GABBEH (53)

Directed by: Mohsen Makhmalbaf

Starring: Abbas Sayahi, Shaghayegh Djodat, Hossein Moharami

The Pitch: A "gabbeh" (traditional Persian carpet) turns into a young girl, who tells an elderly couple the story of her love for a mysterious horseman.

Theo Sez: Even for someone allergic to folkloric movies with beautiful images and a sketchy narrative (Paradjanov's ASHIK KERIB is one of the handful of movies I've actually walked out of), this is undeniably a film of superb visuals - the yellow of billowing wheat-fields, the cobalt-blue of women's head-dresses, myriad lengths of brightly dyed cloth strewn around a palm-tree oasis. The images are not presented self-consciously for our delectation, but are (mostly) tied in with the film's explicit theme - that the essence of Life (and Love, and Death) lies in colours, the building-blocks of Nature, so that a colourful "gabbeh", a representation of Life, is itself able to come alive ; trouble is, the world it comes alive in isn't particularly bewitching, its rather abstract peasants far less memorable than the stubborn folk who populate Kiarostami movies - you might say it's the difference between humanism and mere anthropology. It's a placid, uninvolving, occasionally obscure film (when the old man complains that his wife never gave him any babies, and she presents him with a goat saying "There's your baby", you're unsure if it's meant to be a joke or something Very Deep) ; it's a rough equivalent to a poem by one of those unknown Third World poets who occasionally win the Nobel Prize for Literature - very admirable in a rather technical sort of way, but heavy with the feeling that it must have worked better in the original.