In this golden age of home viewing, the Criterion Collection still provides some of the best editions of the best movies ever released, usually with a rich selection of extras and often including audio commentaries (a feature they pioneered, and perhaps the greatest gift ever to film students and cinephiles alike). This column features one Criterion release per week, based entirely on where my interests lead me.
Director Amir Naderi chose the right name for his 1984 film The Runner, because it’s all about movement, from racing street children to crashing ocean waves to the airplanes and sea-going ships that fascinate the film’s central character, the young orphan boy Amiro (Madjid Niroumand). Amiro himself is constantly on the go, whether he’s hustling for small change, defending himself against those who would take advantage of him, or just having fun with the loose pack of boys who are similarly scraping out a living in the Iranian port city of Abadan. It’s a good thing he keeps moving, because the waterfront is a rough place that could easily eat him alive.
Amiro tries a number of different ways to make money. When we first meet him, he’s one among many desperate children and adults fishing through the trash dump looking for things to sell, and when a fight breaks out no one is surprised that the stronger party gets what he wants while the weaker gets nothing. Then he tries collecting bottles from the ocean in a crate mounted on an inner tube, only to have other boys steal some of what he collected. After that, he tries selling ice water from a bucket, and doing shoe repairs and shoe shines, each of which comes with built-in risks. Amiro lives in an abandoned ship he’s decorated with magazine photos of airplanes, which like ships fascinate him with their size and ability to go places—but since he’s never gone to school, he can’t read the stories in the magazines, just look at the pictures.
Naderi doesn’t supply any back story in The Runner, preferring instead to always stay in the present moment with our young hero. He’s busy trying to survive in a dog-eat-dog world where both adults and other children are more than willing to steal from a child, but that world also supplies intense joys and sometimes, just sometimes, the little guy wins.
For the most part Amiro lives in a world of boys, with men playing only a marginal role (more often than not as a malign presence) and girls and women are basically non-existent. That may be due in part to censorship (many Iranian films of the time have children as central characters because of the many rules concerning filming adult women) but it could also be a reflection of the life of a kid who is basically raising himself in a world where boys have considerably more freedom than girls.
Niroumand, a non-professional like most of the cast (Naderi spotted him in a newspaper photograph), is crucial to making this film work. The film is constructed more as a series of episodes than as a conventional story with a logical progression, and it’s the magnetic presence of Niroumand that holds them together. Niroumand appeared in one more film by Naderi, Water, Wind, Dust (1989), then left Iran for Norway and later the United States, where he became an educational administrator.
Amiro is something of a precursor to the young version of Dev Patel’s character in Slumdog Millionaire (2008), except that The Runner lacks the poverty tourism and imposed palatability that I found so off-putting in Danny Boyle’s film. Also, we don’t see a grown-up Amiro (and thus lack the assurance that he even makes it to adulthood), because Naderi is concerned with the portraying details of his young protagonist’s life as it happens rather than treating his childhood as a precursor to a story about adults.
The other thing that really makes The Runner work is the beautiful, unfussy cinematography of Firooz Malekzadeh. You can practically taste the salt of the sea and feel the sun on your face as Amiro races through his days, but the muted palette and run-down nature of the waterfront where he lives keep the film from becoming a live-action travel poster. Some of Malekzadeh’s shots are brilliant—a silhouette of Amiro set against a distant oil tanker comes immediately to mind—and the closing sequence is amazing. Malekzadeh is particularly fond of long shots taking in the landscape and the sky, the scale reminding you just how small this boy is. | Sarah Boslaugh
Spine #: 1211
Technical details: 90 min.; color; screen ratio 1.37:1; Persian.
Edition reviewed: DVD (1 disc)
Extras: 2023 interview of Amir Naderi by filmmaker Ramin Bahrani; 2022 conversation with actor Madjid Niroumand, Naderi, and programmer Bruce Goldstein; Naderi’s 1974 short film “Waiting” (47 min.), with an afterword by the director; short essay film “Where Do You Stand Today, Amir Naderi?” made by Naderi for a career retrospective at the Centre Pompidou in Paris; illustrated booklet with essay by Ehsan Khoshbakht.
Fun Fact: The Runner is set in Abadan, Naderi’s childhood home, but due to the Iran-Iraq War (1980-1988) was shot in a different port city, Bandar Abbas, on the Strait of Hormuz.
Parting Thought: The Runner was made over 40 years ago, yet it does not feel dated at all, which I might be tempted to attribute to his neorealistic style. However, much as I love the great Italian Neorelism films, they are much more rooted in a specific time and place than is The Runner, so what is it about Naderi’s film that gives it this timeless quality?
