Abbas Kiarostami’s ‘Kahne-ye doust kodjast?’ (Where Is the Friend’s House?) 1987
High up in a pine tree, you will see a child who will lift a chick out of a nest of light. Ask him, ‘Where is the friend’s house?'
This canto from the renowned poet and painter Sohrab Sepehri’s work ‘Address’, (English translation by Jerome W. Clinton) forms the title of master filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami’s epic cinematic vignette ‘Kahne-ye doust kodjast?’ (Where is the Friend’s House?) and aptly so.
Among the few films of this sensitive genre, there are fewer who have so delicately unfolded, stopping short of unduly highlighting, the unadulterated innocence that can pervade a child’s heart and mind, powered by purpose, as also the propensity to politely and single-handedly defy the flurry of adult whims and fancies in the guise of discipline that threaten to break its tender cocoon with brutal attacks of incessant regularity.
The profound story is simply told with a delightfully matter-of-fact nuance.
Ahmad (Babek Ahmadpour) is extremely worried for his elementary school classmate Mohammad (Ahmad Ahmadpour); his agony has reached the point where mounting stress makes way for calamitous distress. What could have bothered an eight year old to cause an anguish of this scale?
Well, back home from a tiring day at school, he has found to his horror, the notebook of his classmate Mohammad Reza Nematzadeh tucked in his school bag, a notoriously confounding twin image of his own notebook. Now, unless Ahmad takes corrective action overnight, this error of inadvertence will spell doom for Mohammad the next day.
Why? Because the form teacher’s cardinal rule for the class is that homework must be done in the notebook and notebook alone, as it helps him assess the progress made by the student over time. The teacher has already issued an ultimatum to Mohammad, a repeat offender, that he will be expelled if his homework is found scribbled on loose papers the next day. So, Ahmad can’t but let things take their course. He must intervene but how?
The film relays Ahmad’s heroic albeit futile attempt to return Mohammad’s pivotal property well in time while there’s time, locking horns with the mighty challenges posed by elders at home, on the street, and in the wilderness that leave him hapless and helpless: ruthless admonishments in quick succession, stony indifference of zombie-like inhabitants of identical dwellings and similar names, absurd tangents of street banter that waste his precious time, flawed directions and cryptic instructions that repeatedly set him on the wrong trail, and misguided counsel with neither will nor intent to address Ahmad’s pressing problem at hand.
Distance is one among the many unnerving obstacles in Ahmad’s way. He is from Kokur, and Mohammad hails from the neighbouring Poshteh. A difficult terrain of labyrinthine alleys, arduous stone steps, and deserted zigzag pathways separates the two locations. How Ahmad goes about his nobler-than-noble mission and achieves a magnificent turnaround towards the end is best watched, not narrated. Suffice to say our two little comrades, Ahmad and Mohammad, steal a quiet triumph, if not the the last laugh, which is obviously lost on the elders that rule their lives.
Seamlessly interspersed within the central narrative are disparate scenes that tell a lot about the universal realities common to the globe, as also provincial constraints of an Iran of the seventies, when the totalitarianism of Ayatollah Khomeini was at its peak.
Ironically, while the young Ahmad shows great character and exceptional resilience in coming to terms with the mayhem around him, every adult is visibly childish about his or her rant or wont – the grandmom won’t stop reminding Ahmad to remove his slippers prior to entering her sanctified premises; the mother wants him to ceaselessly shuffle between housework and homework without a whimper; the idling, heartless grandfather is itching to torture Ahmad with the cold-hearted drills he himself endured during the formative phase of his regimented upbringing; and the father is obsessed with tracking frequencies on his radio, ignoring the turbulent waves of human emotions emerging from a pocket-sized station in close vicinity. The class teacher, though well meaning and the least hostile of the whole lot, is equally ruthless about his hard-coded mandates.
In an evocative scene unfolding by the pavement, a hard-nosed manufacturer and trader is seen making a strong case for the sturdiness of his iron doors, brazenly borrowing a page from Ahmad’s, nay Mohammad’s notebook, for taking stock of customer orders and pending payments. A lonely, ageing artisan of the old order that Ahmad meets later in the day, does the exact opposite, of singing the virtues of his wooden frames, now part of a dying legacy that will inevitably fade with him. While the former is blatantly inattentive to Ahmad’s plea, the latter wants him as an all-approving sounding board to release the pent up frustration of his wooden life.
That child labour runs parallel to child education becomes evident from many telling frames - there's a kid who repeatedly complains of backaches while at school, which, on the face of it, appears like a filmsy excuse to avoid homework till the viewer spots the root cause when he is seen carrying heavy milk cans, apparently an integral part of his day-to-day routine.
The people of the province seemingly value the worth of education but like so many spread across the world, learning for them is only what transpires in the classroom in the supreme light of the all-knowing teacher, and the ultimate proof of their kids’ didactic progress is the completion of the proverbial homework.
For the discerning viewer, the film’s conclusion becomes apparent during the fag end frames and there are a couple of instances when the subjects seem off-guard on camera, but that does not take away even an ounce of the delight and contentment of having witnessed sublime poetry unleashed on celluloid.
It is unfair to call child artiste Babek Ahmadpour’s awesome effort a performance, such is its sincerity and true-to-life essence, clearly the outcome of Kiarostami’s unique improv experiments with the kids of Koker. Kiarostami’s camera astutely underscores the supressed emotions of Ahmad’s roving eyes and radiant face, and the significance of his thoughtful gestures, through a fine blend of closeups and longshots. He also makes recurrent use of emblematic motifs like doors and windows to convey larger truths. Farhad Saba’s haunting cinematography is subtly suggestive of the all-pervading gloom and hopelessness of the milieu, while Amine Allah Hessine’s music accentuates the initial strife and the decisive turn of events with minimal strings beats.
The camaraderie between Ahmad and Mohammad has a magnetic charm about it; you would want to spend a few moments in their noisy classroom for a first-hand experience of earthy compassion that is rarely encountered in the real world.
That we don’t find many kids of Ahmad’s psyche in both rural and urban settings of today is our collective tragedy, a fallout of our misplaced priorities that meticulously and conclusively deprive a childhood of its essential nutrients. We can’t but attribute this moral turpitude and emotional wreckage to the perils of digital invasion, pandemic-induced devastation, or the consequences of global warming, our pet targets to blame for anything and everything that goes astray.