A True/False Poto and Cabengo: twins were raised without ever being let out of the house or taught anything useful (such as language), then are set free by a social worker, who locks the dad into his own house until he agrees to cut it out. Outside, the sisters meet other kids their age, including a boy who fishes for girls with an apple on a string. Rosenbaum liked it.
Part one was a straightforward drama, part two was a reenactment of events that took place after filming that drama, and part three is a reenactment of the filming of part two, whew.
It spins off into a side drama, as the actors cast as And Life Goes On‘s newlyweds know each other – Hossein wants to marry Tahereh, her family says no, and she won’t say anything at all. After filming he follows her and… something happens in extreme-wide-shot which I simply couldn’t make out on the VHS when I first watched this, but seemed clearer now, before Godfrey Cheshire further complicated it.
Or possibly all three Koker movies were made to explore AK’s deep interest in homework, and we’d more accurately call it the Homework Quadrilogy.
Watched all the box set extras. The included Cinema de Notre Temps episode is fantastic, a precursor to 10 on Ten. Crew follows him around as he drives familiar routes and looks for people he knows and interacts with random pedestrians. He finds the Friend’s Home kids yet again, catches up with the star of The Traveler, and teases them all about their acting… talks about truth and fiction, philosophically and in the specifics of his films.
A city filmmaker is driving post-earthquake with his kid – per the commentary this is a re-enactment of a trip the director made with his son in the days after the quake – talking to his son with more patience and respect than young Ahmed ever got in the previous movie. For the first half hour they don’t give away the reason for the trip, then he finds a guy from Koker and shows a picture of Ahmed.
So we’re in a new fiction film responding to real events that involve the previous fiction film – but it gets more complicated. “A film has its own truth.” They find the guy who played the slow hunchback in part one, now playing “himself” with his house still standing after the quake, but he breaks character and calls this his “movie house,” says his real house was destroyed and he lives in a tent.
The kid, not understanding the scope of the situation, wants to buy a coke then complains that it’s warm. Later, to a mourning mother: “your daughter’s lucky she died – she’ll never have to do homework.” But the kid getting distracted from his dad’s trip and wanting to hang with some locals and watch soccer gives the movie its title: “The World Cup comes once every four years, and life goes on.”
One of the blu extras opens with an admiring quote from the other AK. Kiarostami made some 200 advertisements before working on features, and he supervised road repairs, which makes a lot of sense.
Re-enactments upon re-enactments! A decade after watching Kandahar, I’m on a new Kiarostami kick but still haven’t seen most of Makhmalbaf’s work. I’m assuming the meta-cinema ideas came from A.K. via Close-Up, though Makhmalbaf had made a semi-autobiographical feature before then, and a couple of cine-referential features since.
The online synopses say the director tracked down the policeman he’d stabbed as a teenager, but the movie opens with the policeman coming to Mohsen’s house. After a casting call the two men select their young selves, tell the young actors their own stories, then figure out how to stage the big event, leading to the big final freeze-frame which became the movie’s poster and original title (Bread and Flower).
Honestly a documentary about homework, interviewing kids about their homework in order to make points about schooling and parenting. AK discusses not knowing what kind of movie he’s making at the beginning (“it’s not really a film, more a piece of research”), and at the end he breaks up the format to engage more deeply with a boy who didn’t want to be interviewed.
Two kids’ ambitions:
During the interviews (the central bulk of the movie) he cuts to the cameraman really frequently, presumably for sound edits. My main takeaway was the kids answering yes/no questions with a clicking sound, which I like even more than the “mmm!”-with-head-nod I picked up from anime.
“Isn’t this the same movie you watched last night,” said K when I put on Where Is The Friend’s House the night after this. Besides a couple of distinct Friend’s House references (the dickhead teacher in the opening scene, the guy inside a tree) I’m pretty sure there was some White Balloon (finding tools to retrieve money from under the street). An extremely specific kind of weird thing, in which the director plays “himself” as both a Canadian and Iranian, and his selves and cities swap and merge. Of course I love it.
Mouseover for the reverse angle:
Toothache (1983)
I hurt my tooth on a potato chip, so what better time to catch up on some early Kiarostami films. I’ve had the Koker blu box set for a couple years now, so it’s time to watch that, but first checking out the films he made just before Where Is The Friend’s House.
This would be a completely uninteresting educational short – first half follows a kid who doesn’t like to brush his teeth, and second half is a lecture from his dentist. The one thing that gives it an edge is that during the entire dental lecture you can hear the kid and other patients squealing and crying while getting poked and drilled.
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Fellow Citizen (1983)
Stress-inducing condensed hour at work with a traffic guard tasked with preventing people from driving into the city center unless they have a permit or a special exception. Guess what, it turns out every single automobile driver in the city is a very special person with very special circumstances who deserves to be let through. Our guy lets them all through but feels increasingly taken advantage of and starts denying access more and more, among nonstop yelling and honking. Ends with a pure frustration montage set to the most psych-rock song of any Kiarostami film.
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First Graders (1984)
After an attendance-taking intro, we spend the day in the principal’s office doing conflict resolution. Unlike the people at the traffic stop, the participants here seem unaware of the camera. They are little kids with undeveloped concepts of right, wrong, truth, etc., and you can see their big puzzled thinking faces in closeup. Halfway through, the camera unexpectedly follows the kid on crutches home, getting a bicycle lift from his dad. Overall some suspiciously posed/staged camera angles for a straight doc. It also follows an American Beauty plastic bag, as AK keeps changing his mind about what kind of movie to make.
The second half of this week’s Panahi double-feature puts another girl in a basic situation with higher potential danger – this time she’s been left behind at school and has to figure out which bus to take home. Unfortunately this girl has a shrill-little-kid voice that gets on my nerves, and the busy streets and bus stations don’t make for as warm a viewing experience. But halfway through the drama, the girl quits acting and goes home with her mic still on, so Panahi bowfingers her voyage home to complete his movie. Each half ends up pretty good, but the rupture in the middle is groundbreaking.
Little girl in Tehran wants to buy a new year’s goldfish even though her family has a goldfish pond, gets a few bucks and hits a series of obstacles, mainly in the form of adults (street performers, shopkeepers) with confusing motives. Her older brother finds her, but the money has fallen down a street grate and they need help reaching it. Unbelievable movie, almost entirely because of this girl’s big and real reactions.
