Tickets (2005)

User Rating:

6.9/10   

Directors:

Abbas Kiarostami
Ken Loach

Writers:

Abbas Kiarostami (screenplay)
Paul Laverty (screenplay)

Release Date:

25 March 2005 (Italy)

Genre:

Comedy | Drama

Plot:

A train travels across Italy toward Rome. On board is a professor who daydreams a conversation with a love that never was...

Awards:

1 nomination

Cast

Carlo Delle Piane	...	Professor
Valeria Bruni Tedeschi	...	PR Lady
Silvana De Santis	...	Italian Lady
Filippo Trojano	...	Filippo
Martin Compston	...	Jamesy
Gary Maitland	...	Spaceman
William Ruane	...	Frank
Blerta Cahani	...	Girl
Klajdi Qorraj	...	Boy
Aishe Gjuriqi	...	Mother
Sanije Dedja	...	Grandmother
Kledi Salaj	...	Baby
Edmond Budina	...	Father
Danilo Nigrelli	...	Man With Mobile
Carolina Benvenga	...	Girl

Runtime:

109 min

Country:

Italy | UK

Language:

Italian | English | German | Albanian

Color:

Color

Aspect Ratio:

1.85 : 1

Sound Mix:

Dolby Digital

Certification:

UK:15 | Netherlands:MG6 | South Korea:12 | Finland:K-7 | Australia:MA

Company:

Fandango

Goofs:

Continuity: The form of the text that the Italian pharmacologist is writing on his laptop is inconsistent between the close-up shots and the longer-distance ones: the laptop is a Windows machine, and the longer-distance show the Windows operating system, but the close-ups are of the modern Macintosh operating system.

Soundtrack:

The Celtic Song

One train. Three directors. Three caricatures of train travel in Europe.

An overnight Trenitalia Intercity train from Innsbruck to Rome is the venue for three short stories that happen on the same journey.

(1) An Italian bio-pharma professor returning from a day-long meeting in Austria is unable to use airline tickets to fly back to Rome and instead is forced to return by train. It's night and the train leaves Innsbruck. A scrambled time-line, surreal elements and the most exaggerated caricature.

(2) A young man and a general's wife -- an impertinent woman -- travel in first class with second class tickets. Straight narrative, filled with little episodes, and the most humorous.

(3) Three Scottish lads clad in white-green soccer fan T-shirts en route to Rome to attend a game are faced with the loss of one of their train tickets. Straight narrative and a view on the multi-cultural crosscurrents of Europe. It's daytime and the film closes with the train's arrival at Rome's Termini station.

In the confined and crowded linear space of passenger trains, secondary characters bump into each other and that helps stitch the stories loosely together. Of those, members of an Albanian immigrant family --Roma gypsies? -- play parts in the first and third.

Don't go looking for a strong narrative backbone. Instead take this film for what it really is, a caricature of train travel in Europe. Think in terms of vignettes: examples of the myriad situations that one may observe when travelling by train in the EU. The film is a sampler of those situations, but a concentrated one. Take it is a primer if you have not visited there. Buy your ticket and enjoy the ride.