Lover Under the Olive Tree
《Passenger》
"The Taste of Cherries"
◎ Mei Sheng
A few days ago, the "Retrospective Exhibition of Film Master Abbas Kiarostami" was unveiled at the Shanghai Art Film Alliance. Abbas's 22 digitally restored short films or feature films directed before 2000 are rare in meeting Chinese audiences. But this is only the tip of the iceberg of his creation, not enough to lead the audience to its own rich world.
Abbas, a film master who is highly regarded by Akira Kurosawa, Jean-Luc Godard, Martin Scorsese and other film masters, has made great achievements in painting, poetry, photography, painting and design. His artistic expression not only connects the Persian culture's tradition of reverence for nature and life, but also looks at the realistic soil of Iran, Italy, Japan, Africa and other countries and regions with childlike pure eyes, revealing evidence of human "birth and growth".
Speaking of art, Abbas once said, "Poetry and film, painting and literature, they teach me a lot and lead me in new directions, which contain beauty.". In a way, his artworks, especially poetic films that use elaborate forms to load the most simple content, also help ordinary viewers who cannot "live elsewhere" to re-examine their relationship with everyday worldly life and gain insight into the truth that is blinded by dust. These truths are written by a steady stream of pain, but moments of joy alternate, as in one of his short poems, "Mine-strewn Ground / A Thousand Trees / Flowers" (the verses mentioned in this article are from "A Wolf Is At the Whistle – Abbas's Collection of Poems").
1
[A stamp on the envelope depicts a laughing child, that letter from an angry woman]
The child was the absolute protagonist in Abbas's early creative landscape. However, this kind of film is not a traditional concept of children's films. The documentaries "Elementary School Freshmen", "Homework", the drama film "Experience", "Wedding Dress", the concept short film "Recess", "Order and Disorder", etc., although the camera is aimed at children, but the child is only the "head" he uses to discuss social issues such as children's education, public order, and class differences. However, when showing the contradictions between children and adults, his position is very clear and resolutely on the side of children.
Many of his children in the movie are naïve and stubborn and independent, in stark contrast to the sad-faced adults. They cannot understand the social rules that adults make and obey, and will only listen to their hearts, guide the pace of action with free and simple ideas, and do the right things that they think must be done. Often educated by adults, they warn adults in disguise that they should learn to break free from explicit or implicit rules and get along with others and the world in a simple and direct way.
As early as 1970, in his debut short film "Bread and Alleys", Abbas used a parable to tell the audience that children can hardly rely on adult help to resolve the dangers on the road of life, and can only find their own ways to deal with it. When the little boy came home with bread in his hand and a stone kick, he was blocked by dogs barking at him from the depths of the alley, and he tried to avoid the disaster after the old man with the hearing aid, but the old man quickly entered the house, and the dog was still in front of him. The boy was in a hurry and tore off a small piece of bread for the dog to enjoy. The dog instantly became friends with him, wagging its tail to escort him home, and crouched down in front of his house, waiting for the next child.
Since then, children have gone on their own in a playful or stubborn way when they are hopeless or difficult to ask adults for help, which has become the theme of Abbasid's films.
In 1974's "Traveler", Kazim, a small town boy who loves football and does not like to learn, is a "bad boy" who has a headache for his parents and a teacher who hates. In order to watch a game of the Iranian national football team in Tehran, in addition to stealing his parents' money, he also co-starred with his good friends in a double reed play, using a camera that had been damaged, in the name of taking commemorative photos, defrauding many smaller primary school students of pocket money, while selling his precious football and miniature ball frame. After some tossing and turning, he scraped together the money for the road and the tickets, and in the middle of the night, he hid his parents from getting on the bus to the capital.
In 1987's "Where Is My Friend's Home," Ahmed, a primary school student in Koguel, a remote mountain in Iran, was preparing to write homework, he found that he had brought home Muhand's homework notebook from his tablemate, remembering the stern warning issued by his teacher in class about Muhammad's homework, and if Muhammad made a mistake in writing his homework, he would be expelled from school. Although he did not know Muhammad's home address, he decided to return the homework book to Muhammad and explained the seriousness of the matter to his mother. But his mother thought he was making up excuses to go out and play, and not only did she not agree, but also arranged various chores for him to disrupt the rhythm of his homework. His mother told him to buy bread, and he sneaked out of the house with Muhammad's homework book.
However, compared with the boy in "Bread and Alley", the little protagonists in these two films are not so lucky. They have suffered a lot in the face of difficulties. Kazim was unable to buy tickets to the ball game through the ticket window and paid a high price to get the ticket from the scalper. As the game progressed, exhausted, he was sleeping soundly on the lawn near the pitch with a group of low-level laborers. Ahmed traveled twice between him and Muhammad's village, asking many passers-by, but was unable to find Muhammad. On a windy winter night, he endured cold, hunger and drowsiness and completed two homework assignments.
The road of life is full of bumps, and paying does not necessarily have a return. Abbas seems to be using images to remind children who look at society through a crack in a door to notice that there is a cruel world outside. At the same time, however, he also pointed out to the children the need to live with good intentions and no impurities. "Where Is My Friend's Home" also has a scene of a boy meeting a dog, but the plot direction is completely different from "Bread and Alley". The empty nest old man who took Ahmed to find Muhammad, although he could not get Ahmet to do so, led him past the dog and gave him a nameless flower. The next day, when the teacher checked the homework, Ahmed, who was late, handed Muhammad the homework book in time. Confused, Muhand escaped his teacher's punishment and saw the little flower caught in his homework notebook.
As a result, although Abbas claims that he cannot enter the world of light and shadow created by Robert Bresson (he said that he has only seen 50 movies, and the only ones he likes are Federico Fellini's "The Great Road" and "La Dolce Vita"), it should be admitted that his little protagonist belongs to the same kind of people as the adults under Bresson's lens. Francis in "Death Row Escape" and the young priest in "The Diary of a Country Priest" are all lonely knights who do not desire the approval of others on the roundabout road of hope.
2
[When I returned to my birthplace, the mulberry trees were being cut down by acquaintances]
Abbas's mid- to late-stage films examine the objects divided into two levels: one is the adult men and women in human society, who gradually replace children as the protagonists of his works; the other is the animals, plants and seemingly inanimate objects in the natural landscape.
There are still children in "Life and Flow", "Passing with the Wind", and "Ten Rhythms of Life", and children are still using their way to tell the simple truth that makes adults ashamed, but "Close-up", "Lover Under the Olive Tree", "The Taste of Cherries", "Legal Copies", "RuMu Love", etc., are the confusion of adults around the world. These perplexities are universal, ranging from material and emotional issues closely related to social reality to the meaning of life and death.
Every adult was once a child, and the sad thing is that the vast majority of adults have long since lost the one-line thinking to solve problems in a simple way and with an optimistic attitude, and the skills they are proficient in are often only idle and small things. The woman in "Lover Under the Olive Tree", although she loves him as a man loves her, has not responded to the man's marriage proposal due to the constraints of family beliefs and social customs. The identity of the man in "The Taste of Cherries" and the reason for suicide, although Abbas did not explain, he was bent on death, still saw the audience's heart, and could not help but combine his own experience and guess what kind of difficulties he encountered.
Perhaps because adults and children belong to two distinct species, Abbas's later films often have open-ended endings, unlike early and mid-term films, which have a clear direction. The man and woman in "Lovers Under the Olive Tree" who walk through the dense olive jungle one after the other may become husband and wife, or they may not be over. Whether the men in "The Taste of Cherries" come out of the darkness, there are two or even multiple answers.
Films such as "Wu" and "24 Frames" allow various objects on the earth to avoid human sight and survive in the heavens and the earth. The first image in "Wu" shows the seagull eggs on three rocks, swallowed up by the undulating waves. In Abbas's 2017 posthumous work "24 Frames", the waves also broke a branch into two long and short sections.
Essentially, the above two levels belong to the same latitude. Human beings should coexist in harmony with society and nature, but the greed of adults always destroys the operation of social mechanisms and the cycle of natural ecology. The flock of birds scared away by the emergency brakes of the car in "24 Frames", the towering trees that fell to the ground with the sound of chainsaws, the old people who were abandoned by relatives and friends who rushed to the city to live in "Where Is My Friend's Home", the handmade wooden doors that embody the Persian cultural heritage but gradually became unsought for, the rural scenery that was disliked by urban engineers in "Life and Growth Stream", and the mobile phone signals that are only available in the heights, etc., together tell the current survival picture of the Iranian people and even mankind as a whole.
On the one hand, the change in abbas's creative theme is related to the Iranian Youth Education Development Association that he later left for many years (the first film director he cooperated with was Abbas, the first film produced by the association was "Bread and Alley", which launched "Little Shoes", "White Balloon" and many other children's films), and it was also the inevitable result of the Outbreak of the Iranian Revolution in 1979 and the years of chaos that followed, transforming the social structure and influencing the artist's expression.
But Abbas is very moderate compared to other Iranian artists who are more radical and face the pain of reality, such as Mawson Makhmalbaf, the director of "Long Live the Movie" and "Innocent Moments", and Asha Farhati, the director of "A Parting", "The Salesman". He never rendered war and suffering head-on, but only looked at the countryside again and again, expressing his love for the land with the help of hills, wheat fields, woods, roads and other scenery that had not yet been destroyed by humans.
3
[The wind is blowing in the direction it wants to go, blowing the bird in the direction it doesn't want to go]
In terms of creative means, Abbas is good at combining documentary and drama fiction in order to extract glittering truth from ordinary reality. He argues: "Real documentaries don't exist because reality isn't enough to be the basis for constructing a film. Making a movie always involves some kind of re-creation element. Each story contains some degree of fabrication because it carries the imprint of the photographer. It reflects a perspective. ”
The process of the seagull egg being swallowed into the belly by the sea in "Wu" does not belong to the truthful record of heaven's favor, but the result of Abbas and his colleagues shooting countless goose eggs for eight hours and spending four months editing the effective material into ten minutes into a film.
His "country trilogy" forms a set structure that combines virtual and real. In 1992's "Born, Growing Stream", as the director of Abbas's avatar, after the great earthquake in northwestern Iran in 1990, he took his son to Kogel, one of the hardest hit areas, hoping to find two young actors who played Ahmed and Muhammad in "Where Is My Friend's Home". Along the way, they saw not only the lethality of the earthquake, but also the belief of people who had survived the disaster to rebuild their homes. The villagers who were busy setting up antennas to watch the World Cup, and a man and a woman who had lost more than 50 relatives and still consummated their marriage according to the established plan, made the father and son, especially the father, sigh and move.
It no longer matters whether the two find the two young actors, and there is already life in the ruins. Just like the birds that migrate in autumn and winter, although it is a last resort to fly away from the north, they will work hard to build a nest and settle down as soon as they settle in the south.
1994's "Lover Under the Olive Tree" can be seen as a "behind-the-scenes documentary" of "Life and Growth". The male and female protagonists walked out of the set of "Born and Grow", and the relationship between the newlyweds was declared over. He "gave orders" to her in accordance with the director's requirements in the play, but no one outside the play guided him, and could only "whisper" over and over again begging her to bravely accept his love. The two boys who carried the flower props for the crew, although they did not identify themselves, the audience could recognize at a glance that they were the same pair of friends in "Where Is My Friend's Home".
Abbas's 1990 "Close-up" from social news has become increasingly difficult to distinguish between true and false. Sabuzien, an unemployed worker who is a loyal audience member of director Mawson Makhmalbaf, sees Mawson's films as humanitarian and illuminates his impoverished life. Posing as Mawson and gaining the trust of a wealthy family, he became a director and threw himself into rehearsing new film projects with the family. At the same time, he also used a false identity to obtain financial support from the family. A few days later, Sabzien's true identity was exposed by a weekly reporter and he was taken to court.
In addition to the "Close-up" filming of Sabzien's trial process, Abbas also found the rich man, journalists and other parties involved, and together with Sabzien "reproduced" the incident, and let Mawson intervene. Sadzyn, forgiven by the rich family, walked out of the courtroom and, when he saw Mawson standing outside the door waiting for him, excitedly hugged his idol and cried bitterly. Mawson then drove Sabzien on a motorcycle to the rich man's house, and on the way helped him pay for a pot of pink chrysanthemums.
Interestingly, Mawson's 1996 "Moment of Innocence" also recreates a tragic historical situation with the participation of the parties. The pistols and daggers that symbolize confrontation in the memories of the parties are finally replaced by the actors who play them, and they are replaced by bread and small flowers with a sense of reconciliation.
Back to Close-Up. At the end, Sabzien and Mawson talk intermittently on the road, which belongs to Abbas's intentions, in order to avoid sensationalism and leave room for the audience who cannot understand to think deeply about this meaningful story.
As for what the inspiration for the audience is, Abbas did not say it, but hid it in the mirror of the car that followed the motorcycle to shoot Sabzirn and Mawson's car. As an important prop that has appeared in many Abbas films such as "Life and Flow", "Lover Under the Olive Tree", "Ten Rhythms of Life" and so on, the car mirror not only provides another way to observe the still and flowing scenery, or the perspective of daily life, to inspire the audience to discover the true meaning of life from the details, but also to record and fiction, film and life, director and audience, surface and truth, constitute a mirror image relationship.
This is the fundamental reason why "Close-up" and many of Abbas's films are far more real and moving than news reports or real life. Using the camera as a pen, he rewrote the narrative rules of the film, following the context we are accustomed to and even numbing, and encountering new words for writing longings and dreams.