Life and Nothing More (Abbas Kiarostami, 1992)
Let's begin with some autobiography (appropriate given the film at hand). My interest in cinema began before I really had the intellectual capacity to understand a lot of the canonical classics. I was watching the titles everyone knows, like
Tokyo Story and
Andrei Rublev, at around the age of 12 or 13. When I appreciated something (and I do recall liking both of those at the time) it usually came down to whether or not a film could offer me an experience I'd never had before. Almost always, understanding of the nature of that experience was lost to me. I didn’t see my favorite films as artistic statements or aesthetic objects, but (and I hope you'll forgive the somewhat absurd analogy) more along the lines of temples: I could enter into them for a few hours and then leave having seen and felt a great deal but, ultimately, aware that there was something more, something beyond my understanding, that made them endlessly mysterious.
As time went on, sharpening of my critical skills from high school English, as well as practice in watching ever-more obscure and ever-more daring movies, gave me the ability to read films like I hadn't before, to recognize symbols, to analyze form, etc. The upshot of this is that I'm considerably more articulate than I used to be (for proof, some of my earliest posts here show me struggling in the middle of this evolution), but the downside is that all of the films I loved way back when have lost the ineffable mystique that made cinema such a romantic thing to me at the time. Now, mind you, I'm not arguing against the importance of critical thinking and theory (far from it - film theory is one of my most beloved disciplines), nor am I insinuating that I've become disillusioned with the world of film (again, nothing could be further from the truth). But there is definitely a part of me that's nostalgic for the days when I could watch
Seven Samurai for the tenth time and still not fully comprehend what it was about but just know there was a greater wealth of wisdom in it than I'd experienced in my short lifetime. And then along came Kiarostami.
Well, actually I shouldn't say that. My introduction to Kiarostami came with Criterion's release of
Close-Up which was around the tail-end of the early, non-analytic period of my film obsession that I've discussed above. I remember getting virtually nothing out of it the first time I saw it (which was not too uncommon - if a film's form was in some way unappealing to me, I would often lose interest) but, since the rule of the land was that I know nothing and the film knows all, I gave it another go a few months later. And the second time was completely different. I was totally moved by the protagonist's plight, extremely fascinated by the film's interior, unspoken tension between fiction and reality, and I'm pretty sure I cried at the end. Of course, at the time, I still couldn't have been able to articulate what about the film was so remarkable to me (I actually tried on two of the few adults I know who are interested in art films, my uncle and his best friend; I think I said something about how "it avoids ordinary drama and turns inward to be a kind of interrogation of the medium," which sounds alright and was convincing enough for them but still strikes me as a woefully incomplete representation of what Kiarostami's actually doing), so it was as much an object of mystery as were any of my other favorite films at that point. But it held a peculiar fascination because it seemed to, in a way, sort of be about
that. Isn't the protagonist's relationship with film sort of similar to my positioning the viewing of a great film as a kind of secular rite? In any case, I took it very personally and it became a go-to choice for one of my favorite films (I even listed it, along with a few others, on a college entrance essay that asked about my most meaningful experiences - perhaps my insistence on talking about films is why they declined my application
).
Logistical issues (particularly the inexplicable lack of
Taste of Cherry at any of my local retailers) contributed to my inability to see any more Kiarostami films until fairly recently, and it's sort of in that capacity that I went into
Life and Nothing More, as someone with an intimate familiarity with a small part of the man's oeuvre, now finally being exposed to the rest of it. I was desperate enough to see the film (for this project, and just in general), that I subjected myself to one of the more bizarre and cumbersome viewing experiences I've yet had: a very low-quality rip of the film in one window with subtitles in some unidentified language, and a transcript of all the dialogue in slightly broken English in another. While I imagine some people here have gone to far greater lengths to see films, that about tops my list for complexity at the moment (along with the Korean bootleg copy of
The Travelling Players from before I went region-free, on which the fourth or fifth subtitle would always be replaced by a repeat of the previous one, and, late in the film, they just stop being there at all), and it made for a much more active engagement in the task of interpreting lines of dialogue and pinning them to sections of speech than I'm used to. Consequently, I probably had to expend as much, if not more, effort in understanding what people were saying as I did in grappling with the film's big themes. Perhaps that was part of why it had such a peculiar effect on me, but that doesn't encompass all of it.
It is, of course, a remarkably quiet film, but still an extremely beguiling one, even hypnotic (and that’s a word I don’t use lightly). The ultra-loose structure, which I imagine is what people mean when they talk about its appearance of non-fiction, lends a kind of discursiveness to the way the film approaches themes. Ideas don’t accumulate in a linear way, as they do in most “intellectual” movies. They pile on top of each other somewhat haphazardly, and the relationship between them can sometimes be pretty inscrutable.
Would anybody familiar with the film like to venture an interpretation of Kiarostami’s attitude toward the presence of European culture in Iran? It seemed to be a critical theme – what with the survivors of the earthquake banding together to watch a soccer game, and less obviously in the director’s (that is, the character of the director’s, and perhaps, by extension, Kiarostami’s as well) association of Western classical music with natural beauty in the midst of destruction, which seemed to be connected with what the elderly actor from Where Is the Friend’s Home? said about art, that it should be beautiful and happy and “move you” – but what exactly was being expressed by the motif and, more pertinently, how it fit in with the rest of the film was lost on me.
Now, if you unlocked that spoiler (or whatever is the proper verb for that action) you’ll know that I still find considerable portions of the film more or less opaque. And I suppose that that, in a way, gets at what I find so compelling about Kiarostami’s work. It’s not just that he’s one of the few filmmakers who can still mystify me (obscurity, in and of itself, is hardly a positive attribute) but that he’s one of the few who can do that and still be profound. It has nothing to do with the “inherent authority of obscurity” or my habit of giving less readily comprehensible films the benefit of the doubt (a habit which has been dying off in the past few years). To exemplify this, once again, in this film, Kiarostami put me at the verge of tears.
It happened towards the end, when the director meets up with the two girls washing dishes in the river who’ve both lost most of their families, and they smile while relaying their harrowing stories, as if they can’t comprehend what has happened. Now, I realize that what caused my reaction was the incredibly disconcerting juxtaposition: the playful smiles and the horrific stories. But beyond that, the film seems to have an enormous, unspoken ambivalence towards an idea that’s expressed in what I understand is an alternate title (but was the main title given on the transcript I read from): And Life Goes On. This is an inherently optimistic notion, and that optimism is expressed in the employment of music I mentioned under the previous spoiler tag; but at the same time, there’s a kind of horror to be viscerally felt in moments like these, and also when several children seem more interested in the upcoming soccer game than the fact that many of their siblings are buried under the rubble.
It reminds me of the bizarre way the old actor shrugs off the disaster, the enormous proportions of which are made clear to us time and time again, with the following (and I’m quoting because I just remembered I still have the transcript): “This disaster has been like a wolf, a hungry one that attacks and goes, devouring the people where he passes by, letting the people live where he has not passed. Not, this is not the work of the Almighty. He wants his servants. That's how I see him.” Although I’m not sure what is meant by the last two sentences (it’s the unclear translation, I think), I find the first part extremely fascinating for the way it exemplifies how people are trying to rationalize and push into the backs of their minds the tragedy, refusing to entertain the notion that God might be responsible, but also apparently unable to accept that it was without meaningful motivation or purpose, that it was not a punishment or lesson, just a senseless, random catastrophe.
And then there’s the whole issue of houses and how the inhabitants of the nicest house in a particular neighborhood, which had been used in the filming of Where Is the Friend’s Home? as the old man’s house, were killed and now, ironically, the old man is actually living there, except he is unable to get in (I suspect there’s a mistranslation somewhere, because that doesn’t make sense in hindsight). There’s something subtly disturbing about the irony of that. For one, it destroys the pleasant, unassuming illusion of the original film with cruel reality. It also has the peculiar effect of simultaneously trivializing the deaths of those people (after all, the most we learn about them comes in the form of a sort of joke) and, strangely, making us acutely aware of them. And that’s really a basic tension underlying much of the film. It’s present in the way that whole neighborhood functions following the disaster; it plays strangely like a sitcom in spite of the underlying tragedy, which just brings us back to that conflict between cheerful vitality and gruesome death. Yet, Kiarostami never gets lost in playing up the grotesqueness of this apparent contradiction; instead, the film is caught between something like a celebration of the tenacity of these people and the kind of horror that I’ve tried to describe.
This will be an inexplicable pronouncement to anybody who didn’t unlock the spoilers (and if you haven’t seen the film, I really think you shouldn’t unlock them), but I also want it to stand for those who haven’t and those who have seen it as my ultimate statement on what it meant to me:
The film is ambivalent in a way and to a degree that is genuinely beyond me. It has a conception of mortality that is so fundamentally and so powerfully conflicted, it transcends the realm of cinematic storytelling or intellectualizing. It’s the pure expression (albeit adorned with a number of auxiliary and corollary concerns, most of which eluded me) of a very deep sense of, simultaneously, love for and fear of people and what they can do, the way they react to things, how they behave in the wake of a tragedy. It’s an immensely powerful statement, all the more so because it’s so oblique and elusive. By lying within the most obscure depths of the film, beneath the sometimes mundane, sometimes overwhelmingly emotional moments of which it’s comprised, the statement allows Kiarostami’s film to simultaneously articulate its ideas devastatingly (as I’ve outlined above, albeit in a form devoid of rhyme or reason, as the film’s scattershot structure demands) through the vehicle of emotional intuition (rather than logic) while it also maintains that air of mystery that made me fall in love with art cinema years ago. I was a little skeptical when zedz included this film (which I knew only by reputation to be a false documentary wherein Kiarostami seeks out the boy from
Where Is the Friend’s Home? after an earthquake) high on his Films of Faith list, but I now find I couldn’t agree more. In a way that I haven’t experienced in ages, the film is like a temple. It’s a domain into which I can step for ninety minutes or so and be confronted with the wonders and the horrors of humanity when faced with mortality. And as a nonreligious person, I can appreciate it as an immensely great humanist document to rival the canonical works of faith. In spite of its unavailability on home video (at least, with English subtitles) I strongly urge everyone who hasn’t yet to seek this out. At this point, I’m out of superlatives, but it’s really a thing to be experienced.
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Well, that turned out to be rather more lengthy than I had initially expected! I guess I’ll take up a little more space to thank zedz for initially bringing this film to my attention and swo for inspiring me to watch it for this project (lousy viewing circumstances be damned!). I’ll have to watch it once more before submitting my list because there really is too much in it that I haven’t yet managed to comprehend for me to feel totally secure in placing it as high on my list as I expect I’m going to (you may have noticed that I failed to mention what everyone else does, the final shot; and the simple reason for that is that, while it made me smile from ear to ear, I couldn’t even begin to explain what it means).
Wrong Move most likely still has it beat, if only because I’m hesitant to place a new discovery ahead of a movie that, like I said, I feel I’ve grown with (and realistically, since the whole system of ranking is arbitrary anyway, value over time is probably a better reason to give one thing the edge over another than any other reason I can think of).
In the meantime, I’m also scouring my local library (which, having just started living here a few months ago, I didn’t realize had as fantastic a DVD collection as it does) for anything that shows the slightest hint of being a road movie. Once I’ve created enough of a backlog, I’ll start dumping my capsule write-ups on these blind-viewings. (And it’s announcements like that, ladies and gentlemen, that are the first steps in transforming a list project into your own personal blog!
)