Khane-ye dust kojast

I've mentioned a handful of times, albeit no so much recently, that I've got a backlog of foreign films on my DVR that need to be watched and posted about. Indeed, I don't think I got to much of what I recorded during Jean-Paul Belmondo's day in Summer Under the Stars last August before the stuff expired in May. With that in mind, I watched some of the other foreign films that were about to expire from the DVR and so that I could do posts on them and schedule them some time in the future. There were two Iranian films from a TCM Imports block on Abbas Kiarostami, and first up I'll post on Where Is the Friend's House.

Ahmad is a young student at one of those old-fashioned-looking elementary schools where the students sit in a small room on bench type desks. It's a poor part of Iran (at the southwest edge of the Caspian Sea, although this particular village is in a part of the province farthest from the sea), where most people walk to where they're going and there doesn't seem to be running water, and certainly no phones. Ahmad's best friend is the kid who sits next to him, Mohammed Reza Nematzadeh. However, Mohammed is a bit lazy or absent-minded about bringing his composition book for doing homework home, to the extent that he's had several instances of doing homework on loose-leaf paper, which really bothers his teacher. It's so bad that the teacher threatens to expel the kid if he doesn't another time.

So what happens? On that very day, Ahmad walks home only to discover that he's taken both his and Mohammed's notebooks home with him. He feels like he absolutely has to get Mohammed's notebook to Mohammed so that Mohammed can do his homework and not get in trouble. But Ahmad's mother is insistent that he do his homework first before doing anything else, even though she keeps pestering him with things to do around the courtyard and in the few rooms of the house. Ahmad feels like Mom doesn't understand him, so eventually he runs off without telling Mom, in order to take the notebook to Mohammed in the next village over.

However, since Ahmad and Mohammed only know each other from school, they haven't really been to each other's village, and Ahmad certainly doesn't know which part of the village his friend lives in. It's also a good ways away on foot. As Ahmad makes his way to Poshteh, Mohammad's village, he finds that the adults on the way seem to have about as much interest in his plight as his mother did, which is to say none at all. Not even his own grandfather, who lives in Poshteh cares. Grampa, for his part, tells the other men he's talking to that part of this treatment is that a boy like Ahmad needs to learn discipline in order to become a responsible adult.

Darkness falls and so far Ahmad hasn't found his friend's house. Worse, it means he'll be walking home in the dark and his parents would be understandly angry with him for running off like this. At the same time, Mohammad won't have much time to do his own homework since the kids from Poshteh are told by their teacher to go to bed earlier since they have to wake up early to walk to school on time. Will we get a happy ending?

Where Is the Friend's House is a mostly interesting movie, although I had a few problems with it. It's a surprisingly slow movie even though it only runs 85 minutes. At the same problem, I couldn't help but think some of the characters had poor motivations as the adults come across as particularly mean at times. (One thing that I thought would be a plot hole is fixed by Ahmad being told there are a lot of Nematzadehs in this village, which helps explain why nobody can give him a good answer of where the one he wants can be found.) The story mostly works, and it's a visually pretty movie to watch.