The Year My Parents Went on Vacation
Directed and co-written by Cao Hamburger
Starring Michel Joelsas and Daniela Piepszyk
Classification: NA
The year of The Year My Parents Went on Vacation is 1970. In Sao Paolo. For aficionados of soccer, that's a celebrated annum, when the World Cup was graced, and won, by perhaps the best team in the history of the game – the Brazilian side led by the iconic Pele. For any nation, sport can be an essential diversion, a collective cultural expression as passionate as an opera and potent as any novel. But for a nation under iron rule, that diversion can also be a distraction from the chains that bind. So it was in 1970, and so it is in this quiet little movie.
As in many Brazilian films that wend their way here – Pixote, Central Station, City of God – the protagonist is a young boy, 12-year-old Mauro (Michel Joelsas). This time, though, he hails not from the underclass but the middle. His parents – Jewish father, Catholic mother – possess their own car, and in it they drive him to his grandfather's apartment in Sao Paolo. He thinks they're leaving on an extended “vacation” but, from their sombre looks and wary manner, we know better. The script hints at their political activism, and at the military dictatorship that tolerates no politics but its own. Goodbyes are said, and the tale begins.
Enter a rather clumsy contrivance: Mauro discovers his granddad died mere days ago. This too-convenient tragedy sets the stage for the boy's exile and subsequent journey into his adopted community. Touched by his plight, the Jewish families in the building care for and feed him. But when Mauro turns up his secular nose at gefilte fish for breakfast, that's the film's cue to switch gears and tones. Suddenly – again a bit too abruptly – the background tragedy gives way to foreground comedy, and we're into a light coming-of-age yarn.
So, out in the neighbourhood, the kid experiences its ethnic diversity – Jews, Italians, Greeks, indigenous blacks, freely mingling in the streets and, apparently, always prone to kicking around a soccer ball. He develops a crush on a local waitress, Irene, then falls into puppy love with little Hanna (Daniela Piepszyk), the enterprising girl from down the hall. Enterprising, because she's running a tidy business making horny young boys pay for the chance to peer through a peephole in the change room of her mother's dress shop. Oh, it's light comedy, all right, damn near weightless.
Soon, though, director Cao Hamburger is serving up his own peep show at the edges of the frame, affording us tiny glimpses of the rough political climate – anti-government graffiti sprayed onto walls, whispered chatter in a student union, mounted police riding into a small crowd of demonstrators. But these are just peeks. Mainly, the picture unfolds from Mauro's naive perspective and he, like most everyone in the country, is seized by World Cup fever. The contest has started; the titans are on the march.
The rest of the movie sees Hamburger trying to unite the competing parts of the narrative – the central comedy with the peripheral tragedy, innocence with encroaching experience, sport's power to divert with its capacity to distract. His attempts feel laboured on occasion, and there are moments – like when Mauro is watching the games on a grainy TV, while simultaneously keeping a vigil for his parents out the apartment window – when the film seems as naive as the boy.
But be patient and brace yourself for the climax; the wait is definitely worthwhile. By far the picture's best sequence, it's the one point where, intercutting from the euphoria of the Cup finale to the starkly different mood of Mauro's reunion, Hamburger gets everything to coalesce poignantly. On the public stage, Brazil revels in its day of sporting glory; in private places, Brazilians endure another year of political shame. As the tournament ends, a once-callow fan is obliged to make the hardest of starts – beginning, just beginning, to remove his blinkers and open his eyes.
