Brazilian 'Vacation' kicks around political and personal upheaval
There's a great movie to be made about life during Brazil's vast political unrest in the late 1960s, '70s, and '80s - the chaos, the ideology, the dictatorship. Cao Hamburger's "The Year My Parents Went on Vacation" is the cute version. The film is set in 1970, and most of it is seen through the eyes of a 12-year-old named Mauro (Michel Joelsas). The point of view is limited. Hamburger is only slightly more inquisitive than his little protagonist. So when it comes to why the boy has been anxiously dropped off in a Jewish enclave near Sao Paulo at his grandfather's, the story is egregiously short on historical specifics and long on rabid enthusiasm for that year's World Cup, which, since Pelé was playing, was a great one for Brazil's team.
We can glean a lot for ourselves. Mauro's lefty parents are fleeing state persecutors. His father and his barber grandfather are estranged. Mauro doesn't know the old man or his religion at all, and there's not much time to bond, since grandpa promptly drops dead while giving someone a shave. Mauro's parents insist they're taking a little summer holiday. Until they come back custody falls to the grandfather's neighbor Shlomo (Germano Haiut), who doesn't appear to know what to do with his charge.
The vacation business epitomizes this movie's euphemistic spirit. It's gentle and conscientious to the point of seeming willfully naive, surrounding Mauro in a strange new world whose realities are infrequently brought to bear on him. Part of this is that Joelsas has an adorable, open face, but it doesn't seem to register much. Anna Muylaert, who plays a neighbor who befriends Mauro, is much more interesting to watch. Hamburger wrote the film along with three other people, and he can never quite rouse adventure from the story. Youthful ignorance operates like a force field. Political movies about kids in fraught political environments are admittedly tricky balancing acts. A filmmaker's wisdom has to jar a child's innocence without triggering trauma. How do you capture what children feel and perceive while invoking a broader, more vivid social or historical context for those perceptions to affix themselves, for the kids to have a sense of how the world works?
For us in the movie theater, it's a magical feat. Latin filmmakers seem to be especially deft at pulling a rabbit out of that hat - Victor Erice's "The Spirit of the Beehive," Alfonso Cuarón's "Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban," Lucrecia Martel's "The Holy Girl," Guillermo Del Toro's "Pan's Labyrinth," and Julie Costa-Gavras's "Blame It on Fidel" are the cream of that crop. Those are films by disillusionists. Life is dark there, and its shadow creeps across their children's faces - but without ever seeming overbearing. "The Year My Parents Went on Vacation," is underbearing. It's too protective of Mauro to encourage him to ask many big questions and or even a lot of little ones.
Hamburger really understands some of the finer points of childhood - the way kids fixate on deadlines and wish for them to be met; the obsessive hope that seizes them while, say, they stand in the window and wait, the way Mauro does here. But to a large extent, his soccer mania is the movie's. It really only comes alive in its shots of people in the neighborhood sitting around their television sets. What we're really talking about here is a problem in scope. In Hamburger's film, the world is no bigger than a cup.
Wesley Morris can be reached wmorris@globe.com. For more on movies, go to boston.com/ae/movies/blog. 