Tickets

Maltings Cinema
Saturday 17th, 18:30

Ermanno Olmi, Abbas Kiarostami and Ken Loach, three world-famous directors, each direct one segment of this film, which is set entirely on a train travelling from Austria to Italy. Though stylistically and narratively distinct, these segments are woven together to form a coherent and affecting whole. In the first story (directed by Ermanno Olmi), a flight cancellation forces an elderly scientist to take the train home; this inconvenience nevertheless allows him to spend a fleeting moment with a young woman whose kindness and beauty startle him, the memory of their meeting accompanying him along the journey. In the second story (directed by Abbas Kiarostami), a quiet Italian youth boards the train in the company of a cantankerous older lady. He remains oddly docile in the face of her outbursts until a chance encounter with a girl from his home town jolts him out of his passivity. Further down the line (in a segment directed by Ken Loach), three whipped-up Celtic fans struggle to contain their excitement as they near Rome for what will be the Champions League match of a lifetime. When one of their train tickets goes missing, their journey takes on a less jubilant turn.

Setting a film on a train brings obvious narrative and practical constraints, yet the three directors found these liberating, concentrating on isolated encounters to weave a portrait of human interaction that resonates on a much wider level. In Olmi's segment, the elderly scientist's reverie is disturbed by the obvious discomfort of less fortunate passengers, while the attitude of a bullish soldier causes much unease. This hints at two themes that will become central to the film: the persistence of a class system based on exclusion and inequality, and our relationship to authority. The latter pervades Kiarostami's understated, enigmatic segment, while the former is at the heart of Ken Loach's piece. All three stories share a common fascination with the way our minds travel; as different as they are, each of these segments illustrates the metamorphosing power of even the smallest journey and the lasting effects of the briefest casual encounters, their narratives and characters interweaving like passengers on a train.

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