‘Moishele’ and his grandfather form bonds in The Year My Parents Went on Vacation.
August 21, 2008
[Editor’s note: What are the odds that two movies focusing on bar mitzva-age boys, the local Jewish community, and soccer’s World Cup would be released within a short span of each other? In addition to the British-based Sixty Six, we move to the other side of the world (and four years later) for The Year My Parents Went on Vacation, set in a predominantly Jewish section of Sao Paulo, Brazil.]
For a North American audience, The Year My Parents Went on Vacation — at once Brazilian and Jewish — has to be a curiosity. Think of bearded Orthodox men jumping for joy in front of a television, tzitzit aflutter, as Brazil’s soccer team triumphs.
I found myself pondering what makes a “Jewish film.” It’s obvious when it considers Judaism, or Jews as Jews. At other times, it’s when the characters are identifiable as Jews — even if only tangentially so.
The latter is true for this movie, Jewish less incidentally than an episode of Seinfeld and certainly not as mockingly as might be portrayed in a Woody Allen oeuvre.
Perhaps Parents should be described as a “half-Jewish” film, in keeping with the half-Jewish parentage of 12-year-old Mauro, the central character — portrayed by a young actor from Sao Paulo who, like the child he portrays (and like director Cao Hamburger), has a Jewish father and a non-Jewish mother. Two of the other starring roles are Jews — Mauro’s friend, 11-year-old Hanna, and Shlomo, the elderly man who looks after him — both played by Brazilian-Jewish actors.
The film is set in 1970, during Brazil’s right-wing military dictatorship. This is also the year of Brazil’s third world soccer championship, an event that figures prominently in the plot. Daniel and Bia, Mauro’s parents, known vaguely as “leftists,” suddenly have to go into hiding. Daniel calls his father, Motel, and peremptorily says they’re leaving the child with him. The cover story given to Mauro is that they are going on vacation and will be back in time for the World Cup finals.
Daniel and Motel are so estranged that the parents don’t even wait for him to greet them; they deposit Mauro in front of the apartment building as they speed off in their Volkswagen Beetle. We later learn, under somewhat humorous circumstances, that Mauro is uncircumcised (“He’s a goy,” Shlomo says in consternation), an issue that undoubtedly has something to do with Daniel and Motel’s animosity. In fact, the strain of this sudden call from Daniel almost immediately afflicts Motel with a fatal heart attack.
Shlomo, Motel’s next-door neighbor, at first has no idea of how to care for an adolescent. (One wonders if the filmmaker should have revealed why he is alone and so clueless about children, but this might also have cluttered the plot with an unnecessary tangent.) Still, his religiously informed sense of moral obligation combines with a menshlichkeit capacity to grow and form a bond with the little “goy,” whom he calls “Moishele.”
Mauro’s friendship with Hanna is likewise memorable for its authentic feel. Their mutual affection is conveyed casually, without any display of adolescent sexuality.
The adult Jewish characters speak at least as much Yiddish as Portuguese and live comfortably and unself-consciously Jewish lives within their Brazilian and multi-ethnic surroundings. The way in which the Jewish characters, along with some good-natured non-Jews, care for this abandoned child, provides this film with a warmth that is mercifully just this side of shmaltzy, and that is but one of numerous elements that make it a delight.
The film is available on DVD from City Lights Home Video.
Ralph Seliger is editor of Israel Horizons, the publication of Meretz USA and its Web log, Meretzusa.blogspot.com.
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