AND LIFE GOES ON (73)

Directed by: Abbas Kiarostami (1992)

Starring: Farhad Kheradmand, Puya Payvar, Hossein Rezai

The Pitch: A film director (i.e. Kiarostami) journeys with his small son to an earthquake-ravaged region to find out if the stars of his (i.e. Kiarostami's) "Where is My Friend's House?" are still alive.

Theo Sez: Less convoluted (and stimulating) than THROUGH THE OLIVE TREES, less cerebral and more pedagogical, as befits a film produced by the "Institute for the Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults" : the line between Life and Art remains intriguingly blurred (i.e. we don't know if the people onscreen are only acting or really telling us their stories), but mostly this is a straightforward, quasi-documentary illustration - as befits a film dedicated to the victims of Iran's 1990 earthquake, and affirmed by the English-language title - that, even in a disaster zone, Life does in fact go on. What makes it special is the matter-of-factness, the various survivors never patronised or "plucky" (though a couple of classical-music interludes over shots of ruins veer uncomfortably close to fake Poetry) but remaining always the stubborn, naturally courteous, sometimes exasperating denizens of Kiarostami's world - a place, like de Sica's Rome in BICYCLE THIEVES, of chance meetings, open endings and an over-riding equanimity that's either very cruel or very tranquil (or, of course, both). It's not easy to pin down the peculiar innocence of this director's style, the way he doesn't quite reflect reality while somehow distilling it, or even his relationship to his subjects, the (seemingly) artless villagers who seem both to be opening their hearts and keeping their distance from this "outsider" (whose films they can't even see unless they trek to the big city). It's actually a strange kind of film-making, transparently honest yet detached, leaving things out as if half-formed - and perhaps the key moment here comes early on, when the little boy, playing lazily in the back seat of the car, plaits his hands together in a makeshift frame then gazes through it, one eye shut : the child as film director. And, the movie as a whole seems to suggest, vice versa.