THROUGH THE OLIVE TREES (74)

Directed by: Abbas Kiarostami (1994)

Starring: Hossein Rezai, Zarifeh Shiva, Tahereh Ladanian

The Pitch: In a small village in rural Iran, a film-shoot is complicated by the real-life attraction of the two amateur protagonists.

Theo Sez: On the surface - with its slow pace, self-referential doodling, inconclusive counterpointing of real and movie-real, determinedly unadorned look and wilfully obscure ending - this acclaimed movie seems a prime candidate for the Emperor's-New-Clothes syndrome. Fortunately, like all the films (that I've seen) from the current Iranian flowering, its main feature is not self-importance or even the appearance of profundity but above all an unpretentious humanism : even the rigorous, austere style - long takes, an often-static camera, and a preference for showing only part of a scene (only one participant in a conversation, say), letting the rest happen offscreen - forces us to concentrate on people and places, these stubborn unpredictable peasants in their rocky hills (which, by the time the film ends, you may well feel you've spent half a lifetime in - but in a good way). The emphasis on documentary-like images - what you might call "reality", at least if this weren't a movie - goes well with the film's theme, which is (probably) the impossibility of capturing real life through Art : just as the makers of the film-within-a-film (which is Kiarostami's own AND LIFE GOES ON) inevitably change the depiction of the villagers' lifestyle to fit their own urbanite vision of what peasant life should be like, so their protagonist's offscreen passion for his co-star is inevitably blurred and curtailed by the process of being captured on film (i.e. this film, the one we're watching), the elaborate final shot - a POV of the actor playing "the director" - gradually reducing the couple to near-invisibility (in the same way, perhaps, that their passion will gradually and inevitably be diminished in our minds as memory of the film fades - for what's a film after all but its director's POV?). The trick, of course, is that it's impossible to say whether these actors are playing versions of themselves or just characters with the same names as themselves - whether we're actually seeing a version (however flawed) of reality, or an out-and-out fiction ; the film's charm is that it makes such weighty questions seem intriguing but more or less subsidiary. It demands patience, but all in all it's a happy experience - and surprisingly entertaining.