Tickets

Tickets deals with three different visions on a train journey, following three different stories that in fact interact with each other. The first part of the movie could be quite boring if you consider that there are too many symbols, too many voice-over, and not enough action. But the whole story is well-written and has a real narrative force. The second story is also full of symbols...this old woman seems to carrie a burden...we feel her despair and sadness. The young man who accompanies her, does not say much...but rather show his feeling through his acts...and this will explain his final decision... I especially liked the third story, dealing with the three Scottish Guys and the refugee family...i won't tell too much.

This is a good movie.

Throughout the twentieth century, critics and filmmakers alike have often commented upon the interactive relationship between transit and cinema, interpreting train travel as a visual metaphor which fuses these notions together. In "Tickets", a film which unites three famous 'auteurs' of contemporary cinema- Abbas Kiarostami, Ermanno Olmi and Ken Loach- three narratives of differing cultural sensibilities are intertwined within a single journey aboard a train from Eastern Europe to Rome. Although there are noticeable shifts between the narratives of each of the directors, particularly if you have already seen some of their previous films, the individual signatures of each director create a unique tripartite and structure that breathes life into the complex human interactions experienced whilst on the journey.

It can be said that aesthetically trains provide confined moving spaces, which Einstein would suggest, are only relative to our perceptions. While the relationships between the characters in "Tickets" are often utterly separate, from a lonely professor dreaming of love to three Celtic soccer fans on their way to a Champions League game, by occupying the same social space the characters are intrinsically linked to one another. In this vein, the film adopts a particularly European sentiment that is closely associated with the emergence of the European Union. Yet, to imply that this theme resonates in a dominant manner throughout the film is incorrect. Rather, this an intensely beautiful film bound by a shared ability of the directors to convey the emotional subtleties and internal perceptions of the various characters, all of which are, whilst aboard the same train, ultimately traveling in different directions. For this reason, "Tickets" is a rewarding film that allows you to think outside the exaggerated and distorted realities imposed by many films today. It certainly is worth a ticket!

9/10

Tickets (2005) was directed by Abbas Kiarostami, Ken Loach, and Ermanno Olmi. Olmi and Kiarostami also wrote the screenplay.

Almost the entire film takes place on a train to Rome. Each director presumably directed one of the three short films that make up the movie. There are, indeed, three plots, but the same characters appear in all of the three movies. Sometimes they're protagonists, sometimes you barely glimpse them.

Ken Loach certainly directed the third segment, about three working-class English guys who are on their way to a major football (soccer) event. I couldn't tell which of the other two directors directed which of the other two segments.

The Loach segment will tug at your heartstrings, but I thought the first segment, which was the simplest, worked best. In that segment, a scientist (Carlo Delle Piane) is helped to get home by an employee of the firm for which he consults. The employee, played by Valeria Bruni Tedeschi, is very solicitous. That's her job, and she does it well. However, the scientist daydreams about the young woman throughout the trip. We can see that there's no real basis for his daydreams, but apparently he cannot see this.

It's an interesting concept to have three great directors combining to make one movie. However, for me, it didn't really work. It's not a bad film, but I don't think it's good enough to seek out and view. The movie has an IMDb rating of 7.0, and I agree. I gave it a rating of 7.

And thank God that his segment was last because it rescued what until then had been a dull, pointless film.

If his piece had been set at the start of the train journey, the other two sections would have seemed even more disappointing and excruciating.

I've always admired the way Loach has continued to use cinema as a means of social commentary. I don't always agree with his message particularly when it is surprisingly naive and unfounded (Bread and Roses being a prime example) but his films are always worth seeing.

Thankfully, his piece about a trio of Celtic fans travelling to Rome is the standout in this film in the same way as his contribution had been to 11'09''01 - September 11.

What had gone before it was pretty dire. First of all, there had been the story of a Roy Scheider lookalike Professor and a PR lady who inexplicably has the hots for him.

As he is about to board the train, he says to her that they have never met before even though she was with him earlier and booked the tickets! Maybe there was something going on there that I missed...

The next section involved an incredibly annoying old battle-axe, a General's widow, a man on community service who accompanies her and a whole series of boring, pointless discussions and encounters. One such encounter was between the man and a 14 year old girl he had known several years earlier that made me worry a little about where it was going.

In fact, it didn't lead anywhere at all; it was as tedious and unnecessary as the rest of that story.

Loach's work isn't one of his best but it was good enough to improve something that was pretty dreadful and leave us with a mediocre film that ended on a high note.

I would recommend skipping the first two stories altogether and just watch Loach's instead. Everything that went before it is really not worth the bother.

I knew pretty much nothing about "Tickets" before watching it, except that Ken Loach was involved in it, so I suspected that there was going to be some social issue addressed therein. It turned out to be sort of an anthology movie, with a whole sequence directed by three people (in addition to Loach, Ermanno Olmi and Abbas Kiarostami participated).

The movie takes place aboard a train going from Innsbruck to Rome, and looks at the experiences of some of a professor, an elderly woman, and some sports fans. I could tell that the last one was Loach's work, since it was the most socially conscious.

In the end, I wouldn't call it the greatest output from any of the directors, but it's an interesting enough movie for its runtime. It sure makes one wish that the US had the kind of train system that Europe has (or that Japan has).