Page 10 - Cine Appétit Issue 01
P. 10
Cine Appétit THE EASTERLY
PAGE 10
“AND TWO HEARTS BEATING
EACH TO EACH”: THE
ENDING OF KIAROSTAMI’S
THROUGH THE OLIVE TREES
B Y
R E B A N T A G U P T A
The acclaimed Iranian filmmaker Abbas against the background of Koker, a little
Kiarostami’s celebrated Koker Trilogy is Iranian village slowly recuperating from the
fashioned like the Russian Matryoshka dolls, devastating Manjil-Rudbar earthquake of 1990.
where the kernel of each story is hidden It charts an illiterate boy’s tempestuous quest
within the body of another. The journey that for love and passion in the midst of the rubble.
started with Where is the Friend’s Home? (1987) Hossein Rezai, a former stonemason, who is
jumps to a higher reality in Life…and Nothing recruited as an actor in a film (which happens
More (1992), and finally comes to a halt with to be the metafictional shooting of Life…and
Through the Olive Trees (1994), which stands as a Nothing More), nurtures the wish to marry
buffer zone between the trilogy’s three-tiered Tahereh, a girl orphaned by the earthquake,
cinematic world, and the plane of “reality,” on who is ironically playing the part of the
which Kiarostami and his crew are sculpting in leading lady in the film. The marriage
time for the celluloid. The trilogy glows with proposal was shunned by the girl’s
the heat of the questions of love, existence, grandmother, citing the poverty of wealth and
reality and fiction, and stoicism. Through the literacy that plagued Hossein. Although the
Olive Trees, the last member of the cinematic boy shows perseverance in his efforts to
triumvirate, is set convince the girl, she avoids him and
