Kickin’ It Old School | Michel Joelsas is obsessed with the outcome of the 1970 World Cup in The Year My Parents Went on Vacation.
Sometimes movies end up being more story than they are film. By that, I mean that in a director’s efforts to develop believable characters, engaging plot twists, and a meaningful moral, they forget somewhere along the way that film is supposed to be a visual medium. You get the sense that some movies don’t have to be movies—they could be novels, plays, comic books. Thankfully, in The Year My Parents Went on Vacation, director Cao Hamburger doesn’t make that mistake.
It’s 1970 in Brazil. The World Cup looms large in the hearts and minds of Brazil’s people and for Mauro, a young soccer fan played by Michel Joelsas, it completely overshadows the political turmoil that looms large in the hearts and minds of his parents. The left-leaning couple, in a country controlled by a military dictatorship, must leave their child with his grandfather in order to go on an extended forced “vacation” as a result of some undisclosed activism. Unfortunately, before they drive away, Mauro’s parents don’t check to make sure Grandpa is still alive. (He’s not. Oops.) And so Mauro spends the rest of the film waiting for his parents to return.
As far as the story goes, the audience is pretty much stranded like Mauro, but for those who relish visual stimulation, Hamburger paints a lush landscape of muted yellows, blues, and browns, often filmed in the distant reflections of mirrors, puddles, and windows and at slightly awkward angles. Each shot serves as a visual echo of Mauro’s feelings of confusion, longing, and, sometimes, wonder. It is this scenic cinematic framework that holds the movie together when it seems like the film has lost its direction.
Those hushed colours that surround Mauro also draw attention to the boy’s dark brown gaze as he surveys a new world he does not understand—for his parents didn’t just leave him a few blocks away, but in Bom Retiro, a suburb of São Paulo and a predominantly Jewish community. This culture clash provides the film many moments of gentle humour, from the bewilderment of a goy listening to Yiddish for the first time to the frustration of Shlomo, an curmudgeonly Jewish bachelor (Germano Haiut), who is forced into the role of Mauro’s temporary guardian.
It’s sort of a stock middlebrow-arthouse movie situation, but Haiut and Joelsas are both very charming to watch as their characters reluctantly stretch to meet each other halfway across their cultural divide. (Shlomo even goes so far as to watch the World Cup with Mauro... even if it is over top of his newspaper.)
The film is never laugh-out-loud funny, but it does buzz along pleasantly for a couple of hours. My one beef with Hamburger (oh, stop groaning—as if you didn’t know that was coming?) is that he leaves the point of the whole adventure—the moral, the raison d’être, the meaning audiences can “take out” with them—a little underdone. And while good films tend to accomplish one or the other, great films have it both ways.
