First-class comforts

Reviewed - Tickets: A gaggle of great auteurs - Ermanno Olmi, Abbas Kiarostami and Ken Loach - comes together to tell three stories set on a train bound for Rome. But the film is not quite a portmanteau piece.

The tales interweave with one another, thus causing the odd teeth-jarring judder in the vehicle's passage. One moment a young man, on board to care for an angry older lady, is talking to a teenager in the halting, vaguely sedated style familiar from Kiarostami's quieter films; the next, three (subtitled) Celtic fans, on their way to a Champion's League game, are spitting out profane dialogue characteristic of Loach's collaborator Paul Laverty.

Still, despite these occasional messy splices, Tickets feels surprisingly cohesive. The consistent rhythms of the train and the uniformly enclosed space bind the narratives together well. After all, you do meet all sorts on a train.

Olmi, the oldest but least well-known of the trio, whose The Tree of Wooden Clogs was a hit in the late 1970s, begins the journey with the tale of an academic developing a crush on the PR operative who made the arrangements for his trip. While he ponders the girl's charms, he observes an Albanian family being badgered by the officious railway staff. The refugees' plight will later pose a moral dilemma for Loach's hilariously mouthy football fans. Elsewhere a young man, carrying out duties for his community service, puffs, sighs and apologises for the irascible general's wife he is escorting across Europe.

Olmi's tale has a subtle, aching poignancy to it; the pointlessness of his hero's longing is wistfully intertwined with a stubbornly adhesive memory from his youth. Kiarostami's story, though funny, is a little too bland to even qualify as enigmatic. The highlight has to be Loach's segment. Though the fans' yarn does have the schematic structure of a parable, the honest, roaring energy of the young actors (two appeared in Loach's Sweet Sixteen) proves quite irresistible.

There is, however, always a suggestion of compromise in such projects. Enjoyable as much of Tickets is, you wouldn't really call it a proper film. It works as a sort of taster menu, designed to drag you back to future work from its distinguished directors.