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Through the Olive Trees (1994)

Posted: Thu Aug 30, 2018 12:31 pm
by dardan
Despair for a friend lost, hope for a city upon a hill, desire for a woman beyond reach: these are the stories of man. They are told in three films by Kiarostami. This is the last.

The three stories, of a boy searching his friend, of Kiarostami searching the boy, of man and woman, within communities equally searching, together, for hope, for safe passage, at first glance, seem different. To those living them, they are; despair, hope, love, sorrow, joy - they speak to us with voices immediate and intimate. They appear as fruits emergent to character and circumstance conflicting, and they absorb us. They cast us off into queestes for meaning, for truth, to our destination unknown. In our search, we find paths and yet again paths, differing in kind, though sometimes the same, hopeful each time the one leads to more than the other.

There are a great many paths, and only a few, among them Kiarostami, have seen the way of ways. And even fewer still, among them still Kiarostami, have from this abstract been able to transpose an image visible in the domain of art; have gone from the cave and back again. We partake, Kiarostami shows, in the same structures delivering us life, sharing paths trodden by wanderers past, as reincarnate spirits, wading and weaving through narratives of collective writing. That is why the sorrow of one is that of the other. It is not just our emotions deriving from a similar nature: it is from our lives unfolding in the same way, as subjects to mechanisms of storytelling whose nature is beyond us.

https://www.criticker.com/film/Through- ... ewr=dardan