Switzerland isn’t exactly known for its film industry, and this, their entry for last year’s Oscars, may explain why. It initially seems to be treading on familiar ground. Vitus is the son of an average couple, an ambitious engineer (Urs Jucker) and his schoolteacher wife (Julika Jenkins). She is identified as British by birth and occasionally breaks into English, though if that has any particular significance to Swiss audiences you’d have to ask them. They are delighted to learn that their young son has an extraordinary IQ and what seems to be a natural talent for the piano. Though they want to raise him as a normal boy (a decision implying that being smart isn’t normal, but let’s overlook that), their well-intended desires to nurture his gifts almost inevitably cause frustrations. By the time he’s 12, Vitus is looking around for a way out of the pressures of their expectations. When he found a way at about the halfway point of this nearly two hour movie, I breathed a sigh of relief: At last the film seemed to be going somewhere. Yet even then, director Fredi M. Murer shows no sure grip of his material. The idea seems to be that Vitus will begin to experience the inevitabilities of life—death, disappointment, ambition, sex—at his own pace. He’s helped along by the one adult his can talk to, played by Bruno Ganz, who is to the Swiss film industry what Donald Sutherland is to the Canadian. Yet Murer throws most of that away on a plot turn that puts Vitus in possession of a huge amount of money, as if that were the answer to all happiness. The actors who play Vitus at ages six and 12 were presumably chosen because, as actual piano prodigies, they didn’t have to fake the musical scenes. But they’re better musicians than actors, keeping Vitus a character we can never quite warm up to.