A dozen members of a Buenos Aires suburbs family starts a single weekend trip of 1000 km to take grandma to a wedding, in a motor home. Every character in the movie plays a great part (this is Trapero's best film), relationships are shown with quite a simple eye, but with a lot of sensitivity. Some kind of argentinity is shown, the movie takes the spectator along the way with this family members who will show incredible capability to survive and pass on obstacles, and also amazing human vices, good and bad, but particularly and specially human. The way Trapero engages in dialog with the audience is extremely mature, the director finds the way to balance between not underestimating the audience shooting unnecessary and not pretending to find deep sociological or anthropological plots, just showing how everyone works.
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EFGgirl10 September 2006Unusual, fresh, entertaining and interesting would be the words to describe this movie. It isn't a classic, but it IS a good watch. As I've never been to Argentina, I think it says a lot about the film's quality that it was able to evoke a strong sense of place, and of Argentinian life, and I felt as if I was there.
I see some of the other commenters have complained there was no development or drama - and to some extent they're right, but they're also missing the point that this movie isn't about thrills and surprises Hollywood-style. It's about one normal family doing something unusual, and how they deal with the various problems that occur on the way. That was incredibly enjoyable, not to mention very involving. Lots of humour, some very moving scenes, great direction and acting - it's all good, really. Highly recommended. -
jpschapira15 July 2005Pablo Trapero, one of the most recognized directors of the new Argentine cinema, has done three movies: "Mundo Grúa", which I haven't seen and seems to be the best; "El Bonaerense", a tale about a man who becomes a cop; and "Familia Rodante", which is not more than what it proposes.
His second film was characterized by focusing thoroughly in Buenos Aires' reality and the reality of the persons that try to survive there. This is repeated in "Familia Rodante", but with a family, that travels. It's a trip to Misiones, well-known Argentine province; and it is a trip because of a wedding. I don't want to think about the fact of making a two-day trip to come back after some hours and travel for two more days...And there are many members.
With Grandma Emilia (Graciana Chironi), her daughters Marta (Liliana Capurro) and Claudia (Ruth Dobel) travel with their husbands Oscar (Bernardo Forteza) and Ernesto (Carlos Resta), plus the kids of the first ones; Matías (Nicolás López), Gustavo (Raúl Viñona) and Sol (Sol Ocampo), and the daughter of the second ones; Yanina (Marianela Pedano) with her friend Nadia (Leila Gomez). Don't be fooled by the actors' names, just like Carlos Sorin, another master of the new cinema, Pablo Trapero uses non professional actors in his movies, therefore just some of them have done things before, and others, like Graciana Chironi (directly related with the director), have only acted in Trapero's films.
Trapero's magic lies in his camera, in how he cares for his story. A story, in this case, full of situations that I wouldn't like to tell because they occupy the whole movie. And they are wonderful like life itself; and messed up and crazy and even incredible sometimes.
Thinking about life as watching the film, it came to me: We fall in love like the characters do because we feel the same, we laugh out loud because we have experienced the same situations they experienced, or we have seen it. We fight like they do: something more realistic is impossible.
I even believe that Trapero directs so close to reality that we could be watching a documentary. -
robsworld12 April 2007This is a drama more so than a comedy. The direction was very hands off, and the acting wasn't the best. The pacing was perfect, and the locations great. In this movie, a great grand mother is honored with an invitation to a wedding as the maid of honor. Despite the distance involved (crossing the length of Argentina), and the probable hardships they'll endure, she assembles the clan (an extended family of about a dozen people) and insists that everyone accompany her on this voyage. While I don't understand the Argentinean family ethic, the film assumes that this group acquiesces to their matrons desires. They pile into the only vehicle large enough to accompany the entire group (a dilapidated 1956 Chevy Viking camper), and set out on a journey. This movie is more about family relationships, than it is about the physical places they travel through. Crammed into a confining space, the group is forced to confront family issues in a positively charged atmosphere. Unfortunately the size of the cast hampers a thorough examination of these complex relationships. I liked the fact that the cast didn't consist of polished egos and competing actors. The dialog was sparse, but well drafted, and it worked splendidly with the pacing.
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johnnyboyz25 May 2010Rolling Family tells the story of a large group of people, more or less members of the same family name, journeying from one side of the nation of Argentina to the other so as to service a long standing and much loved member of their family. It begins and ends with this same elderly woman observing an item, physical in the sense of the opening in the form of some old mementos; but concludes with a pausing and a pondering of something once everything that's happened has happened: new memories have been forged and life goes on. The film has a knowing and sweet eye on life as an item, the bonds that form; the various degrees of love for someone else that unfold; the sacrifices we take on and the hardships we all grind through together. Despite beginning and ending on the same individual, the film is as much about the family within the film as it is her and what she's going through; culminating in an interesting and thoughtful mediation on a number of characters with a number of traits.
Pablo Trapero has written and made a piece that will remind you of another Argentinian film, this time from 2001, in La Ciénaga; alá The Swamp. Its sticky, intimate, close-up, cramped feeling is difficult to shake when you watch it; it's heated, not just by way of the weather but also the attitudes certain characters have towards one another at certain times while its wonderfully free flowing feel will guide you effortlessly from one clutch of characters, young or old; male or female, and their problems to another clutch, all the while shifting tones and atmospheres with the minimal of fuss. But Trapero applies certainly the aesthetic of that to a road film arc, taking everything from that enclosed and very rural, very isolated country house and applying it to a film about a large family crammed into a mobile home as they journey from the Buenos Aires outskirts to the town of Misiones.
People have compared it to 2006's American film Little Miss Sunshine, but it's a bit better than that; it underplays its material, its more interested in its characters than it is interested in attempting to create some sort of 'cult' item by way of the idea that a broken down, dilapidated yellow VW camper van might act as an iconic image of some kind. It doesn't buckle into providing well known actors playing individuals in the most archetypical of manners; rather, we are provided with rough and ready looking people whom have more of a genuine feel to them as these personal and intimate thoughts and studies are played out. Certain characters here react to different things and each are going through changes in their lives at various points, with a middle aged married couple struggling with one another and their child; adolescents feeling certain feelings for their cousins and gruff looking fathers and husbands raging at both toll booth prices and with members of the constabulary, therefore with the state itself, in what is a varied but focused spread.
The film's opening of a large gathering in which a lot of fun is had and many bonds are seemingly enhanced is only the beginning. Elderly woman Emilia (Chironi) announces to everybody at that congregation that she is to travel to the said town of Misiones so as to attend a wedding and contribute heavily to that. The rest of the family take it upon themselves to travel with them in a somewhat rickety mobile home and the adventure is on. Some of the people at the early gathering seem to think they know each other, that they can get along whatever the situation but they learn that it is relatively simplistic to merge with one another at a large and open gathering, when everyone's there to have fun anyway and there's always another space to venture off to with space to manoeuvre. Rolling Family will later consist of enclosed and cramped conditions, in which people are there to journey to a destination with any emphasis on any sort of 'fun'; they are locked in a place in which one may not merely shift to another part of the locale if someone else annoys or frustrates them and they will come to accept a truer form of family bond.
Trapero balances the long and wide open Argentinian roads complete with rural nothingness surrounding them really well with the enclosed interior scenes inside the mobile home. Like The Swamp, Trapero is able to get the most out of both the premise of the situation but additionally make the mostly rural locales they find themselves in as sweaty and itchy as the rest of the film. Here's a film, or a pair of films, less interested in quaint cinematography revolving around beautiful foliage part of a forest but the hot and humid border-line jungle that these characters find themselves traipsing through and existing within so as to reach their destination. I can understand a film about a frustrating road trip to a far off locale as individuals with flaws exist within close proximity to one another in a film with a lazy and sticky aura being a tricky sell, but Rolling Family is worth the effort as these characters and each of their predicaments are given due attention. -
robert-6424 September 2010It had the potential to be a good film but was let down on a few technical aspects.
1. He shouldn't have used too many hand held shots.
2. Should have used film stock rather than electronic. Poor colour separation.
3. Far, far too many close up shots. If you are going to make a 'road film' then its a good idea to see the characters within a location. There were just not enough. Okay, one could argue that he tried to convey a feeling of claustrophobia but we don't need the entire film to tell us it's claustrophobic inside a camper. Surely if it was mad hot they would all want to be outside on every opportunity?
4. The kissing young couple. Sorry but very basic and primitive. It would have been better for them to be seen sneaking off into the woods then we could use our own imagination.
5. The dialogue with non members of the family with other people were few are far between. The only worthwhile example I can recall was the police roadblock and the man with a spare gasket.
There are too many 'road movies' and to stand out from the rest you really do need to be original - this wasn't.
And lastly, I thought it could have been improved with a large injection of humour or real pathos. -
There are certainly some wonderful interesting roads in this movie and they certainly do engender the desire to get in a car and drive from Buenos Aires to Misiones; but really at core, this film is about interpersonal family dynamics. This movie is so beautifully observed and dare I say it, made with 'a love of family' perspective probably impossible in the UK. I found it utterly spellbinding. Call me an old soppy but just the opening shot of the great grandma sitting on her bed looking through her box of family photos had me sobbing tenderly. OK there was drama and incident along the route, but the way the family accepted each others foibles and gave each other space, seemed totally magical to me. I know they probably did know each other well in non-film reality, but the way it has been captured on screen is almost visceral. Hey man it was like you were there! I hope Mr Trapero goes on to make more Cool-Greatgrandma pictures and never hands over the casting of his films to an agency.
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c-r-bennett-571-90803119 June 2010Its bad, sorry 'naturalistic'. A bunch of unlikeable people go on a road trip and you don't find out anything about them. Or maybe you do, its just that we decided we couldn't last longer than about 45 minutes into the film. We'd have lasted a lot longer if it had just been a film taken by someone poking a camera out of a car window for an hour, because some of the scenery could have looked lovely, and there would certainly have been more action.
I had wondered if it was a cultural thing, if it was a problem with the humour not being translated well into the subtitles, but to be honest I really think it really is that dull. There is an issue with the style of movie and the subtitles, in that its often hard to work out which of the characters mumbling in the background the subtitles actually refer to.
There have been some comparisons with little miss sunshine but there is no comparison. One has interesting characters well developed in a very economical way, poignant moments and some real humour, the other has a guy swearing at toll booths every few minutes. -
enrique-5928 July 2007As it happens with any road movie, road, cars, and landscape are excuses for developing a story; the road chosen could not have been better, landscapes are superb, and the caravan they travel with is a gem on its own!
Each of the 12 people on this caravan had a story to tell and Trapero managed to thread them together very well. True, acting could have been a bit better, but I took it as part of the essence of this movie, adding for a natural freshness of the plot.
Human relationships and family business are taken to the core of this family during the trip with a good balance of drama and comedy. The movie is flooded with touches of Argentinian customs along the movie that also come as a bonus.
Highly recommended movie! -
jeremy-liebster5 June 2006I honestly wanted to like this film. I love Argentina and I like quirky films where not all that much happens. But I am sorry to have to report that this is one of the worst, most excruciatingly dull films I have ever seen. There is absolutely no plot and absolutely no character development. What happens (to use the term loosely) is that a Buenos Aires Grandma decides that her whole family will drive up to Misiones for a wedding and the film shows us what happens on the trip. Which is nothing. Except lots of incidences where the van breaks down which means there are lots of shots of engines and carboretters. We find out very little indeed about any of the family who go on this trip except that one of the men is having an affair with one of the women. Sometimes with road trip films at least you get some lovely shots of the countryside, yet even here the film fails, making the pampas look about as dull as the subject matter.
I actually found it remarkable that this film is presumably a work of fiction. The fact that somebody would bother to make up a story where absolutely nothing of interest occurs and where there is no character development or humour is actually remarkable. And the fact that a film company thought that it would be a good idea to buy the story is equally astounding.
I occasionally have a problem on my machine with DVDs skipping. And whenever this normally happens I go hopping mad. I have to tell you however that when my copy of La Familia Rodante started jumping I was actually relieved that it meant I would have to endure less of the awful banality that was proceeding in front of me. Honestly, the only people who would like this film are mechanics and even they would get bored after the first breakdown. -
eoscarz19 January 2008I have to admit that I totally disagree with the unfair comments from the previous viewer as I thoroughly enjoyed watching this film. Obviously if you are a fan of fast pace films, such as American blockbusters, then this film will definitely not be your cup of tea. What this film does is to take an ordinary family out of their natural environment and explores their feelings and emotions. There are conflicts throughout and tension among most of their components. It is a journey of discovery. The fact that Grandmother is invited to a family wedding in Misiones (1,200 kilometres from her home in Buenos Aires) is an excuse for the director to deeply explore and investigate how the characters will react and come to terms with their own feelings. The caravan is a very small environment and it is hard for the family to live in such a close boundary. I did not find this film boring in anyway and I will highly recommend to anyone who is interested in human relationships (including mechanics! Haha). The only disappointing thing is that the subtitles does not always give a true representation of the dialogues from the original language and, if you do not speak Spanish, that may be a daring task to follow.
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I don't usually do negative comments, but in this case I feel the positive reviews and the IMDb rating are so much higher than the film warrants that you wonder about the impartiality of the writers and voters (a danger when there are so few responses).
There are so many good movies of this genre (Little Miss Sunshine and Y tu mamá también come to mind) that you might be interested in this one, based on the reviews. I think you'd be disappointed.
1. The camera work in the RV will drive you nuts. Sure, you get the idea that the RV is moving, but you will also get seasick.
2. To paraphrase Yogi Berra, the scenery really stinks, and there is too much of it. This is a pretty short movie, and a lot of it is endless shots of the RV going down the road.
3. There are too many characters and, as others have mentioned, nothing happens. At one point I was actually looking forward to coming to a toll booth!
4. When something does happen (there is some conflict), the "actors" who work OK when they are just being normal people come up very short, and the scenes just come across as amateurish.
If you watch the DVD extra features (I gave them 1 minute), the director says that the film is essentially autobiographical. I think that's the basic problem. People don't watch film to see real life, it's all around them. You can do a great film about real life and you can pace it slowly, but you have to find something profound about the human condition. I didn't see that in this film. -
Tweekums23 May 2019This Argentinian film follows a large family from Buenos Aires as they make the thousand kilometre journey to a remote village in Misiones Province. They are making the journey because eighty four year old Emelia has been invited to be maid of honour at her niece's wedding. Four generations of the family pack into a camper van for the journey. Along the way various things occur that effect the family. Some of these are comic, others lead to tension and there is even romance... between two teenaged cousins.
I found this film to be a real delight; it might not be full of action or hilarious moments but the characters feel real... not in the common sense of film/TV characters being described as 'real' just because their lives are miserable but because they are a fairly ordinary family. The journey in the cramped van provides some tensions but nothing excessive. The way director Pablo Trapero films the characters in the van adds a sense of claustrophobia but this is lightened by the outside shots of the various characters during the occasional forced stop. The cast, many not regular actors, do an impressive job. Overall I'd say this won't be for everybody but if you are looking for a relatively low-key film with humour, pathos and 'real' characters then I'd certainly recommend it.
These comments are based on watching the film in Spanish with English subtitles. -
fljbrs12 June 2005Awful film. Boring and awfully acted and directed. No dialog, almost no plot...just nothing. Avoid it! Grandma id turning 84 and she decides all the family must go with her to a wedding 1500 Km far away. No discussion...everybody goes. Why? You never see why they agree. Grandma is not a central character in the movie and you know nothing about her relationship with the rest of the family (and the actress playing the part is anything but an actress). The trip is just that...a trip with multiple stops because they have problems with the van. No character is developed, you just get two or three glimpses to quite ordinary things. Very, very boring and not recommended at all.