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<a href=http://www.boyacts.com/cgi-bin/movie.cgi?ref=954>Mondo (1996)</a> <<-- click
Ovidiu Balan
This is a review of the movie "MONDO" which has expired from its site, so I quote it here....
Monday, June 23, 1997
The whole world in his hands
By LIZ BRAUN
Toronto Sun
" Mondo is the story of a little boy, and as the title suggests, that little boy is a citizen of le monde -- the world.
This film from Tony Gatlif (Latcho Drom) is a magical mystery tour of just how the world looks from the innocent perspective of childhood.
A mostly visual undertaking, Mondo begins with the appearance in Nice of a gypsy boy, aged maybe nine or 10.
Where he comes from is unknown, as are such other pertinent facts as his age, the location of his family, and so forth. Meet Everyman before he gets ruined by life.
Initially, Mondo wanders around Nice observing people and places. In scenes filmed from the child's point of view, there are sequences of swirling adult activity, shots of delicious and unattainable food in the
markets, moments of fear when the police ask why he's not in school.
Mondo quickly connects with several of the locals.
He wanders in and out of their lives -- a fisherman who teaches him to read, a magician who lets him hang about, an old homeless guy who keeps doves in a suitcase, a mystical woman who offers shelter in her home.
He shows up. He touches the lives of those capable of understanding and seeing. He disappears again.
Without much dialogue, Mondo (which is based on a story by French author Jean-Marie Le Clezio) presents what is essentially a forgotten world: That place where children live.
And in showing the freedom of that place, the movie also shows the invisible imprisonment of others -- captured in such scenes as Mondo quietly following a middle-class family around a grocery store.
In keeping with the general spirit of things, filmmaker Gatlif has cast mostly unknowns in the film. Mondo is played by Ovidiu Balan, an exceptionally beautiful Romanian gypsy who was 11 -- and about to be thrown out of France -- when his family met Gatlif.
The dove-loving homeless character is played by Jerry Smith, a homeless Scotsman who lives in Nice; the magician is played by tightrope hero Philippe Petit.
Mondo is put together with beautiful images. The visuals have an innocence and a purity about them that reflect the central character, and despite a few scenes that err on the side of way too fey, this one proves to be a rare treat among current box-office offerings."
(I think this is the first review I have ever seen that refers to a boy actor as "exceptionally beautiful ".)
A second review...
Metromix -- Tribune reviews
MOVIE REVIEW
`Mondo' Gives Us a Gypsy Boy's View of the world. By Michael Wilmington, Tribune Movie Critic.
Originally published Friday, September 12, 1997
" Movies today are so adept at rendering the thin surface of reality - or at realizing vast heavy hardware science fiction extravaganzas -- that it's heartening to see something like Tony Gatlif's "Mondo": a movie where dreams are airy and sweet yet grounded in the visible, tangible world.
"Mondo," Gatlif's first feature since his award-winning "Latcho Drom," is a robust fantasy from an innocent eye. Gatlif is a rare talent and his new film is a wonderful mix of the earthy and the delicate, shot in a gleaming poetic style that transfigures the world it reveals.
As in most of his other movies, Gatlif focuses here on outsiders -- although these outcasts live in a paradise, the French Riviera playground of Nice. His hero is a eleven year-old Gypsy boy named Mondo, who mysteriously appears in Nice's chic streets and changes many of the people who cross his path. As Mondo wanders or races through the streets -- disarmingly asking total strangers to adopt him -- we see him as a figure of spirit and dventure, a magical child.
That description may make "Mondo" sound fey or preachy. But it's actually full of wondrously airy jokes and flights of fancy.
Director Gatlif and original story writer (novelist J.M.G. Le Clezio) share an almost mystical belief in the beauty of the everyday, the unnoticed. They're a couple of urbane mystics, patrons of society's forgotten or scorned. And their film is about all the wonders we usually miss or ignore, but which Mondo sees.
A wistful, dying old tramp with live doves in his suitcase. A solitary fisherman who teaches Mondo the alphabet by inscribing letters on small rocks and giving them whimsical backstories. A self-sufficient old Vietnamese woman who lives in a mansion where the gardens are lined with statues of great French litterateurs.
The boy Mondo is played by 11-year-old Ovidiu Balan, a tousle-headed charmer with a ready smile and gleeful eyes. Some audiences may reject Mondo as a character -- and even Ovidiu as an actor -- because he looks too perfect and adorable, too much an ideal movie child. (An art film Macaulay Culkin?)
But, in fact, Ovidiu is a Gypsy child spotted by Gatlif on the Paris subway -- from a family so poor and illegal that they were deported back to Romania after the movie was made. (Gatlif got special dispensations to keep his actor in the film.) And the world Mondo explores is the real-life Nice -- with the populace mostly played by Nice's actual citizenry. Giordan the fisherman, the gentle angler who teaches Mondo the alphabet, is played by a real Nice fisherman, Maurice Maurin. The postman whom Mondo meets is a real postman (Ange Gobbi). Mondo's special friend, the homeless beggar and tramp Dadi -- with his doves and his sad, resigned smile -- is played by a homeless Scottish ex-fisherman, Jerry Smith -- who settled in Nice over a decade ago and lives under a bridge in a rough part of town. Mondo's nurturer, the Vietnamese woman in the mansion, Thi-Chin, is played by Pierette Fesch, widow of the famous "convict saint" Jacques Fesch.
The only real "name" in the movie is the wiry actor who plays Mondo's pal, the agile magician and tightrope walker. This is Philippe Petit, whose blood-freezing exploits have included crossing between the twin towers of the World Trade Center on a high wire. Petit has great style and presence, but no more so than most of his non-professional colleagues here.
Frenchman Le Clezio, "Mondo's" creator (and longtime resident of Albuquerque), wrote about him in his 1978 collection, "Mondo and Other Stories." For Gatlif, a longtime Le Clezio admirer, the little boy probably symbolizes all the world's outsiders and lost children.
But Gatlif doesn't make Mondo pathetic. The little boy who prowls the streets and sleeps under the stars is free, happily intoxicated with life. Watching Mondo, we can understand why the townspeople (though not the Nice police) grow so used to him.
And we can accept "Mondo" as a fable: a more neo-realistic version of a story like Antoine de St. Exupery's "Little Prince." And though watching it can sometimes break our hearts, it can fill them up as well.
Writer-director Gatlif is known in the U.S. primarily for his 1993 musical epic "Latcho Drom," a stuning "documentary" that retraces the Gypsy migration from India to Europe in soul-stirring landscapes and concerts. But Gatlif, an Algerian Gypsy by birth, also has shown the Romany world in more conventional stories, with the same passion and color: in the moving semi-autobiographical 1983 road movie "Les Princes" and in the lusty "Lajos Biro," a big audience and critical hit at the recent Montreal Film Festival.
Gatlif also has shown himself a master storyteller in the non-Gypsy world: in his 1985 urban film noir, starring Gerard Depardieu, "Rue de Depart."
What all Gatlif's films share is rough poetry and a profound commitment to simple people and the music of forgotten or persecuted lives. In "Mondo," at its best, he takes tears and makes them shimmer, takes sorrow and makes it sing. In real life, a boy like Mondo might suffer or be scarred, even die. In cinema's magic world, we can see him, for a while, as a little prince and laughing godling. "
(Edited by MikeZ at 7:26 pm on April 11, 2003)
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