The Last Picture Show and four other unforgettable ‘coming-of-age’ films

Directed by Amil Naderi, The Runner is an Iranian film released in 1984 before the country’s filmmakers became fashionable in the West. Based on the director’s own childhood like 400 Blows, it compares favourably to Vittoria De Sica’s Shoeshine and The Bicycle Thief, and Luis Buñuel’s Los Olvidados. Like those works, it is grounded in realism and explores themes of poverty, disparities in wealth and opportunities, youthful innocence and naivete.

The central character Amiro (played by Madjid Niroum and with ferocious energy) is an illiterate 11-year-old orphan living alone in an abandoned tanker in the Iranian port city of Abadan. He scrapes a living, working odd jobs – diving for deposit bottles (until the appearance of sharks frightens him), shining shoes, and selling iced water. Bullied by older boys and adults, he struggles to better himself and enrols himself in a school to learn to read.

The Runner is the most impressionistic of the five films. Episodic in nature, there are no backstories, explanations or even a conventional narrative. The film is torrent of fragments: the boy’s day-to-day survival at society’s margins, his friends, and encounters with foreigners. The defining image is of a race between the street kids on a rail track. The children push each other trying to be first to a block of ice which serves as the finish line. Amiro wins and rubs his burning face with cool water from the melting ice. He then shares it with his friends.

The film opens with Amiro shouting at tankers far out in the Gulf. The film concludes with Amiro framed by an airplane taking off.The motif of ships and planes runs through the film speaking to his thirst to leave behind his limited life. It is metaphor for all these children trying to escape their conditions.

Naderi and his cinematographer Firooz Malekzadeh’s used a stunning palette of colours and unusual camera work to create a distinctive visual vocabulary. It is complemented by a rough sound track, filled with the noise of streets and industrial machinery. The incandescent images remain with you long after the film.

Pixote: A Lei do Mais Fraco (Pixote: The Law of the Weakest) is a difficult film to watch. The director Héctor Babenco, who would go on to win fame for films like The Kiss of the Spiderwoman, created a frightening portrait of life in Brazil’s favelas and streets. It is a territory that City of God would revisit but without the same brutal power. Many, including the late film critic Roger Ebert, considered it to be Babenco’s most outstanding work.

Shot like a documentary, it used amateur actors whose real lives resembled those of the film’s protagonists. The central character Pixote (played by the illiterate 11-year-old Fernando Ramos da Silva) escapes a nightmarish reformatory only to drift into a life of crime. The story follows a makeshift group of criminals, prostitutes, and their clients who form floating alliances founded in violence, fear and need. The currency of this world is drugs and sex. Without homes and money, they turn to crime, the only means open to them to survive.

The film’s violence and graphic scenes are confronting. In part, this is because the individuals are not sophisticated or intelligent. The killings, one a mistake when an American client fights back because he does not understand Portuguese, are thoughtless. The children have no understanding or control over situations. Pixote’s glazed eyes don’t even seem to register the import of one killing and show no emotion. Hours later, watching TV, he suddenly vomits.

Other scenes are confronting. The old prostitute Sueli is shown after performing an abortion on herself disposing of the foetus explaining everything in detail to Pixote. There is another in which she has intercourse with an underage boy, while Pixote lies in bed next to them watching TV. The depiction of children who only vaguely understand sex but are used to its sights without comprehension is powerful. Towards the end, Pixote turns to suck at Sueli’s breast for comfort, hungry for any affection, but she pushes him away in disgust.

The film has a tragic coda. Da Silva returned to the streets and was shot dead by police in 1987. Pixote is a unforgiving portrait of lives no human being should have to lead.

Most of our childhoods are modestly pleasant. Problems are imagined or exaggerated. These five films, especially the last three, testify to the fact that not everyone is lucky enough to enjoy that privilege.