Through the Olive Trees (Film)

1994. Dir: Abbas Kiarostami.

Co-produced with CiBy (France), the Farabi Film Foundation (Iran) and Miramax Films (USA).



Context:

Kiarostami had first noticed some romantic tension on the set of Life and Nothing More..., with Hossein's attempted courting of Tahereh in real-life meeting some hurdles.






The Film:
The film begins with the actor playing the director, Mohammed Ali Keshavaz, directly addressing the camera in front of a crowd of young, chador-chd village women auditioning for the film. One woman asks if the film will be shown in her village and whether there is any point in making the film if it is not shown: Tour last film went out on Channel 2, which we can't get here.' At the outset, the film activates self-reflexive anxiety, not only about the construction of the film artefact but also about who its main audiences are - not rural inhabitants whose earthquake tragedy the crew has come to film, but 'cultural consumers back in Tehran and in cities around the world'.

Hossein is in love with Tahereh in real life and wishes to marry her, although her family have rejected him because he is illiterate and has no house. The film director, acting like a matchmaker, gives Hossein a second chance, potentially enabling life to imitate art.

In numerous retakes, Hossein repeatedly fluffs his line, displaying the complexities involved when art tries to imitate life. The repetition breaks the naturalistic illusion, together with clapperboards [with the title of this film rather than And Life Goes On written on them???] announcing the start of each take and bleeps calling for retakes.

Hossein sees the silver lining behind the earthquake, as a leveller that has put him and Tahereh's family on an equal footing, since their primary (class-driven) complaint against him as possible suitor was his not owning a house, by destroying everyone's houses. He expounds his logic in the truck scene, to the surrogate-Kiarostami... ("The rich should marry the poor, the illiterate the literate, the homeowners the homeless...")

The motif of the zigzag path (from e.g. Where is the Friend's Home? where it recurs several times on a hill, and also arguably the winding roads of Life and Nothing More... especially the finale) appears here too near the end, when Hossein and Tahereh climb up one before entering the olive grove of the final shot.

Events are referred to before they happen. This begins in the prologue, where the fictional director, talking direct to camera, relates that 'actors were hired on location'. Past tense shifts into present tense as we see the actors being hired before our eyes. In another instance, Hossein reports his visit to the cemetery where he sees Tahereh at her parents' grave (they perished in the earthquake), then the scene is dramatised (and filmed). This 'flashback' to the cemetery, where Hossein makes his proposal to Tahereh, happens almost without warning, our only bearing being that we've previously been told of this moment in an earlier (later in time) scene in the film.

Point-of-view shots are rare in New Iranian Cinema; but there is a startling instance of one here in the cemetery, where the camera takes Tahereh's position and shows Hossein as the point of her glance. Later, Hossein reveals, 'Since [you gave me] that look, I've been following you ...'.

Off-screen sound is used, especially (again, a Kiarostami trait) in the car journey scenes, which restrict the audience's view to a POV shot through the windscreen.

A shaky camera that is never quite sure where to stand, a story line that cannot resist departing tangentially, a dialogue that oscillates between a Tehrani accent and the local Gilaki dialect, a fiction that is prohibited by a reality it cannot control, a paradise-like village ravaged by an earthquake and invaded by this oudandish camera crew, a director who while waiting for a new leading man casually leaves his set to mingle with the local children or chat with the cook in his camp, and scores of other, similar ends that release this film and all its narrative boundaries into the surrounding hills of the village are the defining moments of Kiarostami's deliberately free-form mode of storytelling. [Dabashi M&M, 312-3.]

No young woman speaks to a young man in this film. Tahereh in fact epitomizes forbidden speech, which elsewhere is equally present. Young men do not fare much better. There is an absolutely mesmerizing scene where Azim, a local man who was first supposed to play the lead role, finally confides in the director that he cannot talk to Tahereh, "because whenever I talk to a girl, I stutter." This is the ultimate sign of an arrested culture in which an unarticulated sense of fear and shame prohibits the most natural of acts.

The long shot is almost identical to the penultimate sequence of Close-Up, where Kiarostami again instructs his camera and sound crew to stay out of private, and supremely beautiful, moments in people's lives.

Gary Dauphin, in The Village Voice (on 21 February 1995), has brilliantly captured the essence of this hauntingly beautiful shot:

"How Kiarostami weaves together these disparate threads is the film's closing gift to its audience. The last scene is less an ending about Hossein and Tahereh than it is a revelation of what Kiarostami has been doing throughout the film, the image comprising a cinematic gesture so in keeping with his always gende intrusions that to even reveal its existence is to do Kiarostami something of a disservice. Let's just say that much like Hossein's final trip through the grove of the film's tide, getting the point of Olive Trees1 ending requires a certain measure of faith, not so much in Hossein's blind love for Tahereh as in Kiarostami's love of all of them."

[Car motif, relevant for later films] The last shot is even more perceptive if one remembers that Kiarostami's camera has learned to know its limitations and keep its nose out of people's business only after its very opening shot when the camera literally opens into a wall, from which both it and the car that carries it have to turn away as they begin their journey into people's lives. The initial version of this delicately constructed sequence was damaged in a film laboratory, and Kiarostami had to reshoot it. The camera and the cars of the director and the assistant director in fact have similar intrusive functions throughout the film. They always have to negotiate an uncomfortable passageway for themselves into lives and spaces in which they do not belong. 

The ending was changed at the last minute, because of the director's own growing sympathy for his 'character' Hossein, whose importance grew as the production went along, helping Kiarostami shape it into something different than initially intended. (Note that at some point before the end of the shoot he'd described his film as a tale of social injustice and inhibiting traditions, but the final result is something more than this alone, in fact being the closest thing Kiarostami had ever made to a love story thanks to the ending.) Kiarostami's original ending was more pessimistic. Again the film shows the transformative power of cinema, as Kiarostami allows himself to show the ideal ending, the way he would wish real life were, as Tahereh finally (albeit we barely see it from afar) talks to Hossein. The music accompanying this memorable ending is a concerto by Cimarosa.

The extreme-long-shot of the end, where Hossein and Tahereh are reduced to mere dots in the distance, is of course partly down to censorship, but also displays Kiarostami's restraint in getting too close in moments of intimacy (think of the ending of Close-Up for example). It perhaps also indicates uncertainty in its open-endedness as Kiarostami himself knows no more than us of what will become of these two characters, hence adding a layer of real-ness to them. He has merely presented them to us. (But in many ways we know he also manipulates them while shooting, as the repetitive filming scenes show). This goes with the film's hybridity, as half-fiction, half-documentary.

The ending of course, also invites the audience's active participation, in choosing which interpretation or which ending they want to see (glass half-full or half-empty?),

Yet again in the same issue of Film, Naghmeh Samini gave by far the most insightful reading of the concluding scene of Through the Olive Trees, calling it a "magical long shot," and noting how the camera:

in the most sensitive moment, precisely at that instant when because of our previous cinematic experience we expect an answer for all our curiosities and thus share in the emotional climax of the work, the camera shies away from the focal center of contention, and authoritatively imposes its distance on us too. As if it does not consider us intimate enough, or think us worthy of closely witnessing this love poem.

On the same long shot, Ahmad Talebi-Nezhad, in his piece in the December 1994 issue of Film, offered a similar reading, emphasizing, however, that the intimate expression of love—of a sort that could persuade Tahereh to marry Hossein—is simply not permitted in Iranian cinema nowadays, and thus he accounts for the social and political imperatives underlying this hauntingly beautiful long shot. [Dabashi M&M, 292]

Reception:

As for his previous films, Kiarostami was attacked by some quarters of the Iranian press for this one. The magazine Naqd-e cinema accused (once again) him of taking advantage of the tragic earthquake in his filmmaking.

It met warm response at its Cannes screening however. The film was also set to serve as his 'breakthrough' into the US market, where it was shown at NY and Chicago festivals and purchased for distribution by Miramax.