The opening shot is a roiling hotbed of texture on a perfectly, or almost perfectly, flat and placid surface, just a few square inches of rough-hewn doorjamb and gently swinging unlatched door -- what proves to be the door to a rural classroom, inside which we will witness a stern taskmaster laying down the law to a negligent young student, reducing him to tears. Three times he has told the boy not to come to class without his notebook. Three times. (How many times? Three times.) Next time the boy will be expelled. The most touching sight in this businesslike expository episode is not the reddened, crumpled, and usually buried face of the student under fire, but rather the tender look on the face of his deskmate. And it is not surprising that this earnest little empathizer becomes the central character, when he returns home from school in unwitting possession of his friend's notebook. (Uh-oh.) And so begins an odyssey deep into the night -- the hero lives in Koker, his friend lives somewhere in Poshteh, but Poshteh is split up into a dozen subdivisions, each one a rabbit warren of narrow twisting passages and stair-steps. A sort of Kafka Lite, the odyssey verges at many points on the insipid and even the saccharine (not to mention the monotonous), but Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami is too tough-minded and strong-principled an artist to let it slip over. His seriousness of approach -- in sizing up his material, in fitting it onto the screen, without spilling or slopping -- is never in doubt. The textural riches keep piling up: the barren hillside standing between Koker and Poshteh, with its zigzag footpath crosshatched by vertical gullies of erosion; the knitted checkerboard of the hero's sleeveless cranberry pullover; the robin's-egg paint jobs on doors, shutters, a piece of farm equipment, against the drab browns of the landscape, the stone steps, the plaster walls. A viewer can begin to believe again, at least for the duration, that the cinema is indeed a visual medium. (1987) — Duncan Shepherd
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