Throughout the trilogy, Kiarostami keeps allowing people’s identities to fluctuate (for instance, a major character in one film might be an extra in another), with lines between scripted and “found” roles consciously blurred. This instability cumulatively communicates the changes wrought by the passage of time, and so the characters’ shifting identities render them more lifelike than the cemented stereotypes of TV shows and conventional movie sequels. Yet amid this fluctuation is the seeming permanency of that zig-zag trail, of a grove of olive trees, of a porch outside a fierce grandmother’s home, of landscapes that embody the Sisyphean comedy of everyday travails that come to mean everything.
The loose narratives of these three films offer another sort of permanency, as they all concern a variation of the same plot, following a protagonist who’s thwarted in his quest to communicate a message to another party. And none of these protagonists achieve their quest the way they had imagined, and this frustration acquaints them with the mystery and majesty of the quotidian of their lives, allowing them to integrate with their society.
In Where Is the Friend’s House?, Kiarostami spins one of the greatest of all films out of a child’s urge to return a notebook to his classmate. Dramatizing this dilemma, Kiarostami offers a tapestry of life, revealing how the domestic textures of Koker embody its class issues and politics. Trying to find his friend, Ahmad (Babak Ahmadpour) navigates multiple definitions of authority and varying generations of his family and neighbors. At first, Ahmad regards adults as impediments to his generosity, though the boy gradually comes to see that these men and women have their own vulnerabilities, which Kiarostami expresses in images of rapt beauty. The filmmaker renders common acts, such as an elderly craftsman’s task of taking off his shoes by his doorway, as emotionally revelatory moments of process.
And Life Goes On and Through the Olive Trees are wilder and more free-wheeling than Where Is the Friend’s House?, pondering the ramifications of the earlier film’s existence. In And Life Goes On, a filmmaker (Farhad Kheradmand) clearly modeled on Kiarostami searches for the children who appeared in Where Is the Friend’s House in the wake of the real-life earthquake that devastated Koker in 1990. In Through the Olive Trees, another Kiarostami stand-in (Mohammad Ali Keshavarz) shoots And Life Goes On, getting stuck on a vignette that reveals the real romantic tensions between two of his moonlighting non-actors. The films nest inside one another, freeing Kiarostami from the (comparatively) traditional plotting of Where Is the Friend’s House? With this freedom, Kiarostami creates sequences that are interlocked and isolated at once, existing as stanzas that are both journalistic and figurative.
The tedium of conventional three-act narratives rests in a certain rigidity: Most stories are equations with dilemmas that must be resolved as one might a proof, and to make such equations work, most filmmakers shortchange the spontaneous, ambiguous, sensual textures that are the manna of life. Kiarostami has it both ways, using formal patterns to convey stability, and to give us reassurance of the familiar, while abandoning plots to pursue his more original fancies. In And Life Goes On, there’s a powerfully pragmatic and intimate scene where a husband (Hossein Rezai) explains he and his wife’s need to marry in the face of tragedy, as well as a moment of profound insight in which a young man explains his need to watch the World Cup even among the ruins wrought by the earthquake. And in Through the Olive Trees, there’s a poignant yet piercingly unsentimental moment in which an illiterate villager pleads for the necessity of intermarrying between the rich and poor. Desperate to transcend himself, he’s both classist and self-loathing, willing to breed his people out of existence.
Above all, Kiarostami’s intermixing of fact, fiction, and metatextual confessional affords him and his audience space. These films have dozens of extraordinary moments in which narrative and time seemingly freeze to allow us to register characters’ complex reactions to common stimuli. Some of these sequences are simple and rapturous, such as a close-up of a soda bottle as a boy buys it from a store deserted in the wake of the earthquake; others are troubling and profoundly moving, such as a lingering medium shot of Ahmad as it dawns on him that he has his friend’s notebook, which could get the friend expelled. In the latter scene, we see the crystallization of this boy’s morality as well as his calculation of the perils of honoring it, and Kiarostami accords this moment its full weight without rushing along to tend to the plot. The true story of the Koker trilogy are such poetic moments of extremity, ones that seemingly arise out of nowhere and force us to reckon with the tenor of our existence.
Image/Sound
Criterion’s restoration and promotion of these films, given their relative obscurity in the West, is good news in itself, though the better news is the formal magnitude of these transfers. The images are pristine, with vibrant and varied colors and healthy grit. The textures of characters’ faces and of Koker’s natural landscapes are stunning, especially the rugged mountains and trees. The soundtracks are also impressive, particularly underscoring Kiarostami’s masterful use of diegetic sounds to establish a sense of place—especially the noises made by domestic animals and machines, such as construction equipment and cars. Dialogue is clear, unless it’s not meant to be, and music is rendered with clarity and a becoming lightness of body.
Extras
These extras offer a wonderful examination of the films in the trilogy and their larger cultural context. For a wide-reaching discussion of Iran’s political textures, and of Kiarostami’s use of varied perspectives, the new audio commentary on And Life Goes On with Mehrnaz Saeed-Vafa and Jonathan Rosenbaum, co-authors of Abbas Kiarostami, makes for invaluable listening that will be especially useful for Western audiences. Complementing the commentary are a variety of new interviews, such as the conversation between scholar Jamsheed Akrami and critic Godfrey Cheshire, in which the men wrestle with Kiarostami’s style and the use of the word “trilogy,” and an incisive discussion with scholar Hamid Naficy. Meanwhile, another new interview with Kiarostami’s son, Ahmad, offers a more personal perspective, while a 2015 interview with Kiarostami himself abounds in choice descriptions, such as his approach to non-actors: “They were not acting, they were living in front of the camera.”
A 1994 documentary, Abbas Kiarostami: Truths and Dreams, follows the filmmaker in Koker after the trilogy’s completion, and nearly functions as a sequel to the original films. Even better, Kiarostami’s 1989 documentary Homework is included here; it’s essential for helping to elaborate on the evolution that his filmmaking process was undergoing at this time. (Another critical film in Kiarostami’s canon, Close-Up, was a pivotal influence on And Life Goes On and Through the Olive Trees, and is prominently mentioned by many of the writers on this set.) Rounding out this essential collection of extras is a booklet featuring an essay by Chesire that beautifully encapsulates the complex humanist structure of these classic films.
Overall
This magnificent set of essential restorations, accompanied by passionate and well-researched supplements, is a strong contender for Blu-ray release of the year.
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