A stranger in his own land

A neighbor takes a 12-year-old under his wing amid Brazil's political turmoil

By Michael Sragow | Sun Movie Critic

April 11, 2008

(B-) The most original parts of The Year My Parents Went on Vacation vividly juxtapose melting-pot conviviality with political turmoil in 1970 Brazil.

Michel Joelsas plays Mauro, a 12-year-old boy whose activist parents go underground when the military dictatorship cracks down on left-wing dissidents. His mother and father leave him at the doorstep of his Jewish paternal grandfather in Bom Retiro, a polyglot neighborhood in Sao Paolo. But Mauro winds up in the care of his grandpa's neighbor, Shlomo (Germano Haiut), who works in the local synagogue and soon learns it takes a district to raise this child.

With a Gentile mother and a secular father, Mauro hasn't even been circumcised - the movie's funniest moment comes when Shlomo stumbles onto that knowledge and declares the boy "a goy." What fascinates director Cao Hamburger, who also co-wrote the film, is how much knowledge Mauro gleans from European Jewish immigrants - and their Mediterranean and mixed-race neighbors - without fully understanding them. Jewish mores are as foreign to Mauro as their liturgy; even the fish Shlomo has for breakfast puts him off. But before long, he's serving it to a Brazilian-Italian friend of his father's and advising him (as Shlomo said) it's good for the brain.

The movie had the potential to be a Brazilian Hope and Glory - John Boorman's story of growing up in London when the Blitz unleashed new freedoms for kids as well as new terrors and restrictions. Hamburger achieves a similar giddiness when a vivacious tomboy named Hanna (Daniela Piepszyk) lets the neighborhood boys peek, for a price, through peepholes in her mother's dress shop.

But if the film never goes soft - Shlomo earns Mauro's affection with a moving display of righteous courage - it doesn't ignite, either. Hamburger is more cautious than Boorman. He makes Mauro a tough but conventional little guy. Mauro doesn't see the potential in Hanna, whose eyes blaze like black diamonds, and instead falls into hopeless reveries for a beauteous local waitress named Irene (Liliana Castro).

Generally, this writer-director is too sensitive for his own good. He never lets his boy-hero lose himself fully in his new world - or relinquish hope that his parents will return in time to see Brazil become the three-time winner of the World Cup. You want Mauro's hopes and griefs to be deeper and wilder, the way they are for kids even in stable times.

Still, Brazil's race for the Cup brings the film a welcome streak of brio - and there's fun to be had in seeing a Communist torn between rooting for Czechoslovakia and his home team, and a rabbi leave decorum behind as he whoops it up for Pele.

But Hamburger doesn't sentimentalize sport. He simply understands that the heat of athletic competition is what a melting pot sometimes needs to keep bubbling.

>>>The Year My Parents Went on Vacation (City Lights) Starring Michel Joelsas, Daniela Piepszyk. Directed by Cao Hamburger. Unrated. Time 105 minutes. In Portuguese and Yiddish, with English subtitles.

michael.sragow@baltsun.com