São Paulo International Film Festival Report - The Year My Parents Went on Vacation review
O Ano em Que Meus Pais Saíram de Férias translates into English as “The Year My Parents Went on Vacation”. This title would perfectly describe what director Cao Hamburger’s second full-length film is all about, if it weren’t a euphemism for “The Year My Parents Went Hiding for Fear of Being Captured, Tortured, and Killed by the Military”. But you try telling that to the kids.
This is one of the few Brazilian movies in this year’s São Paulo International Film Festival that has been meeting almost universal acclaim. There’s something in it that eloquently speaks to peoples' memories of the military dictatorship Brazil had to endure from 1964 to 1985. Since most of the audience lived through the dictatorship, or at least part of it, as kids or adults, O Ano em Que Meus Pais Saíram de Férias certainly struck a nerve. But international audiences will probably be just as pleased with this sad but charming coming of age story.
The year is 1970, and Brazil is in the middle of a brutal military dictatorship, still a long way from its demise. 1970 is also the year Brazil won the World Cup for the third time. And it’s the year young Mauro’s parents go on vacation, leaving him with his grandfather in the neighborhood of Bom Retiro, São Paulo, promising to return just in time to watch the games with him. In a case of awfully bad timing, Mauro’s grandfather has a heart attack and dies just before the kid arrives. Stranded in an apartment building filled with strangers, with no way to contact his parents, Mauro has to learn how to survive on his own. Luckily, he finds a reluctant guardian in an old Jewish bachelor, Shlomo, and makes a lot of friends from Bom Retiro’s colorful Jewish and Italian communities, with whom he’ll eagerly await for the World Cup games and his parents’ return.
Hamburger’s film is basically a lighter, gentler version of Andrés Wood’s Machuca. Both movies, after all, are concerned with the following question: how do kids experience the horrors of a dictatorship? The answer is: mostly indirectly, and not really aware of what’s going on other than a feeling that it's very bad stuff. But instead of Wood’s Gonzalo Infante, with his helpless gaze over Pinochet's atrocities and his parents’ wrecked marriage, we have Hamburger’s Mauro with his enthusiasm for the World Cup, and an unfaltering hope that his parents will return in time for the games. That makes up for a much softer, but still incisive movie.
Mauro’s fixation with soccer and the wish for his parents return are symbolically incompatible, and therein lies the drama of O Ano em Que Meus Pais Saíram de Férias. This is one of those things that may or may not cross over to international audiences, but soccer games, especially during the World Cup, are the circenses to our panis et circenses. Brazilian soccer fanaticism has unfortunately played a very important role in placating political restlessness throughout the country’s history, and 1970’s World Cup victory was milked to death in government propaganda during the following years of the military regime. This is still commonplace in the political discourse of democratic Brazil...it’s not an accident that presidential elections happen in World Cup years. This is why the interweaving of Brazil’s 1970 World Cup campaign with Mauro’s wait for his runaway parents packs quite a punch.
O Ano em Que Meus Pais Saíram de Férias is one of the best movies to come out of Brazil since Cidade de Deus, a movie with which it shares a screenwriter (Bráulio Mantovanni is one of the writers) and editor (Daniel Rezende). It was one of Brazil’s possible nominations for the Oscars this year, but that eventually ended up with Cinema, Aspirinas e Urubus. Certainly not a bad movie, but O Ano em Que Meus Pais Saíram de Férias would probably be a better choice, as far as the Academy's tastes are concerned. International distribution is probably a given, in any case, due to the film’s quality.
For foreign audiences, this is a great opportunity to experience what it was like growing up in São Paulo in the 1970s. Bom Retiro’s roads and architecture, and an exceptional supporting cast playing typical figures from the Jewish and Italian communities of the neighborhood should also make for interesting viewing. The coming of age story, although relatively traditional in storytelling terms, is very well grounded and provides everything you should expect from something of the sort, plus some clever, but subtle, political commentary.
Watch out for this movie.
