A distração de Ivan
2009 · 17m · Brazil
Directed by Cavi Borges, Gustavo Melo
Genres: coming-of-age, drama
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
In a working-class district of Rio de Janeiro, 11-year-old Ivan lives with his grandmother and drifts between solitary games and the street football of the local boys; when his grandmother destroys the boys' only ball, Ivan is propelled, furiously pedaling his bicycle, into the adult world.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
It's a competent coming-of-age story in the most conventional sense—kid loses ball, kid gets angry, kid goes on a journey—and I respect that the filmmakers had the restraint not to manufacture false catharsis, but there's nothing here that makes me say 'wait, WHAT?' It's too content being melancholic.
The bicycle as both literal and emotional vehicle shows deliberate structural thinking, and the melancholic restraint positions this squarely in the lineage of Brazilian social realism; the tension between Ivan's solitude and the street's collective life is formally considered, even if the execution doesn't quite achieve the precision of its ambitions.
What elevates this is the decision to make the grandmother's destruction of the ball feel neither villainous nor accidental—just the collision of two incompatible worlds—and then to follow Ivan's fury not toward revenge but into a quiet, almost dreamlike pedaling through adult Rio; that tonal pivot on a seventeen-minute budget is where the film becomes something more than its premise.
Reviews
Le duo Borges-Melo a voulu poursuivre l'exploration des quartiers populaires, initiée dans leur documentaire « Vidigal ». Les cinéastes y distillent avec émotion la charge de réalisme dont sont animés les différents personnages.