Zire darakhatan zeyton, 1994
[Through the Olive Trees]
A
director, played by an actor (Mohamad Ali Keshavarz), speaks in
aside about a real-life devastating earthquake in rural Iran. The
director has returned to the village of Koker to work on a new film
(an actual Kiarostami film) entitled Life
and Nothing More... (And Life Goes On...).
The young women have been assembled for an open field casting call.
A young woman named Tahereh Ladanian is the first person to catch
the director's eye. The director instructs his assistant, Mrs. Shiva
(Zarifeh Shiva), to take down her name. Later, we see that the young
woman has been cast for the role of a new bride named Tahereh.
Mrs. Shiva drives around the village on the following morning in preparation
for the day's shoot. She goes to Tahereh's house, where the stubborn
young woman insists on wearing an inappropriate party dress for the
shoot. Another stop near the makeshift tent school, and two boys provide
houseplants for the exterior shots of the house. The initial film
takes prove to be a disaster. The leading man, who stutters in the
presence of women, is unable to deliver his lines. Mrs. Shiva is asked
to bring his replacement, an unemployed mason named Hossein (Hossein
Rezai), to the set. But Hossein's arrival proves to be an equally
frustrating challenge for the crew. Tahereh refuses to speak to Hossein,
and the director sends the actors home in order to assess the situation.
Hossein reveals to the director that he has repeatedly proposed to
Tahereh, but her family refuses to give their consent. If she would
only provide a sign to show how she truly felt about him.
By defining the role of cinema as a chronicle of real life, Kiarostami
takes on the role of documenter rather than director. In
Through the Olive Trees, it is the director
(albeit played by an actor) who serves as the interviewer, from the
school children watching behind the barricades, to the dialogue with
Hossein attempting to understand Tahereh's silence, to the encounter
with three generations of provincial women returning from their bath.
In depicting the everyday lives of ordinary people through mundane
conversations and unremarkable actions, he attempts to capture the
essence of the human soul in a way that is honest and contemplative.
But in the process of conveying life in real-time, his films can also
test one's patience. In Through the Olive Trees,
the director shuts off the camera, only to find that the lives of
his actors are far more fascinating off-camera than the characters
that they portray on camera. In the remarkable, long, static shot
that has come to define Abbas Kiarostami's signature ending, Hossein,
unwilling to accept Tahereh's continued silence, follows her down
the hill, through the olive trees, and into the open field, pleading
his case for marriage. The camera lingers as the "couple" are reduced
to floating white dots that seem to focus and disperse into the
beautiful, earthy landscape. It is a hypnotic reflection of the
passage of real-time, and we are reminded that we have witnessed
one mere episode, one fleeting glimpse, of a wondrous phenomenon
called life.
© Acquarello 2000. All rights reserved.
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On
a chaotic and congested highway toll interchange, an off-camera toll
clerk listens impassively to a humanitarian public service radio
broadcast from a Red Crescent spokesperson urging listeners to consider
adoption of the many children who have been left orphaned as a result
of the recent devastating earthquake in northern Iran. An unnamed,
middle-aged film director (Farhad Kheradmand) stops at the tollbooth
and inquires about the condition of the main road to Rudbar, having
been turned back a day earlier at the intermediate town of Manjil
due to the impassability of the route. Accompanied by his son Puya
(Puya Pievar), the director is hoping to reach the village of Koker
in search of the Ahmadpour brothers: two boys who had appeared in
his film, 
An
impassive, middle-aged man drives through the busy urban traffic
of the city, and is approached by several day laborers for hire.
He has a specific task in mind, but drives away without saying
a word. His name is Mr. Badii (Homayon Ershadi), and he is
seeking an assistant for his planned suicide. He stops to ask
strangers about their financial state, surreptitiously
interviewing them for the reprehensible job, but leaves without
declaring his intentions. He offers a ride to a young soldier
(Safar Ali Moradi) on his way back to the barracks. An overhead
crane shot follows their vehicle weaving through the narrow,
unpaved roads as he drives the soldier to a remote basin where
he has dug his burial plot at the foot of a tree. He sees a
filial bond with the soft-spoken young man, having himself
served in the military, and Mr. Badii reveals his plan: the
next day, he asks that the soldier call to him twice. If he
responds, the soldier will save him (and literally help him out
of the hole that he has dug for himself). If he does not answer,
then the soldier will throw twenty spadefuls of earth into the
hole and bury him. The young man is horrified by his plan, and
runs away. Mr. Badii then begins to follow an earth-moving
vehicle and ends up at a closed cement factory occupied by a
security guard (Ahmad Ansari) and a seminarist (Hossein Noori) on
holiday. He attempts to recruit the religious man by appealing
to his compassion, but to no avail. Instead, the gentle seminarist
offers him a receptive ear and teachings from the Koran.
Disappointed, he leaves the factory and comes upon a construction
site, stopping to rest. Note the juxtaposition of Mr. Badii's
shadow against the pouring soil. Eventually, he offers a ride
to a talkative old man named Mr. Bagheri (Abdolhossein Bagheri)
who works at the museum of natural history. Coincidentally,
years earlier, Mr. Bagheri had attempted to commit suicide, but
was inspirited by the presence of mulberries under his feet.
He disapproves of Mr. Badii's plan, but his son's illness compels
him to accept the regrettable assignment.
A
group of men from the city of Tehran traverse the rural Iranian countryside
on a jeep, guided by a set of descriptive, yet unavoidably imprecise
directions, seemingly lost. The driver (Behzad Dourani), respectfully
called "Engineer" by the villagers, eventually encounters his appointed
contact along the side of the road: a gentle, courteous boy named
Farzad (Farzed Sohrabi), whom the Engineer proceeds to instruct with
disseminating false information about their search for treasure in
order to conceal the true and undisclosed nature of their visit to
the Kurdish province. On an introductory tour through town, the Engineer
shows interest in the declining health of Farzad's grandmother, Malek,
an invalid centenarian whose family has been keeping a vigil at the
house as she approaches death. One day, unable to receive a clear
signal from his cell phone in the remote village, the Engineer begins
to drive to higher ground, and reaches a hilltop cemetery to receive
his telephone call. Fragments of his conversation with his producer
reveal that his assignment is associated with providing a chronicle
of events associated with Malek's eventual death. With little to do
in the isolated province, the Engineer spends idle time by frequenting
a quaint tea bar where the proprietress eagerly voices her complaints
to any receptive ear, conversing with a lone ditchdigger named Youssef
who literally throws him a bone, and listening attentively as a schoolteacher
describes the sacred ceremony of scarring that is performed after
a death by the women of the village as a sign of respect and community.
But as the Engineer waits for a specific process of life to unfold
for his documentary task, he also becomes a reverent observer for
all of life's undocumented passages in the small rural village.