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Rating: Rossellini used to say that reality is right there in front, ready for the director who has nothing else to do but stage it. Kiarostami, who resembles Rossellini also somatically, with that sly face always hidden behind a pair of dark glasses, knows this, and his films are a beautiful testament to it.
Goffredo Fofi writes that cinema, understood as pure art, has in Kiarostami a director to rely on completely, in an era increasingly dominated by criteria of marketability, marketing, and, without metaphor, stupidity. His cinema has nothing to do with those sentimental-spiritual-mystical-metaphysical sagas of certain Mexican authors who seem to have the exclusive on avant-garde cinema today, but it has the simplicity and directness of popular poetry, in the hands of a poet who is not "popular" in the strict sense, but rather a cultured and hypersensitive director, experienced (his first feature film dates back to '70) and sophisticated. Kiarostami thus makes a stylistic hallmark stripped down and bare his own, implying a depth never unfathomable but (almost) always insightful. And so his films, telling us small stories, warmly invite us to reflect on many things, on life, death, and the infinite and richly nuanced range of human emotions.
The MacGuffin devised by Kiarostami is the crumpled and precious notebook of Mohamed Reda Nematzadeh, which Ahmed, his classmate, realizes he has mistakenly taken upon returning from school. What worries him is the severity of the teacher who has promised to expel anyone caught without their notebook. Here begins the odyssey of little Ahmed who, with the sole desire to spare his friend a punishment, armed only with the goodness of his intent, challenges an adult world deaf to his little voice. The mother doesn't listen to him, mechanically alternating between hanging clothes and the reluctant nursing of the newborn brother, ordering him this chore or that task, and demanding he complete his assignments before going out to play. Then there's a toothless grandmother preoccupied with trivialities who only opens her mouth for hoarse reprimands, as shortsighted and bothersome as a fly. Ahmed is left with no choice but to pretend he's going to buy bread so he can escape in search of his friend's house. But even the grandfather intervenes, whose curiosity at seeing him running down the street prompts him to call Ahmed over and, in virtue of his personal yet traditional theory of obedience, sends him to buy cigarettes. Once this hurdle has also been overcome, he sets off toward his friend's village, only to become ensnared in a maze of paths from which finding the way is impossible. Ahmed asks for directions and those who offer help, provided they're not preoccupied with their own petty concerns, are always vague or misleading. Kiarostami even takes the liberty of mimicking Hitchcock a bit by dressing a child from the village in Mohamed's same trousers and shoes: when Ahmed sees him, while carrying a wooden window (which covers his face) to load onto the mule.....
Finally, an elderly glassblower offers to accompany him to Mohamed’s place. Together they cover a good stretch of road, during which the old man incessantly points out all the windows he has installed to young Ahmed, they pause at a fountain near which the old man picks a flower that Ahmed places between the pages of the notebook. Upon reaching Mohamed’s house, Ahmed discovers it’s the same house of the child carrying the wooden window on his shoulders, a cousin of Mohamed. Disappointed, he returns home. Here he finds a silent father vainly attempting to tune a radio and his mother offering him dinner, which Ahmed, absorbed in his thoughts, refuses. The mother seems less severe and more loving, yet her affection remains blind, insipid, predictably maternal as when she, with care, brings dinner to Ahmed’s room so he can eat when he feels hungry. The following morning, the epilogue is bittersweet: Ahmed brings the notebook, with the assignments also completed for him, to Mohamed, who had tears in his eyes. And the teacher, upon checking it, opens it right to the page where the flower had been placed.
An ode to the freedom of childhood and the purity of feelings against the confinement of the family environment and tradition, against every attempt to trap the future in the forms of the past, and also against every discourse of premature retirement from life, worry for what will happen in the future, in homage to the instant joy of the present, "Where Is the Friend's House?" is a detoxifying masterpiece, disconcerting (because if it’s a masterpiece, then 75% of masterpieces shown so far fall behind), rich in subtleties without being sophisticated, inspired by a poem by Sohrab Sepehri, "The Address," which I necessarily quote.
“Where is the friend’s house?”
Horseman asked by twilight and,
The sky paused.
The passerby presented sands, the branch of light that he had in mouth
And pointed to a poplar tree and said:
“Before reaching the tree,
There is a garden alley that is greener than God’s sleep
And in it, love is as blue as the feathers of honesty.
Go to the end of the alley which stops at the back of adolescence.
Then turn to the flower of loneliness,
Two steps short of reaching the flower,
Stay by the fountain of eternal myth of earth
And you feel a transparent fear.
And in the fluid sincerity of the air, you will hear a scratch:
You will see a child
Who has gone up the pine tree, to grab a bird from the nest of light
And you ask him
Where the friend’s house is.”
It should be seen just for the acting performance of little Babek Ahmed Poor.
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