody is too busy fussing with each other to make Granny see a doctor? He'll take her -- and never mind the abuse in store for doing so.

Pathos without bathos characterizes this near-perfect script nine-tenths of the way, and then suddenly, a facile ending detracts from the depth that came before.

Nothing, however, can detract from Noya's natural, magical performance. His guileless little Valentin, like Bucky Fuller, can't make out -- or make sense out of -- mundanities. But his wise grasp of the Big Picture is a revelation to all.