Two years ago I saw twice a Brazilian movie: "The Year my Parents Went on Vacation" (O anho em que meu paes sairam do ferias). It has all the ingredients to make it compelling to me: the narrator is a kid that right now must be exactly my same age; the story is set in 1970; the immediate context is the final rounds of the Football World Cup, which is the very first one that I saw, the same one that had been enshrined as the pinnacle of not just football history but of the history of humankind! An exaggeration you say? Then you don’t know us, soccer-mad patients. Worse. You haven’t been reached by the saving gospel of football.
Beauty of football aside (and it’s not soccer, mind you: its real name is football!), a yet another more powerful reason recently drove me to see it for the third time.
"The Year my Parents Went on Vacation" is set in the days of brutal military dictatorship in Brazil. It tells the story of a young couple that had to go into hiding but, not to disturb their kid, they took him to Sao Paulo, to his grandad's, telling him that they were taking a short vacation as a couple. Before saying goodbye in a hurry because the Army is looking for them, dad promised the kid to be back in time to watch the final game together. The whole movie is about this kid waiting for his dad to come back. In the meantime, and among the many things that happen, the kid remembers that his mom used to tease dad saying that whereas grandad is never late, dad is never on time. At the end of the movie, while the Brazilian squad pulverizes Italy 4-1, the kid learns that his mom has come back and is waiting for him at his grandad's. But only mom has managed to reach home. The kid doesn't understand why she is so weak and can barely move. It's up to the spectators to connect the dots to realize that dad didn't survive the tortures. At the end, the kid says that that very same year "we went to another country and became refugees, although I don't even know what is that. Perhaps being a refugee means having a dad that is never on time... or perhaps one that will never show up."
You can see why this movie hit me.
Absences, mostly if they go unexplained, have this ability to make a loved one’s presence more palpable, even tangible. A soccer ball aimlessly kicked around by a desperate kid in a Jewish quarter in Sao Paulo was a constant reminder of the painful vacuum that was left by a father who couldn’t make it to the finals. A father’s absence drills a bottomless hole in the deepest layers of his kid’s soul. This is a black hole that will never cease to suck in every ray of light for the rest of this kid’s life.
You can see why this movie still hits me.
