Tickets is a film
rarely discussed by cineastes. If it is discussed, it is often to compare and
contrast its three celebrated directors. It is therefore more satisfying to
evaluate it as a single movie more than a portmanteau film. This is a movie
that progresses in intensity of purpose from one segment to another as though
it was one director’s idea rather than of three directors and their own teams.
Tickets is a film
that examines how different individuals react with strangers. And interestingly
the film focuses on the varied reactions of Europeans on a single train journey
to Rome as carefully developed by three top-notch filmmakers Ermanno Olmi from Italy,
Abbas Kiarostami from Iran, and Ken Loach from UK. Each director makes the
viewer think about the unusual reactions of the characters under differing
conditions—all three sections carve out delectable perspectives about human
nature. There is a common thread—all three segments underscore the good side of
human beings and are therefore uplifting. Of course, the film can also be perceived
as a political allegory of the new Europe grappling with immigration,
anti-military views, and social inequality. Undeniably, all three directors
have a socialist leaning.
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| The rich scientist about to board a train |
What is most interesting to note is the gradual progression
in the film from the subtle to the obvious, from the world of silence, spare
lines of conversation, predominance of non-verbal communication though glances and/or stares, and discrete
notes classical music (Chopin’s preludes) contrasted to the other extreme decibel level with sounds of raucous
yelling and singing of the Celtic song as in a football stadium, verbal abuse,
without losing the interest of the viewer in the narrative. The reverse
progression would not have worked. Olmi is the master of subtlety, and
naturally begins the film. Loach is the master of the “kitchen-sink” cinema
with Glaswegian humor spat out like machine-gun fire and naturally deals with the
end segment of the film. Kiarostami balances the two opposites—a delightful mix
of some polite conversation between four sets of actors set off against an
obnoxious harridan, once rich and powerful when her husband was alive, some pop
music, providing the progressive transition from Olmi’s quiet cinema to Loach’s
loud cinema.
The film is equally interesting as the film progresses
gradually from the rich to the poor. The Olmi segment introduces us to a
scientist in the pharmaceutical industry, who is rich enough to pay for two
seats instead of one for his additional comfort and privacy. The second section
dealt by Kiarostami deals with a woman holding second class tickets without
reservations but travelling in a first class compartment. The third section deals
with sections of the public who either don’t have money for their tickets or do
not have money to pay the fines for a stolen ticket.
The three sections in the film are consciously or
unconsciously divided into the past, the present and the future as well.
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| The recent past: The public relations official (Valeria Bruni Tadeschi) ensures the scientist has a comfortable journey with a lot of care |
The opening Olmi section allows for the respectable
60-year-old scientist to recall his childhood when he had heard the same Chopin
piece being played by a girl whose face the scientist cannot recall or perhaps
eludes his memory. He is constantly
recalling the attractive public relations lady (Valeria Bruni Tadesschi, sister
of Carla Bruni)) who had taken great pains to ensure he has a comfortable trip
back to Rome. She has noticed him for years, but the scientist has not but is pleased
to note her kindness towards him. Gentle
reveries of the distant past and the recent past are shaken by the present—a
sullen military official who occupies a seat opposite him and an Albanian
family of limited means he can view travelling evidently without reservations
between his coach and the next. Olmi
nudges the viewer to evaluate the present in the context of the past. The final
action of the scientist is unusual but assertive; all his co travellers in the
first class coach (including a rich Indian regal family, a music enthusiast and
a man cutting up news snippets from a daily newspaper) are staring at him,
while the military man hides his face behind his jacket. The importance lies in
the silence and stares that end the segment.
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| The present: The harridan who lacks sympathy |
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| The present: A young man is forced to make a choice |
The middle section from Kiarostami allows for gentle verbal
communication among strangers—some characters are polite even under trying
circumstances, others aggressive and repugnant.
As in the first segment, glances and visual appraisal of strangers are
important –but with a difference, they are longer than in the Olmi segment. But each visual and now increasingly verbal appraisal
is more detailed than in the previous segment. The movie has discretely begun
to change its narrative pace. The
segment encapsulates several vignettes:
a man insisting that a stranger is calling on his cell-phone without his
permission, two men who insist on being seated in their reserved seats occupied
by strangers, a young man conversing with a young girl from his own Italian
town who recalls having played with him years ago, and the harridan who making
the life of young male companion increasingly miserable. The future and the past alluded to in the
segment matter less than the present.
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| The future: Decisions that can make a difference |
The final Loach section is about the future as grappled by
three lower middle class football crazy Glasgow young men. One of the three
well-meaning youngsters seems to have lost his ticket (it is possibly stolen)
and has to pay a heavy fine or face jail in Rome if doesn’t pay up. The jail
term in turn would affect their jobs they hold in Scotland. Another Albanian
immigrant family has possibly stolen the ticket but need it more desperately to
reach their destination as it affects their lives. This segment puts the future
of the two groups in perspective, with and without the tickets.
Tickets is
therefore interesting to appreciate as a well-structured movie made by three
directors with similar attitudes to immigration, wealth, and military/police. Olmi’s
brilliant Golden Palm winner The Tree of
Wooden Clogs (1978), which he wrote, directed, edited and even personally
photographed was also an endearing tale on immigrant farm labourers looking at
the differences between the rich and the poor in rural Italy a century ago. In Tickets, Olmi looks at the same subject
of immigrants from the point of view of the rich, prodding the rich to step out
of dreamy comforting images of the past into the present tribulations of the
poor. In Tickets, as Olmi advances in age, it is Olmi’s son
behind the camera.
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| The military and their lack of empathy towards poor Albanian immigrants |
Kiarostami’s segment in Tickets
recalls his first film The Bread and
Alley (1970) in which a child encounters a hungry dog while carrying fresh
bread in an alley. If one chooses to replace the obnoxious woman in Tickets with the dog in The Bread and Alley, there are several
parallels. The man behind the camera is another talented Iranian, Mahmoud
Kalari, who was the cinematographer for Kiarostami’s Shirin and Gabbeh and
the recent acclaimed Asghar Farhadi films The
Past and A Separation.
The Loach segment in Tickets
is considerably helped by the cinematography of Chris Menges and scriptwriter
Paul Laverty. Laverty’s collaboration with Loach has always raised Loach’s
cinema, just as scriptwriter Piesiewicz collaboration with Kieslowski raised
the quality of the latter’s later works. Viewers who have seen Loach’s movie The Angels’ Share (2012) will note several similarities in Tickets , including two actors common
to the two movies.
A philosopher would have given the film a title such as “The
Train Journey” but the film is instead called Tickets. Money and wealth-related power can be associated with the
purchase of Tickets.
Tickets is a
ticket to evolved entertainment for an attentive and perceptive viewer.
P.S. Olmi’s The Tree of Wooden Clogs and Loach’s The Angels’ Share have been reviewed on this blog earlier.
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