Rating: 5/5
Criterion Challenge 2024 | 28/52 | Ari Aster’s Closet Picks
— Are you sure this is the way? — Every road leads somewhere. — What about a dead end?
In 1987, Abbas Kiarostami made one of my favorite movies, Where Is the Friend’s House? In 1990, an earthquake in Iran killed nearly 50 thousand people. This film is a partially fictionalized rendering of Kiarostami returning to Koker, where he filmed Where Is the Friend’s House?
In this film, a film director (Farhad Kheradmand) travels to Koker with his son, Pouya (Pouya Payvar, son of cinematographer Homayun Payvar) to look for Babak Ahmadpour, who played Ahmad in Where Is the Friend’s House?
Because of the earthquake, the usual highway to Koker is closed. So, the director and his son must ask locals for directions, mirroring Ahmad’s actions in Friend’s House, where he asks for directions to Mohammad Reza’s home. Also like Ahmad, people give him side quests and chores, but many do not know what he asks.
The filmmakers capture the movie in the style of a road documentary, with handheld shots of passing landscapes, some from Friend’s House, rendered new in the less formal style. The two actors interact with real people, not characters, and move through the very real wreckage the earthquake left. Pouya asks a man whose shop is in shambles if he has any sodas. The man replies, “What a thing to ask at a time like this.”
Like Friend’s House and the later Taste of Cherry, the camera will pull back to such immense degrees that the characters are barely visible in the landscape. Sometimes, it creates echoes and mirrors from Friend’s House. Other times, it reminds us of how massive the effect of the earthquake was on the land itself. Also, like Taste of Cherry and many of Kiarostami’s later films, the car is the central location of discussion, reflection, and progression.
The earthquake is a reset and a reminder. Much of these people’s world as they knew it fell apart. But what remains are the people who lived, their stories as witnesses, and their lives beyond it. They are not only survivors, but soccer fans, husbands and wives, believers in God, and all the other identities we carry with us. How you see and present yourself are the legacies you leave behind.
Similarly the director, as a character, does not extend beyond the frame. When the movie ends, so does he. In searching for the actors, they search for a legacy outside the frame. You, who were there during the filming — who lived through this earthquake — still exist and are more than the film.
By design, we don’t know if the director and his son will arrive in Koker, let alone find the actors. More than anything, this reveals Kiarostami’s faith in film to arrive somewhere, even if it’s a dead end. Like the director says when someone tells him his car won’t make it, “We’ll see how it goes.”
— Do you think you are blessed? — Those are just words. — Then how do you explain it? — The way I see it, this disaster fell upon us like a hungry wolf. Those in its path were devoured while the rest were spared. No, this wasn’t God’s doing.
I don’t want to dig too deep into the individual moments, because I don’t want to take away from the sense of discovery that makes this movie so beautiful.
What can I do? The World Cup comes once every four years, and life goes on.