When it comes to art, childhood is often more fondly remembered than it was perhaps actually lived through. There’s a nostalgia and cloying sentimentality that creeps into works that skirt so close to the cliches of innocence, wonder and the loss of these as seen years later through often jaded adult eyes.
The history of the movies is littered with all kinds of portraits of childhood ranging from the sickly sweet to the gut-wrenchingly depressing and everything in between. Though there are countless examples of talented young directors making their debuts with films inspired by their not-so-far-off childhood, there are also many made by filmmakers looking back from later in their lives and further away from their childhoods.
These three films, each by a master of global cinema, offer distinct perspectives on childhood. All serving as films about youth in all its complicated messiness, that don’t shrink from mixing reflections tinged by adult regret and nostalgia with the many playful delights and imaginative fancy that childhood offers.
THE ARTHOUSE ESSENTIAL
Fanny and Alexander — YouTube
Swedish cinema’s master of hard, philosophical angst and religious uncertainty, Ingmar Bergman was in his sixties when he turned to his childhood for the inspiration of this unusually upbeat and celebratory epic about two eponymous siblings growing up in a large family in early 20th century Uppsala.
Best seen in its original form of a five-hour miniseries made for Swedish television but no less sumptuous and emotionally engaging in its shorter three-hour cinema release version, the film was originally intended by Bergman as a semi-autobiographical reflection based on his own childhood and meant to be his final film before retiring as a director.
Though he never personally directed another feature film before his death in 2007, several projects written by the metaphysical maestro were brought to screen under the direction of others after Fanny and Alexander, and Bergman directed several TV projects. His brilliant, warm and enchanting final curtain call earned four Oscars in 1983 including for Best Foreign Language Film and Best Cinematography for the director’s longtime collaborator Sven Nykvist.
Filled with a wonder and uncertainty that reflects the spirit of its child protagonists and memorable for a number of visually impressive set pieces, the film also, in more typical Bergman fashion, layers a number of profound and anxiety ridden reflections on the nature of life, the inevitability of death and the rocky emotional terrain of domestic relations that ensure that beneath its glowing, warm exterior, lies a decidedly chillier interior.
THE STONE-COLD CLASSIC
I Was Born, But... — YouTube
Japanese legend Yasujirō Ozu was in his late twenties when he made this late-silent era comedy about two young brothers who experience their first flash of childhood disappointment after witnessing their father kowtowing to his boss in Tokyo.
Set over the course of two eventful days and featuring an unforgettable series of gently funny scenes in which the brothers and the neighbourhood children do some of the darndest things, it’s a quiet but effectively moving film that hides a sad truth underneath its freewheeling, warm-hearted shell.
The pressures their father faces in the cut-throat adult world of business remain uncomfortably stuck in the craws of the brothers, even as they try to ignore them by getting up to no good with their gang. Elegantly executed, charmingly acted, with a strong sense of place and time, it’s a film that’s stood the test of time as one of the best-ever made about childhood and one that’s inspired generations of filmmakers following in the remarkably adept footsteps of its then 20-something director, who went on to ever greater heights in the world of post-war Japanese sound-era cinema.
THE DIAMOND IN THE ROUGH
Los Olvidados — YouTube
Surrealist pioneer and biting satirical dissector of the hypocrisies of the bourgeoisie, Spanish director Luis Buñuel turned to social realism for his 1950 classic about childhood poverty on the streets of Mexico City.
Winner of the Palme D’Or at the 1951 Cannes Film Festival, the film tells the tragic story of destitute children hustling to survive in a Mexico City slum. Disdainful of the lack of poetry in the neorealist cinema that was sweeping across Italy at the time, though cognisant of the similarities its social realist, big-issue focus gave to those films, Buñuel consciously inserted surreal elements into his tale that are visually inventive and remain memorable.
It also, in true, bitterly unflinching Buñuel style, avoids the cloying sentimental idea of nobility in poverty that tinges so many melodramas dealing with similar subjects. In Buñuel’s bleak vision, the childhood characters have become even more ruthless than many adults by virtue of their circumstances and while one may try to understand, it’s not always easy to just forgive because they’re children.
Heavily criticised at the time by Mexican writers and audiences for its overbearing bleakness and unflattering portrayal of Mexican society, the film has since gone on to be celebrated as a masterwork and one that’s influenced countless similar films over the decades from Pixote to City of God.
