Audient Auteurs: Bahman Ghobadi

This is the latest in my 2018 monthly series watching two movies by a renowned director who was previously unfamiliar to me.

Sometimes, you have to reverse engineer an auteur.

I've talked at length about how few of the works of the directors I originally earmarked for this series have been easily accessible. I'll make it to December without the choices completely drying up, but I'm pulling some naughty tricks, and stretching my definition of what constitutes an auteur.

The way I envisioned this series was to identify a bunch of names I'd heard of but not experienced myself, and watch two of their movies per month. Whether they were auteurs or not, according to some textbook definition of that word, was less important. They were names thrown around by other cinephiles as having been responsible for important bodies of work, in way or another.

In short, I figured I would have at least heard of every director I ended up watching in this series.

But here's where the reverse engineering comes in. I thought, "What if I just scan the shelves of available movies at the library, and if I've heard of a particular title, then see if the director is someone whose body of work is worth studying?"

That's how I got Bahman Ghobadi, director of A Time for Drunken Horses, which was indeed a title I'd heard of. I couldn't tell you where I'd heard of it, nor that it was from an Iranian director. But when I saw that Ghobadi had another film available for streaming on Kanopy, it clinched his spot as September's entrant in this series.

There were two things that helped Ghobadi's apparently dubious candidacy. One was that I've wanted to expand beyond the European and American directors who have been my focus so far. I've already watched the movies of three French men, and that's plenty from that particularly demographic. The second was that I am a big fan of Iranian cinema, and if there's an Iranian master I hadn't experienced previously, what better excuse to get familiar with him?

And so Bahman Ghobadi is the first auteur in this series whose movies I never knew I wanted to see.

Wikipedia does not have a huge amount on Ghobadi, consistent with his "lesser auteur" status. However, I can tell you he was of Kurdish ethnicity, born in Iran, and worked early on as an assistant director on Abbas Kiarostami's The Wind Will Carry Us. He made 8 mm shorts and a documentary before breaking into feature films. As I assume Wikipedia would have mentioned it otherwise, he has thus far avoided the wrath of an Iranian government that heavily censors its filmmakers, for reasons that I may get into as I discuss the films.

A Time for Drunken Horses (2000)

When I say I'm a big fan of Iranian cinema, I should probably remember to put an asterisk on that. Before I discovered the great films of directors like Asghar Farhadi, Abbas Kiarostami and Jafar Panahi, I have to remember that I also watched a handful of Iranian films that didn't connect with me quite in that same way. These other films were not films that deconstructed the art of filmmaking, or intensely explored social dynamics spiraling out of control, as these more recent discoveries have done so well. Rather, these were that other kind of Iranian film -- the Iranian film that stars primarily young children.

A Time for Drunken Horses is such a film.

It's not that a movie starring children cannot be good, or even that it can't be dark, because Drunken Horses is dark as hell. It's just that some of these earlier films (I'm thinking of Narrow Alleys and Children of Heaven) felt a lot like what they were -- a director straining to communicate some kind of social message through the strictures of his oppressive government, but being too hamstrung by those strictures to really do so. My understanding is that the films had to star children as part of what the government dictated about who could or could not participate in making films, possibly for religious reasons. If I sound vague it's because I looked it up online but could find nothing that confirmed this. It was something I heard along the way but am only half-remembering.

A Time for Drunken Horses is different in one important way: Part of it takes place across the Iraq border. Okay, that's not much different.

It's a story about a boy, his handicapped brother and his sister, who are orphaned (I think) and are trying to make money along the wintry Iran-Iraq border through a variety of different smuggling endeavors. They smuggle truck tires and other goods of seemingly dubious value, but hey I don't live in that economy so what do I know. The older boy is trying to get money for his brother to have an operation, though it becomes clear early on that the boy isn't going to live that long even if he has the operation. He's got some kind of genetic disease that causes dwarfism, and he has to be carried around and constantly medicated. The sister, meanwhile, has been promised by her uncle in an arranged marriage for purposes involving trade and other financial benefit.

I'm going to sound vague again now as I watched this movie about two weeks ago and it didn't really stick with me. What did stick with me was the unending sense of misery and hopelessness. I'm not against movies where the situation is hopeless, though I do feel like I need something to leaven the scenario, even if it ultimately ends badly for those involved. This was just misery, misery and more misery, and it was the rare time where I felt I really couldn't put myself into this scenario. Of course I can sit here in my ivory tower, eating what I want and never lacking for shelter or warmth, and say I can't put myself into this scenario. But a movie that's succeeding with what it's doing should be able to translate even something intensely foreign to you, so you can empathize with the characters going through it. Ghobadi just doesn't do that here, though of course I recognize that's a very subjective response to the movie and others' mileage may vary.

This is going to sound horrible but one of the things that bothered me most was this severely ill brother. He's a pitiable soul to be sure, made even more so by the fact that the actor himself obviously suffers from this, or at least some, disease, and his own lifespan may not be all that long. But in this world where anybody and everybody is barely surviving, it seemed like there was a disproportionate amount of energy expended on trying to prolong the life of a creature who was obviously destined for an early grave, most likely at some point in the next few weeks you would think. All sorts of plot points surround whether anything they do will be enough to save him, and all sorts of sacrifices are made to try to prolong his life just a little bit. Here's the really bad part, though, the part I feel most awful typing out: It seemed like he didn't even seem grateful about the fact that all these people were trying to do all these things to save him. For some reason I was very put off by the fact that whenever someone would give him his medicine, he cried like a little baby being tortured -- even though I think he's supposed to be like ten years old. If I were one of the people trying to save that kid I'd be like "I'm trying to help you, man. Just lie here in the snow and die for all I care."

See, I told you it was bad. Well, I'm probably not getting that many people reading this far into a blog post on a director most of them haven't heard of, anyway.

Turtles Can Fly (2004)

Which is too bad, because as little as the first film worked for me, that's how much the second film did work. Simply put, I loved my second Ghobadi movie, which totally redeemed my choice to include him in this series.

This was a title that was not familiar to me, whereas the other had been. It's also not nearly as poetic sounding a title. But man is this a much better movie -- which is strange because of how many surface similarities it actually has with A Time for Drunken Horses.

Both films have children filling all the primary roles, with adults sprinkled in to play less consequential characters. Both films involve children taking regular care of a semi-incapacitated child, in this case a blind toddler. Both films involve sub-economies that grow out of the impossible conditions of war, whether it's pre-war, post-war or a war in progress.

There's a small difference in their perspectives, though, which allows for humor and, yes, optimism in the second film. I suppose the symbol of that different perspective is a basic dynamism in the landscape that's absent from the first movie but fully present in the second, and can be traced directly to the decision to shoot outside of the wintry environment that reduces everything to a muddy sameness. The landscape of Turtles Can Fly feels barren in its own ways, but Ghobadi also feels conscious of his surroundings and their potential for visual distinctiveness that may just be a reflection of his own growth as a filmmaker. He sets the camera up in interesting ways and captures a certain jutting beauty in the detritus of a marginal society.

The kids in this movie are also just trying to make it, but this time they are fully within Iraq, a country that has been left in its current state by the government of Saddam Hussein. It's the last days of that government as the 2003 American invasion is just days from beginning. An early teenager nicknamed Satellite has positioned himself at the nexus of most of the ways these people are making money. He dispatches teams of children to help disarm the mines that are nearly everpresent, which they then turn around and sell, and he's also got a quest to help bring television reception to people seeking news of the impending war, shifting his attention from the ineffectual antennae to satellite dishes. His ability to speak/understand English -- or at least his claim that he does -- puts him in high demand as well.

Satellite takes an interest in the case of a mysterious girl who is the brother of a boy who has lost his arms, who is also known for his ability to make predictions about the future that invariably come true. They are both looking after the blind child, and seem to have set themselves apart from the rest of the children. We come to learn that they are not this boy's brother, although they are young enough to be, but that he's the bastard child of the girl, who gave birth to him after being gang-raped by soldiers. Her circumstances have made her suicidal, if she cannot get out of this place, and soon.

The biggest tonal difference I noticed from Ghobadi's previous effort was how more willing he is to play this heavy material for light comedic effect. The story becomes increasingly dour the more that is revealed about it, but it starts out with a certain whimsy, involved as it is in the logistics of Satellite's various commercial enterprises, and his status as something of a huckster. A joyous sense of this local community develops, something that has shades of Italian Neorealism to it.

Again here we see a young actor who is, in real life, profoundly crippled, as the actor who plays the boy who sees visions is actually missing both of his arms. But the things he's capable of even without his arms -- such as disarming a land mine with his teeth -- give us a real sense of the way a person in his shoes comes to assert dominion over his circumstances, rather than succumbing to them. One of the film's other frequent images is of another character, a young boy missing one of his legs, as he moves across the landscape at high speeds. You get the sense that having a crutch instead of a second leg only reduces his speed by maybe ten percent of what it would have otherwise been.

I talked about the expanding scope of Ghobadi's abilities as a filmmaker, and one of the ways this was evident to me was his use of extras. There are any number of shots in this movie that use literally hundreds of extras to convey the local populations as they desperately swarm for information or flee from danger. It was just another way this movie delivers on a big canvas and exceeds many of the real-world limitations that must have informed its creation.

I found the lives of these children endlessly fascinating as they do the work of adults and just try to survive. Ghobadi expertly presents the details of their lives, and unlike in this previous film, he inserts me directly into what these lives were like. I was fully absorbed in their dramas, in the sad ironies and absurdities of their lives, and how they attempted to overcome them -- or failed in that attempt. Turtles Can Fly is something close to a masterpiece, and one of its most potent strengths is the way it deviates from realism through moments of magical realism that deepen the impact of its themes.

My choice for October is someone I'd actually heard of! It's the Korean director Hong Sang-soo, and I'll actually reveal the titles if you want to watch along: two very recent films in Right Now, Wrong Then and On the Beach at Night Alone.