The Year My Parents Went on Vacation: A Delightful Little Movie review
The Year My Parents Went on Vacation is a delightful, little movie with a terrifying backdrop. Using child protagonists to tackle serious socio-political subjects have been a popular tool with filmmakers, and we have seen it done brilliantly in Vittorio de Sica's The Bicycle Thief and numeous films since then the world over. This film with a long title does the same, to take up the subject of the underground Communist movement that had taken roots in Brazil in the 1970s to overthrow the dictatorship. But what director Cao Hamburger does is that he very cleverly mixes his political drama with the Brazilians' passion for football, and it being the year 1970, what better than to juxtapose it with the Pele-led Brazilian team's quest for the third straight World Cup win.
The film begins with little Mauro finding that his parents are suddenly going on a year-long vacation, leaving him with at his grandfather's house in a Jewish locality in Sao Paulo. What he does not know is that his Communist parents are actually going underground to save themselves from being persecuted by the regime. And his parents are not aware that his grandfather has died, but since they leave him there, he is forced to live with an old neighbour of his grandfather who does not seem to like kids too much. A lonely Mauro's only escape from this forced partition from parents is the World Cup and his friendship with Hannah, a little girl of his age.
The film has quite a few heart-tugging moments, and succeeds in showing how often spectacles like big sporting events are successful in making serious issues relating to the society recede to the background. The brutalities of the dictatorship and the losses people suffered at a personal level were all thrown to the background as Pele led the Brazil team to its most famous World Cup victory. This film, released in a few cities by NDTV Lumiere recently, is a tribute to the capacity of ordinary citizens to forget their sufferings through celebrations of a nation's success, even though the nation itself might not have much to offer to them.
It is a film that will make you smile through its mostly lighthearted treatment, but if you scratch beneath the surface, you will also be able to get a deeper meaning about life from it. There is nothing unpredictable in this drama, but then, it is the sort of film that stays with you for quite some time after you have left the theatre.
Comments( 3 )
Watched it like a year ago or so. A
Watched it like a year ago or so. A wonderful film
Excellent point regarding the use of
Excellent point regarding the use of children in movies, Utpal.
While it is brilliantly effective, I'm a bit torn - is it taking the easy way out? A child will always draw more emotion from the audience. So the movie immediately becomes more charged. Are filmmakers using kids as an easy way out instead of figuring out a way to tell the same story with adults?
My gut answer is no - the filmmaker probably think about the most effective way to get the message across and in some instances, the poignancy and whimsy are best communicated through the eyes of a child.
Thanks for making me think about it.
@Shripriya: I agree with you about the
@Shripriya: I agree with you about the emotional chord that a child can develop with the audience, thus helping the director to make a strong bond with his viewer. But I also think looking at things from the children's point of view - or at least the way the director makes us see things from a child's point of view - makes one look at things from an absolutely clean slate, and with innocence. We are sure as children we all looked at things with the same innocence, and when we grew up we realised the gravity of many situations that we saw as children, but finally it is a child's imaginative - and imaginary - world that is the most beautiful. I think that is why filmmakers have been using children to draw a world full of innocence that we would like to see, at the same time contrasting it with the grown-up view (like in this film, and also in Life Is Beautiful) of the same child to bring us back to reality of life.