Tickets

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.

When I first started watching this movie I was looking for some kind of subtle metaphors but it soon dawned on me that this movie was indeed about people on a train. The interactions between people are like those you can see any day on the street and when in occasion there is a slightly more interesting situation the dialogue becomes stilted and boring. Its not that I don't get how this film is trying to portray the way people interact, it's just that in this film they are very boring. If you want to see and analyse these kinds of relationships you'd be best to actually go out and buy a train ticket and look at the people on the train with you. It is realistic but you wouldn't go to a movie to watch a film about you sitting there watching the 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

I put this on not having a clue what to expect and what a pleasant surprise it was. 1 train trip to Rome, 3 different directors, 3 different stories, and an intertwining passenger cast.

Part 1 - Ermanno Olmi. Part 2 - Abbas Kiarostami. Part 3 - Ken Loach.

1, The way everyone's eyes fixate and follow anyone making a noise on the train really gave me anxiety.

2, I found the second part more interesting. It gets you thinking a bit and had me feel pretty judgmental by the end.

3, This chapter was my favourite. Simple, effective and a good way to end the film.

Seems like Ticket didn't quite turn up to be quite a hell of a ride for me. If a Cinephile wants to see a good Journey film there are better options than this. I was awaiting to see this for a very long time and when i eventually viewed it was a disappointing watch. The settings and the characters are quite believable but the dialogues i mean common we do expect a lot especially when an Kiarostami, Olmi and a Loach is directing a film. There are far superior films than (Tickets) which involves Train Journey's that has been made by film directors and the one film that immediately stuck my mind is Nayak (1966) one just have to look for it.