Abbas Kiarostami is quickly becoming one of my favorite working filmmakers. After his Where is the Friend’s Home completely blew me out of Lake Ontario, he followed it up with this, the second of his ‘Koker Trilogy,’ which is, while not quite as moving as Friend’s Home, more formally captivating, self-referential, and bizarre than anything that I was expecting from it. The film takes place almost completely in a car, as an unnamed filmmaker, who I suppose represents Kiarostami, and his son. They are on a long, ‘short cut’ filled trek to Koker, where some of Friend’s Home is set, after it is hit by a massive earthquake. Much like Friend’s Home and his short Breaktime, the film focuses on a journey that is taking place after some sort of trouble arises, and the focus is still on the children. For the first half of the film, the viewer is purposefully left unaware of the motivation for this drive. I assumed that the filmmaker and his son were either going to Koker to check on relatives who lived there, or that they were going to help with the relief effort. When the actual purpose of their trip is revealed at about the halfway point, I was admittedly shocked. The film shifted from a simple story about a car ride into a complex blend of fiction and non-fiction, and I was taken aback by how unexpected and riveting it was.
Much of the film contains Brown Bunny-esque shots out of the front windshield of the car, showing the approaching path. Where in Gallo’s film the shots are tedious and seemingly empty (until the revelatory finale, that is), I was completely engaged by the technique in Kiarostami’s film. As the film reveals itself to be a search, I greeted these shots out of the window with hope and participatory giddiness, and took advantage of them by searching the frame in the same way that the filmmaker in the car must have been. By the time the film was showing signs of winding down, I became more and more anxious that the film would close before I wanted it to, before the search ended. The final shot is gorgeous in its composition, in its relevance to Friend’s Home, and ultimately in how frustrating it ended up being. I anxiously await the conclusion of this, so far, stellar trilogy.