Launching Abbas Kiarostami’s great trilogy in rural, rocky northern Iran (Life and Nothing More and Through the Olive Trees follow), Khane-ye doust kodjast? follows eight-year-old Ahmed as he sneaks away from home after school to pursue a moral cause: the return of a classmate’s notebook he accidentally took. This other boy, Mohammad Reza Nematzedah, lives in another village; for Ahmed the distance is daunting, especially since he does not know precisely where this classmate lives and must constantly solicit directions. He never does find Mohammad Reza’s home, but back late in his own home he completes his classmate’s homework for him so Mohammad Reza won’t get punished. Exhausted after the failure of his mission, Ahmed still hasn’t given up. “Good boy” are the last words we hear: the next day, the teacher’s remark to Mohammad Reza upon examining “his” homework.
The film’s opening long-held shot focuses on the inside classroom door before the teacher’s entrance; we hear the boys’ spirited noisiness. This is indeed a film about doors; one of its finest shots shows small doors being carried out of a front door for transport. Symbolically, doors suggest possibilities—Ahmed’s “open” future, which is contrasted with impoverished older lives, not to mention the constraints that Islamic society imposes on females, including Ahmed’s workhorse mother. Kiarostami’s most brilliant passage here, at night, finds an elderly carpenter presumably leading Ahmed to Mohammad Reza’s home but making a long, winding detour to show Ahmed wooden doors that he has built while bemoaning iron doors that are current fashion because they “last forever.” An iron door, then, has closed on the carpenter’s craft and livelihood.
Amazing: Ahmed sprinting through seemingly skeletal trees, Nature’s graveyard, before a cut to long-shot shows the trees to be leafy green.
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