THROUGH THE OLIVE TREES (Abbas Kiarostami, 1994)

The following is one of the entries from my 100 Greatest Asian Films list, which I invite you to visit on this site if you haven’t already done so. — Dennis

For Where Is the Friend’s House? (1987) Abbas Kiarostami recruited locals from the rural northern Iranian village of Koker, among them, the Ahmadpour brothers. In Life and Nothing More (1992), an earthquake has razed Koker, prompting the director—Kiarostami’s stand-in—to return to Koker to see if the boys are alive. The film ends without resolving the matter. In Zire darakhatan zeyton, a different actor is playing the director, who has returned to Koker to make—well, Through the Olive Trees. One of the most joyous moments in cinema occurs when whose faces should pop into the car window: the Ahmadpour brothers, on their way to school. This is handled offhandedly, but how momentous in terms of life and death.
     The film opens with Kiarostami’s surrogate conducting a casting call outdoors to find among the young female villagers the right girl to play a leading role in the new film. The one selected is named Tahereh; she will play the bride, Tahereh. The wedding is supposed to have occurred right after the earthquake. The first actor chosen, who stutters, proves impossible. A local bricklayer is the next boy chosen for the part; but Tahereh won’t speak to him, because Hossein really has been proposing to her, and her parents won’t give their consent. Faced with her obdurate silence, Hossein hopes to glean a sign from Tahereh that he has her heart despite his disqualifications: being poor and unschooled, however hardworking; having no home to provide for whomever he marries. The making of the film, then, is a comedy covering the tragedy of life—“covering,” as in concealing, documenting, however “inadvertently,” and building upon: this, a metaphor for Koker’s year-after renewal in the wake of the quake.
     Will there be a wedding? Will there be a film?

FAREWELL, MY CONCUBINE (Chen Kaige, 1993)

Chen Kaige’s Ba wang bie ji opens, in Beijing, with two men, costumed performers in the Opera, walking onto the stage as an offscreen voice addresses them. It is 1977—the year after Mao’s death and the trial of the Gang of Four, blamed (along with Mao) for the Cultural Revolution. Why haven’t these men performed together in more than twenty years? The voice suggests, “It’s because of the . . . Cultural Revolution.” “Isn’t everything?” one of the performers bitterly replies.
     The film flashes back to 1924 Beijing, during the “warlord era.” Two boys, Douzi and Shitou, who will become the men we met at the beginning, are among those being trained for the Opera troupe—a venerated, ancient tradition. All the boys are routinely beaten with swords across bare hands and buttocks. When one boy does well, he is whipped so he will remember to do just as well next time. Douzi, who is delicate and in training for the female role of concubine, is already in love with Shitou, who is in training for the role of king. Although Shitou doesn’t share Douzi’s homosexual feelings, the two bond. Chen’s film charts the course of this friendship, which includes Shitou’s marriage to a prostitute, Juxian, prompting Douzi’s jealousy. Chinese history and the pair’s private lives each reflect(s) the other.
     Tradition, then, yields to modernity, with national pride—much as in the case of Russian ballet in the Soviet era—sustaining the anachronism. The nation’s Communist redirection is shown in a harsh light.
     A beautiful shot records Douzi’s prolonged, exquisite acknowledgement of an audience’s enthusiastic applause. The end will not be good for him, however. His confused sexual identity—a metaphor for China’s confused cultural/political identity—predicts his finally insupportable torment.
     Farewell, my concubine.

THE BLUE KITE (Tian Zhuangzhuang, 1993)

The following is one of the entries from my 100 Greatest Asian Films list, which I invite you to visit on this site if you haven’t already done so. — Dennis

Beijing, China, 1953. Comrade Stalin’s death postpones Lin Shaolong and Chen Juajan’s marriage. Their son’s voiceover notes the delay. Like David Copperfield, he refers to time even prior to his birth. At the ceremony, his future parents first pay respect to the wall portrait of Mao Zedong. Mao’s image, actually, falls between them—the iconography of pervasive political power. A year later, the narrator is born. First he is called Lin Dayu—“Big Rain”—because of the weather that day; thereafter, Tietou—“Iron Head”—for the strength it indicates by way of compensation for that weather. This is normal stuff regarding parental names for children. But everything, including this, takes on a different meaning when symbolical power must be drawn to compensate for the everyday autonomy one isn’t allowed. In this context, I differ with most commentators as to the (gorgeous) visual punctuation that Tian Zhuangzhuang, the filmmaker, provides with shots of the blue kite sailing in the open sky. Freedom and hope, others say. I say: compensation for the lack thereof, and implicit defeat and resignation. Of course, I and everyone else are both right.
     This is a narrative film—hence, one that is highly reliant on Mao Xiao’s script. This is a family and community saga, but one in which Tian’s patient, incisive filmmaking counts most heavily. Politics determine everyone’s life, including the lives of those who deny the importance of politics.
     Nothing inherent in communism as political ideology helps explain the constraint under which ordinary people’s lives are put. This isn’t a negative film, only a particular, sharply observant one. The boy grows up and passes on the kite.
     Critic Andrew Sarris has called Lan feng zheng “[t]he most amazing act of political courage and defiance I have seen in the cinema.”
     Could be.

THE PUPPETMASTER (Hou Hsiao-hsien, 1993)

The following is one of the entries from my 100 Greatest Asian Films list, which I invite you to visit on this site if you haven’t already done so. — Dennis

Taiwan was ceded to Japan in 1895 under the Manchu treaty; the end of World War II, fifty years later, brought liberation. Parallel to this, Li Tienlu is required to address his biological parents as “aunt” and “uncle,” and to adopt his mother’s name. He becomes a renowned puppeteer. In his eighties, the actual Li, on-screen and off-, narrates his life story, while Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Hsimeng jensheng—In the Hand of a Puppet Master—re-enacts episodes from Li’s life. The title refers to both Li’s profession and Taiwanese history under the Japanese, who appropriated Taiwanese puppetry for their own propagandistic purposes and who otherwise impressed their own culture on the Taiwanese, making puppets of them. It refers also to Hou, vis-à-vis us.
     Sometimes Hou’s history of Li doesn’t match Li’s own account. It is impossible to tell at these points which, if either version, is accurate. Memory falters; history is revisionism. Ironically, it is Hou’s images—brilliantly color cinematographed by Lee Ping-bing—that create their own reality, while Li functions as “storyteller”—artist, that is, like a puppeteer. But Hou also is artist. Sharp and clear, his images sift reality, becoming shifting sands. Extreme long-shots, in which people appear as dots amidst vast landscapes or seascapes, further tweak the notion of absolute substantiality.
     Hou’s film, both majestic and intimate, expansive, humane, shows reality/human history resisting being pinned down in another way. Throughout, our comprehension of what occurs lags behind the film’s sights and sounds; subsequent shots provide the basis for our understanding of what we have already witnessed, placing us in the position of historian as well as audience.
     The exquisitely formal, decorated puppet shows exert great fascination—and some discomfort, as we gradually accept that we ourselves are puppets. Puppets of nations, puppets of war, puppets of Time.

LIFE AND NOTHING MORE (Abbas Kiarostami, 1992)

The following is one of the entries from my 100 Greatest Asian Films list, which I invite you to visit on this site if you haven’t already done so. — Dennis

In 1990 northern Iran experienced a devastating earthquake. The warm, humane comedy of Abbas Kiarostami’s film precludes condescending rhetoric of noble suffering. His surrogate, an unnamed filmmaker, accompanied by his young son, Puya, tries to drive to Koker; the main road is backed-up with traffic, and another road is impassable because of landslides. Their mission: to locate two young boys who appeared in the director’s Khane-ye Doust Kodjast?, in which one fails to find the house of a school friend in a neighboring village. Will the director have more luck now? Did the Ahmadpour brothers survive? The director comes armed with a poster for the earlier film prominently featuring the starring Ahmadpour boy’s face. En route, father and son learn that the earthquake razed every home in Koker.
     Kiarostami is documenting his own attempt to find the boys. A camera strapped to the side of his surrogate’s vehicle records the devastation. In addition, beautiful extreme long shots of the vehicle’s upward trek through mountainous terrain suggest the struggle of mortally aware humanity to push onward, to keep afloat—what Tennyson described as “ever climbing up the climbing wave.”
     A woman on the road relates she has lost home and family—eighteen persons. She declines a ride, as though too much mitigation of hardship would break faith with the dead. But elderly Mr. Ruhi, from Khane-ye Doust Kodjast?, gets in. He tells Puya that if the dead could return they would appreciate life more. He was made to look “older and uglier” for the 1987 film. “That’s not art,” he humorously opines. “If you make an old man young and handsome, that’s art.”
     Puya is receiving an education of the heart. The film stops mid-journey.
     Zendegi edame darad: And life goes on . . . .