"People, like machines, die" "Sometimes when you're idle, you die"
Director: Abbas Kiarostami
Location: A small village in Iran's Kurdistan province
The first thing that catches your eye is the screen of golden wheat waves, the scattered small earth houses, and the small doors and windows of Tifnilan from house to house. At the beginning of the movie, we, like the people in this village, do not understand why the group of guests from afar came. They only say that they are engineers, and it doesn’t matter if they are true or false. The simple villagers warmly entertained them despite their doubts. The story unfolds from the perspective of the "engineer" who is very "curious", more like taking us to visit the daily life of this small village at will.
During this period, the "engineer" followed the children in the village to check around every day, and kept asking him about the condition of an old lady in the village. It turned out that the "engineer" inquired about the old lady's condition in order to wait for the day when the old lady died, so that he could take pictures of the local funeral customs. Therefore, I prefer to guess that this is a reporter who came to the local area to obtain material. It's just that this is a journalist who is not so lucky. The project, which was originally thought to be completed in a few days, had to stay in the local area longer because of the improvement of the old lady's condition. This is the only main plot of the film. Because of the stay, the protagonist was able to have more time to observe, and finally gave up his obsession with loyalty. It also gives the audience time to think and understand what the director is ultimately trying to convey.
An absolutely unavoidable scene in this film is the one where the engineer drives to the hill cemetery every time he talks to headquarters on the phone. The director seems to be deliberately draining the audience's patience. Every time the "engineer" shouted "halou halou..." from the small blue balcony while starting the car and driving the car up the hill in dust... Repeated 5 or 6 times, each time it was better than the previous Add a little more clips at a time, such as a conversation with an engineer in a cave on the mountain, until later when I was bored, I turned a dry land turtle over, and watched a dung beetle push a dung ball, gradually conveying a mood, things It wasn't going well. Each ringing of the phone is like a scene-switching signal, forcibly pulling the audience out of the current situation.
Another frequent scene in the film is that their voices are heard, but we "can't see" who is speaking. Sometimes we can see the back of the speaker leaving in the rearview mirror, the red dress of the milking girl, the villagers on the mountain are always digging holes by themselves, but they can't see their faces. This kind of "invisibility" allows the audience to have more room for imagination, and also reminds us that movies are just shots captured by the director, and life is far greater than movies.
Obviously, this film does not win by plot. Apart from admiring the beautiful scenery of the Iranian plateau, the director arranges a series of scattered and casual dialogues that are meaningful and can not help but laugh.
- With the little boy: The little boy said my house is too small, the engineer said that small things have their value, you are small but very smart! The little boy answered that I was growing up, and the house would not.
- The debate with the proprietress of the teahouse on the street with the son and daughter of the coffee stall and the old man sitting idle about who is more tired, men and women, is interesting and profound.
- On the first day, the engineer chatted with the hostess who was drying the clothes and asked the pregnant hostess how many children she had, and the hostess said there were 9. The next day, a woman who was not pregnant was seen drying clothes, and the engineer thought it was her sister. He couldn't believe it, but the hostess told him with her usual smile that she just gave birth to her 10th child yesterday. The engineer was stunned but soon resumed normal small talk... We didn't really go to that country and can't comment on any other culture. Cultural differences exist objectively, but the people in this village are essentially the same as us. Many human things and social characteristics are the same. We know that, like many villages in the world, communication is poor, information is blocked, and transportation is inconvenient. Under such an ecology, the educational resources available to the villagers here are bound to be scarce. Is the self-sufficient hideaway beautiful or backward?
- The girl who was milking the milk lived in a dark cave. When the engineer asked her if she could see her appearance, the girl was silent, so the engineer recited a poem "The wind will carry us". The girl asked, have you read a lot of books to write such poems? The engineer said that it is possible to write poetry without reading a book. Finally, when the engineer was about to leave to pay for the fresh milk, the girl's mother collected the money and finally gave it back to the engineer. The girl couldn't help but look at the engineer leaving. I hope that because this poem can sow the seeds of poetry in this young girl's heart, even if she doesn't have the opportunity to receive education, she can make her bleak life more colorful.
The turning point of the story happened when suddenly one day the pit dug by the villagers on the mountain collapsed and the villagers were buried alive. The engineer drove the other villagers to rescue them, and then found a doctor and successfully rescued the villagers who were buried alive.
The engineer also understood the value of life, and recalled that the dung beetle pushed the dung ball, and the tortoise, who was turned over by malicious jokes, still struggled to turn and move on by himself. Nothing can stop time from passing and life moving forward. Not even the mockery of fate.
So he gave up his obsession and asked the doctor to treat the dying old lady along the way. Although the old lady "finally got her wish" passed away that night, the engineer didn't care that much anymore. He hurriedly photographed a group of women wrapped in black passing by. Everyone cast a surprised look. For example, at the beginning of the film, the proprietress of the teahouse resisted him to take pictures. To some extent, we hope to be able to record the truth of the world and broaden our cognition. On the one hand, the development of the Internet and video has indeed made the world in our eyes wider and colossal, but if we can’t really understand what life and death mean, just using a camera to see the surface is also disrespectful to life.
My favorite part of the film is the engineer sitting in the doctor's back seat and traversing the fields, the open fields and mountains, the breeze blowing through the wheat waves, this is what life looks like
"They say the other world is more beautiful, but someone come back from that world and tell us whether it's beautiful or not. I like to live and ride a motorcycle around to see this beautiful world. Reality is more important than vows, and these are not just Death is the most terrifying disease." The wind will carry us~ Rather than looking for meaning, let's look at the scenery on the road.
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