THE sight of hundreds of film fans shrieking with delight as Ken Loach, Ermanno Olmi and Abbas Kiarostami tottered up the red carpet for the opening of Tickets pricked tears from many a rheumy eye. No wonder these venerable gents love the Berlin Film Festival. Who else would greet three elderly directors like pop stars at 10.30pm in arctic conditions and a wind chill factor of -26C?
Their exotic experiment — to direct a feature film without murdering each other — must have been a nightmare to produce. It’s not exactly easy to discern the point either. “Why not?” is the prevailing vibe.
The three directors bundle three different stories on to an inter-city train in “Central Europe” and set off for Rome. The Fat Controller in charge of the first leg of the journey is the 74-year-old Italian Olmi.
In his crowded first class compartment, a bald, prickly professor (Carlo Delle Piane) sips champagne and fantasises about the mysterious lady from Austria (Valeria Bruni Tedeschi) who gave him his ticket.
There are candle-lit intimacies over restaurant tables and melancholy slices of a young girl playing Chopin. While Piane tries to compose a love letter on his laptop, a sinister army officer loses his temper with an impoverished family of Albanians stuffed into the loo space between their carriage and the next.
Advertisement
The film blinks into Kiarostami’s comedy about a luckless young man (Filippo Trojano) who has to escort an obese middle-aged woman (Silvana De Santis) as part of his National Service. Annoyed by her nagging, and distracted by two flirty adolescent girls, he runs away and hides while his overweight charge lumbers up and down the train in sweaty pursuit.
Loach has the unenviable task of tying up the loose ends with three Glaswegian shelf-stackers on their way to a Champions League football match in Rome. It’s the trip of a lifetime for these teenage Celtic fans until Jamesy (Martin Sweet Sixteen Compston) loses his train ticket and is threatened with arrest on arrival. An ugly suspicion — that it might have been stolen by the Albanian family — hardens the comedy into a tense drama where the boys have to decide whether football is more important than life itself.
Tickets is a deeply uneven film. The stories rudely shunt into each other, rather like the characters. The surprise is that it flows at all despite some very dodgy continuity: different train interiors, times of day, and even a change of direction at one point. But there’s a mutual and seamless interest in the agony and farce of travel, and a terrific emphasis on reflections and faces. In a sense, Tickets was always going to be a more useful exercise for the film-makers than it is for us.
Having to play second or third fiddle on each other’s sets must have been a fascinating and probably quite painful experience for this trio of directors. That they manage to share the same screen space without embarrassment is merit enough. That they’re still talking is frankly miraculous.