Children in film: two tragic masterpieces

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Children in film: two tragic masterpieces

Many films portray children who perform brilliantly as innocent victims traumatized in an evil world: The Children Are Watching Us, The Bicycle Thief, The Rocking-Horse Winner, The Fallen Idol, The 400 Blows and The Go-Between.  Two other films are based on novels by Henry James, who never had children but acquired an uncanny perception of their behaviour and feelings: The Innocents (from The Turn of the Screw) and What Maisie Knew.

The two greatest but little-known films in this genre are the Swedish My Life as a Dog (1985, directed in colour by Lasse Hallström) and the Italian The Stolen Children (1992, directed in black and white by Gianni Amelio), which follows the neo-realistic tradition of De Sica.  The Swedish boy has an excitable southern, rather than a repressed northern, temperament.

The tragedy of disease, deception and death in My Life as a Dog is lightened by odd characters and dark humour.  The film opens when the rather wild but charming 12-year-old Ingemar remembers tumbling at a lakeside beach to amuse his healthy mother.  The two brothers have an absent father, a sailor in the tropics who ships bananas to Sweden.

In a voice-over Ingemar tries to comfort himself by recalling comically horrific examples of current tragedies and concluding that things could always be worse.  A crisis occurs when their mother contracts tuberculosis.  The older brother Erik threatens Ingemar and shoots people with his air rifle.  Ingemar develops a number of quirks to express his fears and misery.  He wets his bed and hides the sheets, which his mother discovers; deliberately shakes his hand and spills his milk; and lights an out-of-control fire in a rubbish dump.  As Erik explains the facts of life, Ingemar gets his penis stuck in the neck of a bottle.  His mother asks why he behaves this way and he wittily replies, “menopause”.

Their mother, who can’t control her feral boys, defensively withdraws into her bed, books and illness.  To allow her to rest and recover, the brothers are taken in by a male social worker.  But his wife can’t stand Ingemar’s bizarre table manners and weird behaviour, concludes “he’s completely nuts” and sends them away.

Separated from his beloved dog Sickan, Ingemar longs to be reunited with her and constantly asks about her.  But no one will tell him that she’s been put down and he will never see her again. He also identifies with the Russian dog Laika, who was shot into space with the Sputnik and left to starve in orbit.  Assuming a canine role, he gets down on all fours and barks like a dog to attract attention.

Ingemar is then sent to spend the summer with his childish, oddball Uncle Gunnar—a grown-up version  of himself—in rural southern Sweden.  The uncle shows him photos of himself in Rio de Janeiro when he was also, like Ingemar’s father, a young sailor.  He foolishly tries to build a never-to-be-finished summer house, in the garden but on another man’s lot, which echoes his neighbour who never finishes pounding the shingles on his roof.  Similarly obsessed, the uncle keeps loudly playing his only record over and over again, “I’ve got a lovely bunch of coconuts”.  This drives his wife mad, but he ignores her pleas to stop.

A dying old man sleeps in the lower floor of the uncle’s house.  He secretly arouses himself by poring over a catalogue of ladies’ underwear that he hides under his bedcovers.  Ingemar reads to him from the rather tame catalogue, which temporarily revives the old man, and his final pleasure contrasts with the serious books of Ingemar’s dying mother.

He goes back home at the end of summer, but must leave again when his mother is taken by ambulance to a hospital.  When he visits her there for the last time, Erik tells him there’s no hope and she’s going to die.  But Ingemar doesn’t believe him and absurdly buys her a modern toaster for Christmas that she’ll never see.  He returns to his uncle’s house in the winter.  The old man has died and they’ve now rented the lower floor to Greek immigrants.  Since there’s no room for Ingmar, he moves into the house of the old man’s widow and has to sleep right next to her in the dead man’s bed.

The village has many strange characters and events.  Ingemar plays soccer with his uncle as coach and hopeless goalie.  One of the boys has green hair.  A unicyclist rides on a high wire, but falls off and compensates for the accident by reciting the names of all the American presidents.  The man who’s been hammering on the roof swims in an icy wintry river.  An inventor creates a “space ship”, a metal basket imitating Sputnik and carrying a few children, which first hangs suspended on a cable, then crashes into a cow field.

In the local glass factory, where the uncle works, some men make vases with bulging breasts.  Ingemar befriends Berit, a buxom blonde woman who inspired the vases and has all the village men panting after her.  He chaperones her as she poses nude for a sculptor to make sure it’s “completely artistic”, climbs the roof like the hammering man and falls through the skylight while trying to look at the naked Berit.  The voluptuous sculpture, destined for display in a nearby town square, is later rejected as obscene.  When the uncle asks, “what do you talk about with Berit?”, he answers, “love”.

Ingemar also forms a close friendship with Saga, a girl his age who boxes with him and plays soccer with the boys.  She hugs him in the boxing ring, and regrets the development of her breasts, which she shows him.  They try to bind her breasts flat, but they will soon disqualify her from masculine sports.  In addition to Saga, two other adolescent girls are in love with Ingemar and try to seduce him.  In his hometown, a pretty blonde girl undresses in a railroad tunnel and begs him to respond.  A third young girl invites him to her party and to her bedroom.  The jealous Saga follows them upstairs, interrupts their tête-à-tête and physically attacks her rival.  Despite the temptations, the only sex he has is with a bottle.

At the end of the film, in June 1959, Ingemar and Saga listen to the radio broadcast and hear that his namesake Ingemar Johansson has knocked out the American Floyd Patterson and become the heavyweight champion of the world—a  heroic contrast to their childish boxing matches.  Ingemar and Saga then chastely fall asleep in each other’s arms.

Ingemar has lost his mother, his dog and his home, and has been frequently moved around from place to place.  He’s a specialist at coping, but when his mother dies, he’s overwhelmed with guilt and tells his uncle, who tries to comfort him, “She didn’t want me.  Say I didn’t kill her.”

The English title of Gianni Amelio’s film, Stolen Children, suggests children whose lives have been stolen. The Italian title Il Ladro di Bambini ironically suggests they have been physically stolen by a young carabiniere, Antonio.  Permeated with sadness, the film opens grimly in Milan.  A desperately poor and utterly degraded woman has supported herself for the last two years by forcing Rosetta, her 11-year-old daughter, to have physically painful and humiliating sex with adult customers.  Luciano, the sickly, frightened 9-year-old brother, watches as the police raid their flat and arrest his mother and her latest client.

Since the Sicilian-born children have no father, who’s abandoned them and disappeared, they are placed in the custody of two carabinieri.  One of them soon deserts to see his girlfriend, leaving the inexperienced Antonio to escort them by train to a Catholic orphanage in Civitavecchia, near Rome.  To protect his partner, the unusually sensitive Antonio takes full responsibility for the difficult children.  Being alone with them strengthens his connection to the wretched siblings.  He and Rosetta seem distant, but wear the same blue denim jeans and jacket.  The awkward trio then begin their via dolorosa from Milan to Sicily by foot, train, ship, bus and car.

Luciano, passive and sickly with asthma, survives on chips and Cokes.  He says very little but silently expresses his sadness.  Rosetta is aggressive, rebellious and cynical.  They disobey Antonio, wander away from him when he looks for food and physically fight with each other.  More sexually experienced than the adult Antonio, Rosetta asserts her independence by putting on nail polish, boasting about her perfect teeth and ordering him out of the ladies toilet in the railway station when he tries to find her there.  She even seizes power by threatening to accuse him of molesting her.  But when Luciano has an asthma attack and Antonio is panic-stricken, she provides the essential puffer.

When the orphanage refuses to take them, fearing that Rosetta will corrupt the other girls, Antonio unofficially takes them, en route to another institution in Sicily, to his family’s half-built home in Calabria.  He tells his family they are his boss’s children and he’s taking them home to Sicily.  The children discover their first real family by observing Antonio’s warm welcome and the strong emotional ties of his relatives.  His grandmother shows Luciano a childhood photo of Antonio in a Zorro costume.  Luciano identifies with the little boy, keeps the photo and smiles for the first time in the film.

In the family’s restaurant, a little girl dressed as a bride is celebrating her First Communion.  The two girls—virgin and whore—immediately become friends and plait each other’s hair.  But the girl’s mother discovers from a photo in a tabloid newspaper an account of Rosetta’s sordid past and protects her daughter by separating them.  She has no understanding of how severely Rosetta has been damaged by her mother’s cruelty.  She harshly interrogates the child and forces her to confess the truth about her sordid life.  Mistakenly thinking that Antonio has told the mother about her, Rosetta runs out of the house, Antonio follows, and tenderly embraces and comforts her.  She bitterly cries, “Nobody wants me,” and (like the sympathetic Uncle Gunnar with Ingemar) he assures her that it’s not her fault.  Religion provides no comfort when she listens to a nun’s rote teaching of Catholic doctrine in the orphanage or hears the little girl’s recital of faith from her First Communion.

As Antonio, still searching for a refuge, takes the children by ship from the mainland to Sicily, he changes from a stern authority to a paternal guardian.  Other adventures occur along the way, including an idyllic lunch on the beach, where they meet two pretty French girls touring the island.  Antonio teaches the shy Luciano to swim, and he clings to Antonio in the water as Rosetta had clung to him in Calabria.  In front of the cathedral in Noto, in southeast Sicily, a street thief steals a camera held by Rosetta, who’s been asked to take a photo of the French girls.  Antonio chases him and, while flashing his badge, disarms the knife-wielding thief.  They take him to the local carabiniere’s headquarters, where Antonio is questioned and the French girls learn the shameful truth about Rosetta.

Despite capturing the thief without violence, Antonio is accused by his superior of disobeying orders, kidnapping the children and even abusing them.  He surrenders his badge, is released while awaiting a court martial and fears that his career is ruined.  Like the children, he’s also in trouble with the law.  Before reaching the orphanage, all three spend the night in the rented car.  At dawn, while Antonio is still asleep, the children sit on the roadside.  As Rosetta assumes a protective role and puts a jacket around Luciano’s shoulders, they contemplate their sad uncertain future together and alone.

The acting is superb and the story is deeply moving.  Despite Antonio’s parental love and impossible promises to meet them in Milan, the children are again painfully uprooted and doubt if they will ever see him again.  The film brilliantly shows how the gentle Antonio slowly and poignantly bonds with the hostile children who have never before known trust and love.

Sex is portrayed very differently in the two films.  In My Life as a Dog the children’s tentative sexual overtures are treated with gentle humour.  In Stolen Children prostitution has had a devastating psychological effect on Rosetta.  Both Italian children have been victimised and betrayed by their mother, by the state that has failed to provide for their welfare, and by the Church that did not help them.  Finally, Antonio is punished, though he’s the only person who’s truly cared for them and given them a few days of happiness before they are taken away by the state.

The two directors avoided sentimentality and did not tell the non-professional children how to act.  Instead, they drew them out, encouraged their spontaneity and got brilliant performances from the child actors who silently expressed their feelings on their faces.  The directors refused to conclude their films with a comfortable happy ending (no kind family adopts the Italian children), though the victims are better off now than before their rescue.  Both the Swedish boy and the Italian children have suffered.  But Ingemar has a secure future with his uncle.  Rosetta and Luciano, though rescued from the horrors of prostitution, still have to face a traumatic life.

 

Jeffrey Meyers has published biographies of Humphrey Bogart, Gary Cooper, Errol and Sean Flynn, and John Huston, and introduced four paperbacks of Billy Wilder’s screenplays.

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