Where Is My Friend's House?

1987 Kiarostami film

Rating: 16/20

Plot: A kid looks for his classmate's house after he accidentally takes his notebook. He doesn't want his friend to get in trouble.

The story that takes place here is about as simplistic as a movie narrative can be. A kid has to return a notebook but has trouble finding his friend's house, mostly because the adults around aren't being very helpful. It's a very human story, somehow these movies with kids as protagonists managing to get to the hearts of things more effectively than movies with adult protagonists. There's something profoundly sad about seeing a child, along with all the naive innocence and optimism that comes with him or her, in a world where that sort of innocence and optimism has difficult thriving. This movie really is about the difficult road a person is required to travel in order to practice empathy. The best visual metaphor is a road or path that cuts uphill toward a tree. Empathy isn't a straight shot, is it? It takes some traveling and some sacrifice and maybe some risks. The jagged streets in wherever-the-hell-this-takes-place also create that visual metaphor.

This is pretty damning toward the adults here, individuals who are contrasted so sharply with the kid because they seem to lack empathy. Most of this movie is seen through the kid's eyes, almost entirely his perspective until a scene with a grandfather who wants to beat him every fortnight. And man, that kid's eyes are fantastic! When an act of kindness like this is seen from an adult perspective, a jaded and tired perspective, the contrast is even more extreme.

Lots of doors and windows in this, including a reference to an iron door, a metaphor as simultaneously simple and complex as something from a Robert Frost poem. Differences in doors and windows are as clear as the differences between the hearts of children and the minds of adults, especially at night when funky lights and shadows from windows are thrown on walls. One of the first shots we see in this also has a door, a classroom door that a teacher can't get closed.

Man, that teacher. I know we're probably supposed to see that guy and be disgusted by the way he treats his students, but I'm not going to lie--that's kind of the teacher I want to be.

This is the first of a trilogy--the Koker Trilogy--so I'm probably going to have to check out the other two sometime--Life and Nothing More... and Through the Olive Trees.