This very simple film is perfect given what it was trying to do. A story about a boy trying to return his friend’s homework notebook somehow translates into a surprisingly poignant and beautiful love story. Ahmed’s journey is an intense labor of love for Nematzadeh, whose potential fate of being expelled is a far greater disturbance to Ahmed than any punishment his parent could offer for his disobedience. The primary reason why this film works so well is the unbelievable job by the actors (the boys playing Ahmed and Nematzadeh are real life brothers). In the first scene when Nematzadeh is crying and Ahmed is looking at him, it is devastating because Ahmed’s heart is breaking in that moment. On the way home, Nematzadeh trips on the dirt road, and Ahmed leads him to a fountain, rolls up his pants and washes the dirt from his friend’s skin. His care for him is instinctual, and I got the impression that it had become his mission to never let anything bad happen to him from that point on. When Ahmed finds out that he has accidentally taken home Nematzadeh’s notebook, it’s impossible to not feel the anxiety of the situation. Every hold up in Ahmed’s quest to return the notebook is nerve-racking, and as the night crawls in, and Ahmed is still scrambling through Poshteh, still hasn’t bought bread for his mother, and still hasn’t done his own homework, the hopelessness of the scenario became exhausting to watch.
I was thinking of Pedro Costa a little bit while watching the film. The towns in this film look similarly beat up to those in Costa’s films, though the people here don’t feel as impoverished, pessimistic, and generally dirty as in Costa’s work. More, though, is the door motif. This film opens with a shot of the door to Ahmed and Nematzadeh’s classroom, partially open, swaying slightly as the children make conversation before the teacher arrives. The door continues to be a nuisance for the teacher, and it takes several attempts at shutting it before it finally won’t open again. Later, two important characters are introduced who are doormakers. One man wants to replace everyone’s wooden doors with iron doors, while another, older man limps through Poshteh, pointing at several doors and windows and proudly claims them as ones that he installed. While these latter men and their doors seem to show the changing style and sense of security of Iran, the door of the classroom mirrors the behavior of the children in the film. Ahmed, especially, is remarkably persistent; he will not take no for an answer. He is scolded at one point for always making elders repeat things instead of obeying them when they say something the first time, but it shows his maturity that he doesn’t take any of the adults’ bullshit. One review I read of this film wrote that Ahmed was naive, but I think he is clearly the opposite. His eyes and behaviors show an understanding of his situation more than any adult in the film comes close to. As predictable as the ending may be, it is extremely powerful because I endured Ahmed’s journey and could feel the selflessness that he must have in order to spend the night doing what he’d done. When I saw the flower in the film’s final shot, my heart sank because of its purity and complete lack of cynicism.