Et la vie continue

Zendegi va digar hich (1992) is an Iranian movie shown in the U.S. with the translated title "And Life Goes On." The film was written and directed by Abbas Kiarostami.

The movie is part of a series of films entitled "The Koker Trilogy." Koker is a small village northwest of Tehran. No one outside Iran would know anything about Koker, except for Kiarostami's films. He used Koker as the setting for the first film in the trilogy--Where is the Friend's House? (1987) (I loved this movie. It has an amazing IMDb rating of 8.1.)

After that movie, people may have vaguely remembered Koker. However, the trilogy has made it famous among Iranians and among cinephiles.

Koker is famous because of a horrible tragedy that took place on June 21, 1990. A devastating earthquake destroyed Koker and many surrounding villages. The loss of life was immense. Almost all the buildings were destroyed.

In real life, director Kiarostami and his son traveled to Koker five days after the earthquake occurred. They wanted to find out if the two brothers who starred in the earlier film had survived the earthquake.

Kiarostami turned his trip into this movie. He found that despite the immense grief felt by the local people, life did, indeed, go on.

Farhad Kheradmand starred as the film director (Kiarostami), and Buba Bayour stared as his son Puya. Neither is a professional actor, but you could never tell that from their performances, which are superb. (Bayour never acted again. Kheradmand appeared again in the third movie of the trilogy--Through the Olive Trees.)

Basically, this movie is a quest movie. The father and his young son are determined to find the young boys, and the immensity of the tragedy continually puts obstacles in their way.

Kiarostami is famous for using panoramic long shots, and this is what we see at the end of the film. The closing long shot is one of the most powerful film endings I've ever seen.

This is an amazing film. It has a very high IMDb rating of 7.9. I rated it 10. It worked well enough on the small screen, but of course it would be better in a theater. We saw it on a Criterion DVD, sold with the other two movies in the the trilogy. The films may be available separately, which would be OK. However, the Criterion edition has many video extras, along with a written essay by noted film critic Godfrey Cheshire.

This a wonderful movie--I would say it's a must-see if you love great cinema. Find it and watch it.

IMPORTANT: The trilogy should be seen in order of production: Where is the Friend's House?, then And Life Goes On, then Through the Olive Trees. The movies won't work as well if seen out of their order.

Life and Nothing More (1992, dir. Abbas Kiarostami) What is so unusual about Kiarostami's films? They seem to to inhabit a world that is so ordinary, mundane even, and yet they are lent a sense of wonder as well. The simplicity of action and story is undermined by circumstances that reveal the courage that it takes just in order to live. Here a man and his son are driving to Koker, a town which has been devastated by the Iranian earthquake. Along the way they come across people who are carrying their belongings, food supplies, heaters, etc. after having lost everything. They stop to ask for directions. One woman can't help them, breaks out in tears, "I've lost 16 people" The man can only say, "May god grant you forbearance." There is no easy sentimentalism. Here life goes on for those that survive in spite of it all. There is still the need to fill ones life with love and joy and momentary pleasure. One man talks of his plan to get married in his hometown, despite the disaster. The son talks to his friend about watching a soccer game. He becomes terrifically excited by the building of an antenna at one of the nearby villages which will allow him to watch the game. You see none of the horrific footage of mangled bodies and uncontrollably hysterical victims that we usually associate with natural disasters. You only see people who have experienced tragedy, but continue to live and endure.

If I hadn't read a review or two this movie before watching, i would have been convinced this was a documentary. But it's not. It's a piece of fiction which comes across as a documentary. I am thinking of Orson Welles "War of the worlds" "After the 1990 earthquake in Iran that killed over 30,000 people, Kiarostami went to search for the stars of his previous film Where Is the Friend's Home?. This film is a semi-fictional work based on these events, shot in a documentary-style. It shows a director (played by Farhad Kheradmand) on this journey through the country in the aftermath of the earthquake." The movie puzzled me. Is the main actor a professional among amateurs? The acting (and I guess it is acting) doesn't come across as acting. My favourite moment comes in a sequence during which the lead speaks to two young girls doing their laundry in the open. That's because both of their houses have been destroyed due to the disaster. One of the girls seems more timid than the other. For a few moments there is a shy smile on her face. Is that acting? Looking forward to seeing more of this directors work.

This movie has the realistic feel of a documentary although I wouldn't call it a faux documentary because there is no pretension that it is a mock-up. It has the feel of a documentary and if you didn't know any better, you could quite reasonably conclude that it was. I would say that it is in the tradition of the Bicycle Thief or other classics of the Neo- Realist genre in which life proceeds at a leisurely pace and multiple quotidian events and regular people ground the plot as realistically as possible.

In this film, an Iranian director (Farah Kheradmand), representing Kiarostami, travels with his son (Buba Bayour) to small town Koker in the remote mountains of Iran to find a child actor who had been in his most recent movie and about whom he worried in the wake of a strong earthquake. Clearly there is some overlap with real life events as there was a major earthquake in Iran in 1990 and one of the stars of Kiarostami's previous movies ("Where Is The Friend's Home?") lived in this area. The pace of the movie, the everyday transactions, and the humans' doggedness in the face of tragedy indicate Kiarostami's love for people and thoughtfulness as a director.

Throughout the movie, we see slices of life. We see a young couple getting married even on a day when some of their relatives die, explaining that they thought they should continue, particularly on such a sad day. We see a man lugging heavy belongings to help out his family. We see a young Buba, with the wisdom of an old man, heartbreakingly consoling a woman who has lost one of her daughters. We see a little baby crying and the director quickly consoling the baby. One of these incidents in and of itself would be insignificant, but they are linked together in such numbers that the collective weight of the movie stays with you and cannot be shaken. Together, such a collection of events comprise the guts and the essence of life. The humble dignity of the characters will not be forgotten easily.

This is the transition from Kiarostami's films about children into his more adult, philosophically ponderous phase (and his bridging of the gap between characters searching on foot, as in the first of the trilogy, "Where is the Friend's Home," and within cars). As with all of Kiarostami's films, it's just beautiful to look at, not so much the way he films it (although this film continues his favorite shot of action taking place extremely far away), but what is filmed. For this reason I almost feel like I'm blinded by the director's name on the film, giving his films such high marks, because he doesn't really DO anything that you can point to. There is no startling mise-en-scene (the nature exists anyway, regardless of his camera). But he repeatedly and consistently creates a tranquil, pure, loving feeling in me. It has to do with his soul: he's putting it up there every time. Not autobiographically, but tonally. It has nothing to do with words like "craft" or "quality."

The simple gesture of a child wanting to raise a grasshopper is enough for Kiarostami to be considered a great realist, an observer. And his film is a connector of people. It might sound simple to say, but for a Westerner with no real idea of what life is like in Iran -- or better, not life, but people -- the simple depiction of it that shows, "Hey, they're basically like us," is invaluable. That's the difference between artists who share what is and artists who create what isn't. And more immediately, within the film, he deals with the public tragedy as great connector, whether it's an earthquake or an act of terrorism. And for us Westerners whose first real impression of that came with 9/11, this film will ring true -- and be remarkable if we consider that things like this happen over there all the time. (Which possibly explains why our main character never seems all that shocked by anything he sees; when a woman cries for her family, he nods his head, but doesn't seem terribly affected by her tears.) One character here asks what Iran has done to anger God and cause the earthquake, but there is little religiosity in the film. Unlike certain recent American films, this film does not have a tendency toward hand-wringing and overwrought seriousness reaching toward the skies. That scene itself is understated like the entire film. The characters here are not spiritual ciphers. They're utterly practical.

As with Kiarostami's two greatest films, "Close-Up" and "Taste of Cherry," the film becomes brilliant when it breaks from its placid realism into self-reference: the main character pulls out a picture of a boy who acted in the real film "Where is the Friend's Home?" and asks strangers where this real boy is, who he says played a role in the film. Is this a real earthquake? Is this actor really harmed? Is this a documentary? Is the main actor playing Kiarostami; is Kiarostami filming this from the passenger seat? Are they really out looking for this boy? But as with those two masterpieces, it's this that borders on insufferable, smirking cleverness on Kiarostami's part that makes me question the so-called honesty of his films. (I find his interviews pretentious and evasive.) Is it possible to be a self-referencing deconstructionist and reveal human truths, not just reveal "the nature of cinema," in an attempt to be the Iranian Godard? This is what lessens my enjoyment of his films, because it lowers my trust. Kiarostami asks a lot of us. "Okay, admit the first film was openly a film, but accept this as a closed film, until I tell you it's a documentary..." There are other flaws. It does get "cute" at times, as when the main character repeats his son's question at a later time ("Why is it coming out of a tap?"). And the boy seems preternaturally wise -- part of the film's "message" is not to discount kids' wisdom: the boy questions the validity of the claim that God caused the earthquake, shocking one woman that he and his father come in contact with throughout their travels.

However, there is so much richness elsewhere (and I'm willing to accept that the layering of the self-reference adds to the film, even if it makes it momentarily annoying) that you can move beyond its flaws (which, honestly, I would accept pretty easily in another film; with Kiarostami you have expectations in the clouds). I'm particularly interested in the way children (and the child experience as remembered or experienced by an adult) are presented on screen, and I'm continually ecstatic that we have Kiarostami contributing to this. (That the main character's son describes one boy from "Where is the Friend's Home?" by his eyes is appropriate, as when we see him they are indeed strikingly beautiful.) The film is also an interesting comment on what happens to people after they work -- Falconetti comes to mind. And the ending is already a classic: it's like the swimming pool scene in "Nostalghia" in tone. Does what happen happen because the film has to end that way, or because of the human spirit? (This is one of the few scenes where music plays under it.)

Even though the movie has no end, only a means, it moves forward like a good documentary. Even though time is not indicated (there are few, if any lapses; time is experienced, as in Tarkovsky), it moves along at a nice pace -- not so much in that the story is brisk, more in that we've settled into its own rhythm. There is no "story," only the story of film as experience. Lots of Big statements could be inferred from the film -- it's about an endless journey with no resolution to a place they don't know how to get to (college students, get your pens out) -- but I take it directly. 9/10