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Last week we discussed the first film in Abbas Kiarostami's "Earthquake Trilogy," and we'll focus on the second and third films in this issue (review for Where Is the Friend's Home? can be found here). With the second picture - And Life Goes On. (screens Thursday at the Dryden) - it becomes clear early on that when Kiarostami conceived Home?, it wasn't with a trilogy in mind.
Home?, which takes place before the 1990 earthquake in Northern Iraq and is about a schoolboy's fruitless attempts to return a lost notebook to a classmate, becomes the core of what we eventually learn is a big cinematic Russian doll. Life is, in turn, a documentary set six days after the upheaval that shows a film director (Farhad Kheradmand) and his young son (Buba Bayour) attempting to travel from Tehran to Koker to see if the two child stars from Home? were at all affected by the big quake. That's right - Kiarostami cast an actor as himself and made a film about his own real-life journey.
The director and his kid encounter blocked roads, giant crevasses, landslides and even an older actor from Home? on their way to Koker. They also pass massive destruction - both residential and commercial - and an eerie scene of a field full of fresh graves. This stuff is all real, and the two characters witness it from the window of their car (as opposed to Kiarostami's Ten, in which, literally, the entire film unfolds within the car). The director occasionally stops to listen to people tell their own horrifying stories of losing children, siblings and parents, as well as their seemingly shocking return to normalcy despite the catastrophic loss of life and permanent housing.
As crazy an idea as Life seems to be, Through the Olive Trees (Friday) is even stranger. This time out Kiarostami casts yet another actor as himself (Mohamad Ali Keshavarz). The fictitious director is busy trying to shoot his latest project, which ultimately turns out to be Life. That makes Trees an ersatz documentary about Life, which in itself was a pseudo-documentary about Home? (Lost yet? Try watching the films out of order, which is what most people had to do as Trees was the first released in the US).
The bulk of Trees focuses on the last-second replacement of one of Life's actors, an illiterate bricklayer named Hossein (Hossein Rezai) who is supposed to appear opposite a green-eyed girl named Tahereh (Tahereh Ladanian). Trouble is, Tahereh won't have anything to do with Hossein, and we later learn why - he's been chasing after her for years but was deemed an inappropriate suitor by Tahareh's grandmother because of Hossein's lack of education and home.
As you can imagine, Tahereh's refusal to act with Hossein throws the filming of Life into chaos. Eventually, the director decides to turn off his camera and listen to the stories of the locals. Trees' final shot is one of the best you'll ever see, even if you didn't pick up on the shots and setups that will be more enjoyable for those who saw the first two films in the trilogy.
If one thing is evident, it's that Kiarostami enjoys blurring the line between real life and fiction - even when it's accidental, like in Life where the elderly actor from Home? breaks the fourth wall and starts talking about his real house and real troubles. Maybe it's just an Iranian thing, because the same thing happens in Jafar Panahi's The Mirror, whose young star tires of her role and refuses to go on. Panahi continues to shoot the girl as he tries to talk her into resuming filming and she tries to return to her normal life. It should come as no surprise that Panahi is a protégé of Kiarostami, who wrote Panahi's first big film (The White Balloon).
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