1997. Dir:
Abbas Kiarostami.
Context:
In its tackling of a subject (suicide) that remains a distinct taboo with the cultural boundaries of Islamic Iran, the film can be seen as one of Kiarostami's most directly provocative acts.
Mohsen Makhmalbaf's 1990 film
The Nights of Zayandeh-Rood had previously dealt with this topic but was promptly banned, never to be screened publically again since its festival premiere.
Kiarostami has several times said the genesis of the film was influenced by a quote from Romanian philosopher Emil Cioran ("
If it wasn't for the possibility of suicide, I would have killed myself long ago"), but it is possible to also infer personal and autobiographical elements (related for example to the long slow terminal illness his father had to endure which deeply marked Kiarostami, but also perhaps to some suicidal feelings of his own although this is speculative as he has remained cryptic on this matter), with the film's idea seemingly having been in Kiarostami's head for a long time. Shooting finally begun in 1996.
The film shows the influence of the poetry and philosophy of
Omar Khayyam, whom Kiarostami has often spoken about, admiring the precision and succinctness of his poems which manage to celebrate life while constantly being aware of death. The shadow of
Sadegh Hedayat, the modernist writer who himself committed suicide and was deeply influenced by Khayyam in his work, can also be felt. One particular quatrain by Khayyam was a source of inspiration to Kiarostami for this film:
The cloud came and wept on the greenness
Oh rose-hued wine, there is no living without you;
This green is our pleasure ground today,
But whose pleasure ground will be the green springing from our dust?
The green here reminds of the video epilogue of the film (which could be possibly read as a vision of paradise too?).
The shooting was a rough ride, Kiarostami suffering a car accident later in 1996 which prevented him for working for a few months, and then some of the negative accidentally burning meaning certain scenes had to be reshot in 1997. Its last-minute permission in getting sent to the Cannes festival for its premiere (despite its sensitive subject matter and not previously having been shown at the
Fajr Film Festival as it should have been) is also a well-known story.
The Film:
The film's structure consists of alternation between the main conversations with different characters and the driver (Mr Badei) and periods of silence, essentially allowing us to think about the meaning of the previous conversations. Marco Della Grossa has done an analysis of this structure, timing the various segments (See p124 in Elena).
We are told nothing about Mr Badei, who he is and what might have led him to want to commit suicide. Therefore we are in some way alienated from emotionally identifying with him. This is relevant to the film's technique which Laura Mulvey has described as using 'the uncertainty principle' in Sight & Sound, that is drawing our curiosity in by leaving us uncertain for long spells. This works up right until the end which also leaves us uncertain and without a clear resolution.
Kiarostami's motif of filming within cars is very much on display here and reaches its high-point (at least until
Ten) with almost all the film being inside a car. Badei meanders around the roads of the outskirts of Tehran, often going around in circles (moving without really getting anywhere), rather than in a linear trajectory. This car motif here merges with Kiarostami's tendency for repetition (especially in the structure, see first paragraph above).
As in so many of his films, a journey is central here, but unlike those of his archetypal characters which end up teaching them a lesson and bearing fruit despite an uncertain/unplanned final destination, here it is far less obvious whether Mr Badei's journey takes him anywhere or bears any philosophical fruit within him.
The three central meetings/conversations Mr Badei has are with three characters of particular symbolic resonance, partly for their professions (soldier, seminarian, ordinary taxidermist) and their ethnic backgrounds (Kurd, Afghan, Turk). The three men are, in contrast to Badei, from underprivileged backgrounds, as well as marginalised ethnic groups.This, and the mention of wars, pulls back what is in many ways an abstract philosophical fable into a very concrete political context. (Some critics see in Badei a direct negation of the self-sacrifice of the soldiers during the Iran-Iraq War, whose only way of proving their existence was through death. Here Badei wishes to reclaim his own stake and control over death.)
The function of the Afghan seminary student is, partly at least, to pre-empty the kind of religious criticisms which Kiarostami knew would inevitably be levelled at the film's mention of suicide, by figuring them in the film first.
The in-car conversations are always shown in a kind of shot/reverse-shot and never in the film do we see Badei together with any of the 3 interlocutors in the same shot (in fact they were shot separately, the shots of the 3 people being filmed with Kiarostami actually in the driver seat asking questions which were then removed in post-production).
The earth seems to take up all the on-screen room in the frame, leaving hardly any for the sky. This earth constantly reminds of the idea of burial, and its ochre-yellow colour has associations with desolation and depression in Iranian cultural symbolism.
The theme of solidarity (one that echoes in importance with the allegorical depiction of a multi-ethnic Iranian society) comes up again, as it did in
Life and Nothing More, but Badei unlike that film's protagonist cannot learn the lesson. He is already too detached, pained and distant to be touched by the help he is given by workers in pulling out his car. Does he even thank them or acknowledge them? (Check). This theme can also be seen in Kiarostami's script for
Crimson Gold, where the pizza deliveryman does show solidarity in his distribution of the pizzas.
The video epilogue (Kiarostami's first instance of DV use which in the 2000s he would adopt completely), which Kiarostami only though of after several months of thinking over, must be seen as a natural progression of the rest of film rather than an added-on afterthought. It is possible to read in it some religious connotations, specifically linking to the verses of the Quran describing the Day of Judgment, in its imagery of clouds (seen in the film) and storm (heard) and of a trumpet-call blowing (the coda begins with the music of Louis Armstrong's trumpet from
St James Infirmary, itself a funereal song which turns into a celebration).
Reception:
