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 multi-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 10-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 adventure, 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 (“The World”) 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’ is like a big fly with its wings folded back . . . `C’ and `D’ are a crescent moon and a half moon . . . `Z’ is always a flash of lighting.”). 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 stunning “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.
”MONDO”
(star) (star) (star)
Directed and written by Tony Gatlif; based on the story by Jean-Marie G. Le Clezio; photographed by Eric Guichard; edited by Nicole D. V. Berckmans; sets designed by Denis Mercier; music direction by Alain Weber; produced by Michele Ray-Gavras. In French, with English subtitles. A Shadow Distribution release; opens Friday at The Music Box Theatre. Running time: 1:33. No MPAA rating. Family.
THE CAST
Mondo …………………….. Ovidiu Balan
The Magician ………………. Philippe Petit
Thi-Chin ………………….. Pierette Fesch
Dadi ……………………… Jerry Smith
Giordan the Fisherman ………. Maurice Maurin
The Magician’s Companion ……. Schahla Aalam
