Life, and Nothing More … (1992)

Directed by Abbas Kiarostami.

In 1987 Kiarostami made Where is my Friend’s Home?, a story about two young boys set in the remote Iranian village of Koker.  The cast, including the boys, were all local villagers.  In 1990 a massive earthquake in the same region killed 30,000 people, and Kiarostami set off to discover what had happened to the boys.  Life, and Nothing More … is the film he made about this journey, a road trip by the director of Where is my Friend’s Home? and his son  – and though these two are played by actors, the trip takes us through the actual disaster zone.  In effect, it is a docudrama in which the director creates himself as a character.

The first half of the film depicts the slow, difficult trip along a highway choked with cars, lorries, moving equipment and rescue vehicles, through one devastated village after another.  We see the driver and his son in closeup, from inside the car or through the windshield.  We see crumbled buildings and people searching for victims and clearing up the debris, mostly filmed from inside the car.  The audience is anchored in the car, hearing the conversation between the man and his son and his questioning of villagers and officials about the state of the roads ahead.  Perhaps this is not the route to Koker, perhaps it is the route but impassable – but the driver persists.  The filming of this section is strongly reminiscent of Rossellini’s Voyage to Italy (1954) with its semi-documentary scenes of actors driving through real streets, alternating between shots of the actors in the car and ordinary street scenes shot from the car.

The driver asks people by the road if they know anything of the boys he is seeking.  He shows them a photo on a movie poster; he’s from Tehran, the poster is in French, and he’s searching for two boys in a district where many thousands of dead are still being dug out of the rubble.

Finally, they leave the highway and attempt to reach the village by rough backroads, mostly deserted apart from occasional pedestrians carrying various bundles and items salvaged from the ruins of their homes.  No longer hemmed in by other vehicles, the camera gives us the driver’s view through the windscreen and we see the bare, rocky landscape of northern Iran.  The people they meet are courteous and helpful, yet is is obvious that the driver and his son are from a different world – the urban middle-class in the midst of the rural poor.  Eventually, they reach a village in which part of the first film was shot, not far from Koker.  The villagers are trying to carry on in the ruins, rescuing utensils, clothes and furnishings from what remains of their homes.

They meet an old man who played a character in Where is my Friend’s Home?, and he shows them a house – “that was my house in the movie” –  and observes that his own house is in ruins.  It’s better not to contemplate the intertextuality here – a real person who acted a character in another film is talking to an actor playing the part of the actual director of both films, and they are playing this scene amongst real devastation.

The son, who knows nothing of village life, clambers amongst the ruins: “Dad, what is this?” “A hearth.”  “And this?” “An oven”.  For the son, it’s all an adventure, the human significance of what has happened is simply beyond his comprehension.  The father is determined to press on with his search, but he also tries to comprehend the effect the quake has had on the villagers.

He meets Hosein, a young man who has just been married, a few days after the quake.  Hosein says that he had sixty-five relatives die under the rubble, but he and his fiancée decided to cut short the traditional mourning and marry.  They slept three nights under plastic sheeting and have now moved into a partially ruined house.  They want to go ahead and have children – who knows if they will survive the next quake?  Better to get on with it.

The driver and his son continue, hoping to reach Koker.  Unexpectedly, they encounter one of the boys they are seeking, walking along the road.  He had been watching a World Cup match on television when the quake hit, and most of his family had escaped.  They give him a lift to a temporary camp where survivors are staying.  Men are putting up a TV aerial so that the survivors can watch the World Cup.  The boy gets out and the driver’s son asks to stay to watch the match; since they are only a few kilometres from Koker, the driverr agrees and drives on alone.

Kiarostami is a poet of roads. The director/driver is already travelling the road when the film starts, and is still travelling at the end.  The origin and the goal are purely notional, ideas that provide a frame for the film – but the road is the film.

“The road is the illustration of the soul that has no peace.” (Kiarostami).

Finally, the director is driving alone the last few kilometres to Koker.  We have seen him drive on the choked highway, filmed claustrophobically in his battered yellow car, then on increasingly rough backroads, no longer threatened by traffic but battling the rough roads themselves.  Now in the final, almost wordless sequence, he is struggling up a steep mountain road, trying to maintain traction.  In extreme long-shot the car enters frame from the right on a level stretch, then turns to climb a steep grade.  Near the top it loses traction and slips back a few metres.  Again it climbs almost to the top, then slips and slowly rolls back to the bottom of the slope and stalls.  A man carrying a bundle enters the frame and offers to help push the car, which starts and leaves the frame the way it entered.  The camera follows the man with the bundle as he steadily climbs the hill to the top and turns onto a flatter stretch leading out of frame to the left.  The camera pulls back to extreme long-shot and the car re-enters the frame, this time climbing all the way to the top and turning left along the road to Koker.  It passes the pedestrian, then stops and picks him up and proceeds towards Koker as the film ends.  This almost Sisyphean sequence elegantly encapsulates the spirit of the movie.

Outrage (2011)

Directed by Takeshi Kitano.

Outrage is a yakuza movie that begins with a gathering of Japanese mobsters reminiscent of the 1957 Mafia summit at Appalachin, NJ.  The bosses are all inside having dinner with the Chairman while thirty-odd retainers wait outside by the limousines.  The Apalachin meeting was broken up by state troopers, but if the police turned up to the Yakuza meeting it would only be to collect their envelopes.  Society outside the gangster world scarcely exists.

Early Yakuza movies retained the concept of individual honour from the samurai genre, but later the genre became less idealistic and more pragmatically brutal. The genre is in decline, but Kitano has become the major director in the field and continues to work steadily.  He acts in most of his movies under the name Beat Takeshi, and is best-known in the West for the outstanding 1997 cop drama Hana-bi  (Fireworks) and the samurai-yakuza drama Zatoichi (2003).  In Outrage he plays a middle-level gang boss, Otomo, shrewd and brutal, a man who follows orders because he must to survive, but who is only loyal to his followers.

Sekiuchi, the Chairman, wants to expand his territory, so he orders Ikemoto, one of his underbosses to attack an outside gang led by Murase. Ikemoto delegates the task to Otomo.  This soon leads to numerous killings, but these are in line with Sekiuchi’s larger plan, which involves a lethal reorganisation of his own following.  By the end of the movie nearly all of the bosses and their retainers we saw at the beginning have died violently, often in weltering gore.  The “territory” that’s being fought over seems quite abstract – there are references to drug-dealing, there is a mob-run casino and a clip-joint – but the fight’s the thing, a bloody and sadistic game of draughts in which the last piece left on the board is king.

It’s a hermetic amorality play with more than a touch of black humour, an existential struggle to survive and feed one’s appetites until the butcher comes.  Takeshi tells a complex story efficiently, constructing powerful images dominated by greys and blues.  He is the Japanese equivalent of Jean-Pierre Melville, though a little more violent and dispassionate.

Outrage was sufficiently successful to prompt a sequel, Beyond Outrage (2012), in which Otomo, apparently killed at the end of Outrage, is revived, released from prison, and joins in a large-scale gang war that allows him to settle all scores with his usual panache.  The worldwide success of these two movies has encouraged plans for a further sequel.

 

The Past (2013)

Directed by Ashgar Farhadi.

The past is never dead. It’s not even past.  (Faulkner)

Ahmad (Ali Mossafa) arrives in Paris from Teheran.  Through a glass wall he sees his wife Marie (Bérénice Bejo) waving to him.

As they drive to her home, the conversation becomes prickly.  This is not a reunion, he is only returning to Paris after four years to sign their divorce papers, and he had expected to stay at a hotel.  Marie has two daughters by an earlier marriage, the teenaged Lucie and her sister Léa.  When they arrive at the house, Léa is there, playing with a young boy, Fouad.  Fouad is the son of Samir (Tahar Rahim, star of A Prophet ), Marie’s lover whom she hopes to marry although his wife is lying in a coma after a failed attempt at suicide.  The girls have nothing to do with their father, who lives in Brussels, but Lucie is attached to Ahmad and hostile to Samir.  Fouad cautiously accepts Ahmad, but acts up with Marie and is clearly deeply disturbed by the loss of his mother.

So the pieces are on the board, and we can see how they relate to each other – but what orders this complexity?

Marie seems to be deliberately making Ahmad’s visit uncomfortable.  The reason she offers for failing to book him into a hotel may be spurious, and his mere presence in her house is disturbing – the children have to shift bedrooms, and Fouad must share with Ahmad.  Samir has apparently retreated to his own flat, and clearly he is unhappy with Ahmad’s presence, although when he comes around both men try to behave decently.  Marie must have foreseen this discomfort, and when, waiting with Ahmad to sign their divorce papers, she announces that she is pregnant, Ahmad suspects that she is taking revenge on him for leaving her.  But why require Ahmad to come to Paris for the divorce at all, when Samir’s wife Céline is still alive?

Amongst these complexities and cross-currents, the talk continues – but clarity is elusive.  Farhadi uses a visual motif in which characters see each other from a distance, through a shop window or the airport window, unable to speak – or walk out angrily halfway through a conversation only to return to deliver a barb.  Bit by bit we see that this unfolding state of affairs points back to an initially marginal question – how did Céline come to attempt suicide?

We learn that Marie’s affair with Samir began before Céline’s suicide.  Lucie confides to Ahmad that she sent copies of emails between Marie and Samir to Céline and she believes this prompted her suicide.  But how is Naïma, an illegal immigrant working for Samir, involved?  Did Céline take poison after receiving the emails?  Did she even receive them at all?

We gradually get a sense of what has happened, although Ahmad is the only character to have much tolerance for uncertainty.  Céline is not the only one to act impulsively.  Farhadi is well-served by his cast, ceasing characters who gain our understanding and sympathy even though we see their faults.  Gradually the layers of the story are revealed, the secrets and lies and hasty judgements.  In the process, we see that the past is a story subject to revision, and the revision itself is a story.

Finally, Ahmad is to go home and those who remain seem to reach an implicit agreement to let go of the past; but Céline is still alive.  Is she truly inaccessible, or can she respond to stimuli?  Samir learns that the comatose may still react to familiar smells, and so he takes a collection of Céline’s perfumes to the hospital where a staff member tries some of them out, without obtaining a response.  Is Céline effectively dead, gone into the past with everything else the living wish to bury?  Samir puts on some of his own cologne and, taking Céline’s hand, leans over her and asks her to squeeze his fingers if she recognises the scent.  The final shot as he leans over her is breathtakingly ambiguous.  Céline’s fingers lie limp in Samir’s hand, but a tear slips unobserved down her cheek.

The past is never dead. It’s not even past.