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.
The first thing you see in Through the Olive Trees is a man introducing himself as “Mohammad Ali Keshavarz, the actor who plays the director. The other actors are all locals. We’re in Koker, about 250 miles, no, 220 miles north of Tehran….” As his exposition continues, you might wonder if you’re watching a documentary or a narrative film, but the answer is both and neither—you’re watching an Abbas Kiarostami film so you can expect a lot of playing with the boundaries of reality and fiction, life as it is lived and life as captured on film.
Through the Olive Trees is the third film in the Koker Trilogy (a designation Kiarostami didn’t invent, but which he didn’t reject either), three films unified not only by their filming locations (the Koker region in northern Iran, bordering on the Caspian Sea), but also by overlapping story lines. Through the Olive Trees centers on the filming of the second film in the trilogy, And Life Goes On. That film is about the search for the boy who played the lead role in the first film, Where Is the Friend’s House?, after the area is devasted by an earthquake (a real event that happened in 1990, although perhaps also a metaphor for the disruptions of the 1979 Iranian revolution). For another connection between the second and third films, one of the central characters in Through the Olives Trees was orphaned by the earthquake that occurred before the events in And Life Goes On.
Besides the difficulties of making a film in a region severely damaged by an earthquake—many people are living in tents and cooking over campfires, and assistant director Mrs. Shiva (Zarifeh Shiva) spends a lot of time ferrying people from place to place—there’s plenty of drama behind the scenes in Through the Olive Trees. Chief among those is that the actors (Hossein Rezai and Tahereh Ladanian) playing the key roles in the scene whose filming is the focus of this film have a history that’s interfering with their ability to play the scene as directed.
Kiarostami has said he saw his job as making half of a movie, leaving the audience to create the other half. That’s one of the reasons why I love his films, he was criticized for that approach, with some people saying he was making films to win prizes at international festivals rather than to communicate with the Iranian people. To be fair, his films are not the kind of thing to sell a lot of tickets at the multiplex in any country, but they’re very well-regarded by people who enjoy films that are a bit different. And although they’re often featured in festivals and play at theaters that specialize in non-commercial film, they’re not conventional arthouse movies either.
Saying a director makes “festival films” could be taken as an accusation similar to saying someone’s movies are Oscar bait, but I think there’s an important difference. Kiarostami developed a distinctive approach to filmmaking and ignores many filmmaking conventions typical of succeessful Western movies (and has said that he avoided watching other directors’ films to avoid being influenced by them). Oscar bait is the opposite: it’s a label for films that are manufactured from combinations of elements and conventions harvested from previous films that have been successful and often lack any reason for existing other than the desire to win awards. | Sarah Boslaugh
Spine #: 992
Technical details: 103 min.; color; screen ratio 1.66:1; Persian.
Edition reviewed: DVD (1 disc).
Extras: 2018 video interview with Ahmad Kiarostami, son of the director; 2018 video discussion between scholar Jamsheed Akrami and critic Godfrey Cheshire on Kiarostami’s Koker Trilogy.
Fun Fact: Kiarostami used mostly nonprofessionals in his films, but made an exception in this one. Mohamad Ali Keshavarz has 74 acting credits listed in the Internet Movie Database, from the comedy Night of the Hunchback (1965) to Child of Morning (2011), a biography of Ayatollah Khomeini. Among his best-known roles are that of the pompous school principal in Bahram Beyzaie’s Downpour (1972) and the domineering Hadji Amou in Mohammad Reza Aslani’s Chess of the Wind (1976).
Parting Thought: One reason I enjoy Kiarostami’s films is because he respects the humanity of all his characters. They have different stations and roles in the world of the film, yet whether they are male or female, rich or poor, children or adults or elderly people, they all have something to say and take their chance to say it. Verbal negotiations are a regular feature of his films, as people with different levels of power meet as equals in the realm of speech and the quality of argument matters more than a person’s station in life. This seems like it should be an ordinary feature of a decent human society, so why isn’t it more commonly portrayed in American films?
