over there
by Douglas Messerli
Abbas Kiarostami (writer and director) خانه دوست کجاست (Khane-ye doust kodjast) Where
Is the Friend’s Home? / 1987
Like many of
Abbas Kiarostami works, Where Is the
Friend’s Home? (I prefer the translation, Where Is My Friend’s House?) has the slightest of plots. A young
boy, Mohamed Reda Nematzadeh (Ahmed Ahmedpour) gets into trouble in school when
he shows up for the second time with his homework missing in his notebook. The
teacher tells him that next time he will be expelled, and the young child
breaks into uncontrollable tears, much to the disconcertion of his fellow
classmates, particularly Mohamed’s friend, Ahmed (Babek Ahmedpour).
Mohamed, from the outlying village of
Koker, and is often late arriving at school, and we immediately know that in
the very isolation of the village he must suffer other difficulties as well.
Indeed, we gradually perceive, all of
these children must take on responsibilities at home that, despite their
parents’ insistence that they do their homework, makes it difficult for them to
achieve. Even Ahmed, living in a middle class home, is forced to help with his
mother’s new baby, tending to its needs
and rocking the child whenever it cries. He also is expected to daily go out to
purchase the family’s bread. When he finally settles down to do his homework,
he discovers that he has accidentally also taken home his friend’s notebook
home, the fact of which he attempts to explain to his parents, who refuse to
listen. Accordingly, Ahmed goes on his own journey to faraway Koker to find his
friend and return his notebook.
The significance of this film is his
pluck and determination to find Mohamed in a world which seems to have no real
streets and in which houses are hidden.
An early passerby tells the boy that Mohamed
lives “over there” in the house with the blue door. But the boy (and the camera
that follows him) has no concept of where “over there” might be, as if it might
be a Samuel Beckett stage direction; and many of the houses he does find have
blue doors.
Indeed, before film’s end, doors and
windows become a kind of subtheme in this work, as Ahmed later meets a door and
window maker, who also has difficulty in telling him where his friend’s family
lives, despite his declaration that he has made most the doors and windows for
the houses in the village.
When Ahmed finally seems to have found
the right house, there is no one home. Another family invites him in to share
their dinner, and there he finally does the homework assignment in his friend’s
notebook in order to save the boy from being expelled.
What we perceive is that these
children, encouraged as they are to become educated, are being abused by parents who are quick to
involve them in adult duties. Certainly, there is no playtime allowed in their
world.
Yet, the children seem obedient and
uncomplaining. If nothing else, they are a hardy lot, proven, quite simply, by
the long voyage Ahmed undergoes for his friend’s sake. And the caring and
loyalty these two boys show for one another gives strong evidence to their
moral values. Despite the seeming harshness of their lives, the director
suggests, their parents have somehow imbued them with lessons of civic duty and
instilled in them a need to be responsible for their acts. Indeed, Ahmed’s
late-evening voyage is an act almost of heroism, where he has been willing to
enter a strange new land in search of his suffering friend to save him. Without
an education, we must remember, there will be no successful future for this
village boy.
In the end, accordingly, we do not feel
the necessity of judging either the parents or the two boys, but simply join
the boy on his voyage, observing the very different worlds into the film takes us. Both adults and children live
somewhat harsh lives in this isolated section of Iran, which makes it all the
more amazing that these children want to learn, even if the method of rote
recitation might be questionable as the best method of education.
Kiarostami obviously became enchanted with
the mysterious Koker, where things seem to go up and down rather than spiral
out into orderly streets and avenues, and he devoted his next two films, And Live Goes On and Through the Olive Trees to the same
northern Iran village, creating what critics have described as his Koker
trilogy.
Los Angeles,
March 21, 2017
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