Homework
*** (A must-see)
Both Godard and Kiarostami could be described as creatures of state funding, hence representatives of what Churchill argued a country should fight for and what Newt Gingrich would contend we can and must learn to live without. Interestingly enough, in a letter to the New York Film Critics Circle last January, Godard paid tribute to Kiarostami, lamenting his inability “to force [the] Oscar people to reward Kiarostami instead of Kieslowski.” Without question the best films I saw over three days in Locarno were all by Kiarostami, apart from an untranslated 21-minute film about a leper colony (The Home Is Dark, 1962) by the great Iranian woman poet Forugh Farokhzad (1935-’67), an extraordinary poetic reverie I don’t expect to forget anytime soon.
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It’s too bad that Miramax, which is distributing his most recent feature, Through the Olive Trees, doesn’t agree–or, more precisely, has been ensuring that most Americans won’t know who Kiarostami is. Judging from its behavior, Miramax’s notion of a giant coincides with Gingrich’s–someone who pulls in a profit by any means available, not someone whose art and vision changes the way we experience the world. Not surprisingly, after Miramax unceremoniously dumped Kiarostami’s film–the first and so far only Iranian film ever to receive U.S. distribution–in New York last spring, without any press shows or ads to speak of, most of the press and public ignored it. One of the major art-house programmers in Chicago tried to book the film, only to be told it wasn’t available because Miramax was withdrawing it from distribution. The Film Center did succeed in booking it for two screenings, this Saturday and Sunday, to launch its current Iranian retrospective. (Kiarostami’s documentary Homework, which fortunately isn’t in Miramax’s clutches, will also be shown on both days.) But when the Film Center tried to get a print of Through the Olive Trees early enough to screen for the press–or, barring that, a video for preview purposes–they were less lucky. So to write about it I have to depend on my memories of the film, which I saw twice more than a year ago.
In any event, I can happily report that a year after Through the Olive Trees turned up at Cannes, a first feature by longtime Kiarostami assistant Jafar Panahi, The White Balloon, showed there and won the Camera d’Or. It’s been picked up by October Films, a small but ambitious distributor, and whether the Times reviewer likes it or not, it was so popular in Cannes it’s almost sure to get a commercial run in Chicago. Without being in any sense an imitation of Kiarostami, it has many related virtues. Unfolding in real time, it recounts the comic adventures of a seven-year-old girl in Tehran in the 85 minutes prior to the New Year’s Day festivities, and is easily as good a children’s movie as Babe.
On the surface at least, Homework shows Kiarostami’s documentary methods at their simplest. (It’s the only one of his 16-millimeter features I’ve seen, though there are three others, one of which is also a documentary.) “It’s not a movie in the usual sense,” we hear him saying offscreen to another adult as we see several boys on their way to school. “It’s a research work. It’s a pictorial research on students’ homework.” He goes on to explain that he got the idea to do this while helping his own son with his homework, and shortly afterward we see the boys reciting elaborate religious chants while performing calisthenics outside in what looks like winter weather. (Because the sexes are segregated, no girls are in sight. In fact, we never see any females in the film; we only hear one woman later on, delivering expository narration about questionnaires sent by the filmmakers to the boys’ parents.)
In short, it’s a moment of lyrical beauty as well as a moment of clarification, and the cinema of Kiarostami abounds in such moments. As simple and charming as most of Homework is, it winds up telling us a great deal about Iran in the 90s–everything from what some little boys think of Saddam Hussein in neighboring Iraq to what some Iranian parents think of education in America and Canada. (According to one father interviewed, homework is never assigned at American and Canadian schools.) There’s also the boy who cries during his interview, in part because he’s frightened of the filmmakers. (Kiarostami also reportedly filmed his own son, though it’s unclear whether he appears in the picture.)
