Rather than asking our blockbusters to deliver the nuance we demand of them, perhaps it’s more rewarding to see through a child’s eyes as they navigate their own determined quests.
On the 1959 release of his anti-heroic opus The 400 Blows, François Truffaut reflected that “Morally, the child is like a wolf – outside society.” With so much talk lately of epics and their larger-than-life heroes, I have found myself drawn to the child in the margins. And so Antoine, Truffaut’s twelve-year-old lead, has been on my mind as a kind of anti-Odysseus.
In the vein of Italian neo-realist works like Shoeshine, Truffaut situates his child as both outside adult society, and a victim to it. Antoine is continually ignored, alternately forgotten or disciplined, spoken of and around but never listened to. This exclusion from the adult world drives him to reject home, and through him Truffaut expresses a moral poetry as rich as any Greek or Roman myth.
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In fact, I find there is an entire cinema of little Odysseys out there, its foundations built on neo-realist grounds. Little but by no means small, these films position the journeying child as a kind of moral test of the adult world. Navigating spaces that they are in but not necessarily of, children are acted upon by forces they cannot always comprehend, confronted with an adult world whose cold indifference often holds them at its fringes.
Abbas Kiarostami’s 1987 Where is the Friend’s House? recalls Truffaut from its opening, as a teacher hurls discipline like a blunt object at his pupils. Kiarostami’s agonising close-ups of their smarting faces are politicised, confronting us with our own positions of power. Like Antoine, eight-year-old Ahmad is often thrown against the apathy of adults; when he mistakenly takes a classmate’s workbook home, they seem unable to hear his pleas for help returning it.
But while adults appear deaf to these frequencies, they certainly do speak. Like a Greek chorus, they shape a wider context in the cinema of little Odysseys, over and above the child. “In the adult world,” Gilles Deleuze asserts of neo-realism, “the child is affected by a certain motor helplessness, but one which makes him all the more capable of seeing and hearing”. While (over)hearing with them, the audience is like a child, unable to influence the world on screen. And so as Ahmad journeys, we are given to listen, eavesdropping as his grandfather recounts how, even when Ahmad behaves, he’ll “find an excuse, and give him a beating every other week. So he wouldn’t forget”. Ahmad cannot understand the immense social pressures acting on the adults around him, but bears the weight all the same.
Kiarostami called his film “a poetic, heroic work,” and dramatises Ahmad’s quest with an almost mythic sensibility. When he realises he must travel to Koker, the village over the hill from his town, Ahmad’s climb is figured against a severe pyramid rising towards the horizon, topped by a single tree, zigzagged by arduous paths. Eventually, finding sympathy in an old man with an ailing memory, Ahmad navigates labyrinthian streets, Escher-like in the increasing darkness. Encountering a dog, his terror renders the unseen creature monstrous. Through doorways, windows, and endless stairs, Kiarostami’s richly poetic visuals of textures and absences, of shadow and light, are profoundly attuned to the senses of a child navigating adult spaces.
Mina, the fierce eight-year-old lead of Jafar Panahi’s 1997 The Mirror, is surrounded by the constant swirl of conversation. On buses and streets as she tries to make it home from school alone, the social undercurrent of ’90s Iran is traced through overheard snatches about gender roles, family politics, and even a football game. These adult realities shape terrains where obstacles feel larger and stranger beside the children traversing them.
A child’s perception of the world can be more emotional than literal: Panahi’s Mina must intuit her way home along a route she has never travelled alone, but she’ll “recognise it if you take me there.” Panahi inverts the film midway, tipping the viewer into the same disoriented emotional space as Mina. The young actress suddenly storms off set in the middle of a scene, absconding from the production, which shifts from fiction into apparent documentary.
In Mina’s obstinate confrontation with a film crew she senses is exploiting her, in the sudden break of contract between viewer and script, Panahi posits a moral challenge. Afterwards, now surveilling Mina from afar, his lens makes us complicit in the ways the adult world is using her. Likewise, in films like Kiarostami’s or Truffaut’s, adults who interact with (or ignore) these children become a series of avatars for the viewer, challenging us by way of showcasing our power. It’s no coincidence that Panahi chose such a literal title for his work.
On screen, the alienation of these small leads is the root of this moral challenge, and Theodoros Angelopoulos’ Landscape in The Mist visualises this with brutal grit. His film follows 11-year-old Voula and her five-year-old brother Alexandros as they run away from their mother in Greece, trying to reach an absent and unknown father they believe is in Germany. Hopping trains, walking desolate highways, accepting rides, in their vulnerability they encounter both kindness and brutal violence. Here is not the Greece of Homer; far removed in time and place, Angelopoulos explores a mainland where romantic notions of past glory feel very distant. His is a Greece alternately desolate, cold, industrial, and muddy, the edges and backroads of a society in decline.
And yet, it still strikes me as a poetic world. Shots unfold like Homeric similes – long, extended takes unpacking layers of meaning. For Deleuze, “the frightened child faced with danger cannot run away, but the world sets about running away for him and takes him with it”. Action often seems to happen around the children, bound tightly together in a fiction erected as a barrier to the ‘real’ of the adult world. More than once we encounter grown-ups seemingly frozen, as Voula and Alexandros run through their statue-like stillness undisturbed.
But there is not only misery and impotence in little Odysseys. Wim Wenders makes plain, in his lyrical 1974 work Alice in the Cities, how the world unfolds for a child when an adult centres them. The film lightly sends young Alice across great distances when she accidentally lands in the care of Philip, a stranger, ultimately searching for her grandmother across the Netherlands and Germany. Like Mina, Alice is lost; asked where her grandmother lives, she admits: “l don’t know exactly, but l’ll find it when we get there”. Kiarostami compared children to “sages we read about in books,” and Philip quickly grants Alice a kind of mystical authority over their travels. Her caprices and whims lead them through foggy but recollections of place and memory. And although Alice seems hesitant to complete her journey, where an arrival would mean confrontation with her mother’s neglect, the world seems largely friendly.
These filmmakers resist the temptation to ‘get on the level’ of the child. Framed against their settings, space and scale render their quandaries grand. Alice in the Cities closes with Alice and Philip on a train, as Wenders pulls out from a close-up into an aerial view, positioning them both as determinedly fixed objects against a world making way for them.
The fact that we have seen fewer films in this vein in recent years is perhaps reflective of the ways that societies have made space for children away from the margins, and how the perspective of filmmakers has shifted. Works like Mike Mills’ C’mon C’mon may share sensibilities with Alice in the Cities, but Joaquin Phoenix centres his nephew in a way that feels natural to the world of the film. Likewise, while films like Sophy Romvari’s Blue Heron or Annie Baker’s Janet Planet reckon with the shape of adult spaces, they are more focused on the intimacy of family and community dynamics. But across these earlier films, the child’s Odyssey becomes a means of measuring the specific world that bounds them. Their movement through the margins of adult spaces exposes their moral shape, monstrous or kind, and pushes at the walls of the world outside the screen.
