Yves here. Regulars may recall that Satyajit Das has written other articles about movies that we have been honored to publish, such as Desperately Seeking Entertainment and New Asian Cinematic Obsessions. Here, he looks at some prominent examples from the genre of leaving childhood behind and what that really amounts to.
Oh, and not surprisingly, he approves of our new Sunday morning movie feature!
By Satyajit Das, a former banker and author of numerous works on derivatives and several general titles: Traders, Guns & Money: Knowns and Unknowns in the Dazzling World of Derivatives (2006 and 2010), Extreme Money: The Masters of the Universe and the Cult of Risk (2011), A Banquet of Consequences RELOADED (2021) and Fortune’s Fool: Australia’s Choices (2022). His latest book is on ecotourism and man’s relationship with wild animals – Wild Quests(2024). Jointly published with the New Indian Express Online
A popular cinematic genre (whatever that means!) is the ‘coming of age’ film. Most are works of cloying sentimentality steeped in nostalgia. Focused on a young person growing to maturity, it traipses through standard dilemmas. Ordeals are overcome. There is awakening, sexual or otherwise. There are archetypes – the rebel or outsider is favoured as conformists are dull and limit dramatic possibilities. The settings are cliques and milieus centred around schools and communities which set out stereotypical social hierarchies.
A few films transcend the strictures of the formula and remain enduring works. Peter Bogdanovich’s 1971 The Last Picture Show and 1973 Paper Moon standout amidst the Hollywood dross.
Based on a Larry McMurty novel, The Last Picture Show shared the sensibility and evocation of America present in Bob Rafelson’s 1970 Five Easy Pieces. Shot in cold black-and-white, it opens with a panning shot from the cinema across a deserted main street while a car drives by. The sound is a car radio playing Hank Williams’ “Why Don’t You Love Me (Like You Used To Do)?”
The film is a bleak portrait of a dying small town and its inhabitants. It is a collage of lives, some beginning and others near the end, all trapped. At the film’s centre is two brother – Sonny (Timothy Bottoms) who bears the burden of looking after the younger disabled Billy (Sam Bottoms). Jacy (Cybil Shepherd) is the pretty, glamorous and spoiled daughter of a rich family in a relationship with Sonny’s best friend Duane (Jeff Bridges). Her overt sexuality combines desire and calculation which worries her frequently drunk mother (Ellen Burstyn) who fears her daughter will get pregnant and marry young ending up in the same rut she’s found herself. Another relationship is the affair between the school coach’s wife Ruth (Cloris Leachman) and Sonny. Echoing the relationship between Anne Bancroft and Dustin Hoffman in The Graduate, it is impulsive and doomed – an older woman seeking a last chance at happiness and a child who uses her to gain sexual experience without understanding or reciprocating the older woman’s feeling.
Studied and deliberate (Bogdanovich was a film historian), it is a merciless examination of hope and how it withers away or is thwarted. The Last Picture Show’s final scene returns to the empty street where the cinema is now abandoned, a farewell to the town and a way of life.
Paper Moon is different. Also filmed in black-and-white (by cinematographer László Kovács), it is about a con man (Ryan O’Neal) and a little girl (O’Neal’s real daughter Tatum), a tomboy who might be his illegitimate child. A period piece set in the Great Depression, it uses generic conventions, including from road movies, to show poverty through the eyes of its characters as they swindle their way through the countryside hawking Bibles. Along the way, they pick up a sideshow tart – the unlikely named Trixie Delight (played with relish by Madeline Kahn). Paper Moon is held together by the performances, especially that of Tatum O’Neal (who became the youngest-ever Oscar winner for her performance) and her transformation into a precocious hustler as she strives to survive in the conditions she finds hereself.
Like The Last Picture Show, Paper Moon is open-ended never reaching a conclusion. In Joe David Brown’s novel on which it was based, the young girl returned to live with her grandmother but the film version has the con-man and the child going off together, allegedly because the scriptwriter had never finished the book.
Bogdanovich’s two films have a touch of the maudlin. The other choices are arid, eschewing Hollywood tropes for cinema verite.
The 1959 400 Blows (Les quatre cents coups), considered by many as one of the best films ever made, was the directorial debut of François Truffaut. It follows Antoine Doinel, a rebellious young boy in Paris prone to skipping school, explaining his absences with lies about his mother’s death, and stealing. Handed over to the police by his stepfather, Doinel is placed in an observation centre for troubled youths. It is an unflinching observation of adolescence. Truffaut wold later observe: “I demand that a film express either the joy of making cinema or the agony of making cinema.”
The film has a honest simplicity, perhaps reflecting its semi-autobiographical elements. The director once stated that films saved his life. It is sparse with every scene pared down to ensure that nothing is for pure effect. There are moments of humour. The best is a sequence showing their physical education teacher leading the boys on a jog through Paris as the children peel off until the teacher is at the head of a line leading one or two who remain. The film’s ending is memorable. Antoine escapes under a fence and runs away to the ocean, which he has always wanted to see. He wades into the water. The final shot is a freeze-frame of Antoine, zooming in on his face as he looks directly into the camera.
Bogdanovich found it difficult to reach the heights of The Last Picture Show and Paper Moon or his screwball 1972 comedy What’s Up Doc. Truffaut, who would die at 52 of a brain tumour, returned repeatedly to the world of youth and the classroom include several other, albeit less successful, films about Antoine Doinel.
Directed by Amil Naderi, The Runner is an Iranian film released in 1984 before the country’s filmmakers became fashionable in the West. Based on the director’s own childhood like 400 Blows, it compares favourably to Vittoria De Sica’s Shoeshine and The Bicycle Thief and Luis Buñuel’s Los Olvidados. Like those works, it is grounded in realism and explores themes of poverty, disparities in wealth and opportunities, youthful innocence and naivete.
The central character Amiro (played by Madjid Niroumand with ferocious energy) is an illiterate 11-year-old orphan living alone in an abandoned tanker in the Iranian port city of Abadan. He scrapes a living working odd jobs – diving for deposit bottles (until the appearance of sharks frightens him), shining shoes, and selling iced water. Bullied by older boys and adults, he struggles to better himself and enrols himself in a school to learn to read.
The Runner is the most impressionistic of the five films. Episodic in nature, there are no backstories, explanations or even a conventional narrative. The film is torrent of fragments : the boy’s day-to-day survival at society’s margins, his friends, and encounters with foreigners. The defining image is of a race between the street kids on a rail track. The children push each other trying to be first to a block of ice which serves as the finish line. Amiro wins and rubs his burning face with cool water from the melting ice. He then shares it with his friends.
The film opens with Amiro shouting at tankers far out in the Gulf. The film concludes with Amiro framed by an airplane taking off. The motif of ships and planes runs through the film speaking to his thirst to leave behind his limited life. It is metaphor for all these children trying to escape their conditions.
Naderi and his cinematographer Firooz Malekzadeh’s used a stunning palette of colours and unusual camera work to create a distinctive visual vocabulary. It is complemented by a rough sound track, filled with the noise of streets and industrial machinery. The incandescent images remain with you long after the film.
Pixote: A Lei do Mais Fraco (Pixote: The Law of the Weakest) is a difficult film to watch. The director Héctor Babenco, who would go on to win fame for films like The Kiss of the Spiderwoman, created a frightening portrait of life in Brazil’s favelas and streets. It is a territory that City of God would revisit but without the same brutal power. Many including film critic Roger Ebert consider it to be Babenco’s most outstanding work.
Shot like a documentary, it used amateur actors whose real lives resembled those of the film’s protagonists. The central character Pixote (played by the illiterate 11-year-old Fernando Ramos da Silva) escapes a nightmarish reformatory only to drift into a life of crime. The story follows a makeshift group of criminals, prostitutes, and their clients who form floating alliances founded in violence, fear and need. The currency of this world is drugs and sex. Without homes and money, they turn to crime, the only means open to them to survive.
The film’s violence and graphic scenes are confronting. In part, this is because the individuals are not sophisticated or intelligent. The killings, one a mistake when an American client fights back because he does not understand Portuguese, are thoughtless. The children have no understanding or control over situations. Pixote’s glazed eyes don’t even seem to register the import of one killing and show no emotion. Hours later, watching TV, he suddenly vomits.
Other scenes are confronting. The old prostitute Sueli is shown after performing an abortion on herself disposing of the foetus explaining everything in detail to Pixote. There is another in which she has intercourse with an underage boy, while Pixote lies in bed next to them watching TV. The depiction of children who only vaguely understand sex but are used to its sights without comprehension is powerful. Towards the end, Pixote turns to suck at Sueli’s breast for comfort, hungry for any affection, but she pushes him away in disgust.
The film has a tragic coda. Da Silva returned to the streets and was shot dead by police in 1987. Pixote is a unforgiving portrait of lives no human being should have to lead.
Most of our childhoods are modestly pleasant. Problems are imagined or exaggerated. These five films, especially the last three, testify to the fact that not everyone is lucky enough to enjoy that privilege.
© 2025 Satyajit Das All Rights Reserved
