Belle Mondo

Tony Gatlif honors the Gypsy life

by Peter Keough

*** MONDO Written and directed by Tony Gatlif, based on the story by J.M.G. Le Clezio. With Ovidiu Balan, Philippe Petit, Pierrette Fesch, Schahla Aalam, Jerry Smith, Maurice Maurin, and Catherine Brun. Delayed release. Now playing at the Kendall Square, in Cambridge.

There's a fine line between simplicity and sentimentality, and in Tony Gatlif's Mondo it's almost nonexistent. His first film since his lyrical and innovative Latcho Drom, an aural and visual tapestry depicting a thousand years of Gypsy history in less than 90 minutes, Mondo focuses on one Gypsy life, that of the 10-year-old orphan boy of the title (Ovidu Balan). Illiterate, homeless, and, in the treacly words of the press kit, "with an irresistible smile," Mondo wanders the streets and shores of Nice savoring the beauty of nature and humankind and in general brightening the lives of all those he encounters -- policemen and dogcatchers excepted. Based on a story by J.M.G. Le Clezio, Mondo sounds in theory like unmitigated kitsch, a Hallmark version of The Little Prince crossed with Dondi and addled with a confectionary messianic complex.

In practice, though, Mondo's smile is almost irresistible. Partly this is due to the film's minimalism. Superbly photographed impressions and limpidly acted episodes are integrated by a soundtrack ranging from Middle Eastern music to Palestrina. The effect, more often than not, is clarifying rather than cloying, a brief glimpse into a world of innocence and lucidity only occasionally tainted by mawkishness. With little dialogue to disclose its intellectual and dramatic slenderness, Mondo relies on its splendid eye for detail and warm respect for the beauty of the human face.

Played by Ovidu Balan, himself a Romanian Gypsy whom Gatlif rescued from deportation to act in his film, Mondo is first seen through the windows of tony boutiques and fancy restaurants, a big-eyed waif overwhelmed by the gray-clad throngs of the preoccupied city inhabitants, his tiny feet buffeted by the tide of seeming automatons. He smiles at a bourgeois fellow on a park bench reading Flaubert, then asks, "Will you adopt me?" When the man asks him where he's from, Mondo flees in terror, finding refuge in the derelict La Fontana Rosa garden, where he eats a pomegranate, drinks water from a leaf, and falls asleep under the gaze of busts of Balzac, Dickens, and Cervantes. It's a sequence wavering between the pristine and the precious, with an unfortunate voiceover narrative ("How pleasant to sleep that way . . . " and similar rhapsodizing drivel) nudging it over the edge to the latter.

Thus restored, Mondo returns to the city, singling out individuals from the faceless mass and enjoying the kindness of strangers. He enters a supermarket and tags along with a well-fed family pushing a shopping cart, eating a stolen loaf of bread as one of the spoiled children whines for cream cake. Soon he ingratiates himself into the lives of a handful of eccentrics, revitalizing their lives like a miniature of Jean Renoir's Boudu Saved from Drowning. Giordan the Fisherman (Maurice Maurin) tells him about Africa and teaches him the alphabet by inscribing the letters on stones and describing them in phrases that waver between the cute and the profound. ("A is like a big fly with its wings flattened back. B is funny with its two bellies.") Dadi (Jerry Smith) is a grizzled homeless Scot with two pet doves who introduces him to the Magician (Philippe Petit) for whom Mondo serves as assistant. Thi-Chin (Pierrette Fesch) is a mystical Vietnamese Jew in whose garden Mondo takes shelter when ill. Depicted with humble integrity by non-actors from the streets of Nice who actually live the roles they portray, the characters overcome their stick-figure whimsy and spring to life.

Such haiku-like material, however, wears a little thin even over 80 minutes. And though some of Gatlif's images inspire awe and foreboding -- the serpentine monolith of a breakwater ending in the red eye of a lighthouse in particular evokes uneasiness -- most of them wallow overlong in the realm of sweetness and light. The film's emotional range, too, seems limited to what Pauline Kael referred to as the "little child and clean old peasant" school of foreign filmmaking. Beatifying homelessness as freedom, and posing regimented authority as the bad guy, Mondo finds little that is sinister or dark in the life of the streets (a bald guy offering popcorn is the only hint of possible victimization). But given the paucity of genuine portraits of innocence, simplicity, and the sheer joy of living on the screen these days, Mondo is an orphan well worth adopting.