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Ali Reza Raisian�s 2002 film The Deserted Station (Istgah-Matrouk) was written by Abbas Kiarostami, and it shows in a number of Kiarostamiesque motifs. We have lengthy scenes of people driving in cars, sometimes talking, sometimes silent. We have hordes of unattended children, generally deferring to the adults when they�re not venting some sly smartassery. We have very little in the way of plot, although plenty in the way of story. And finally, we have women with issues.
The film opens with a long scene in which a man (Nezam Manouchehri) drives silently through a parched, at times bleakly beautiful Iranian landscape. Only when he stops the car to get out and take a picture (for he is a photographer) do we see his wife (Leila Hatami) in the front passenger seat. The couple is making a pilgrimage in hopes of curing their fertility problems, which are only hinted at in the beginning, but which will be elaborated on later. As they continue to drive, a deer leaps out at their car and the man drives it off the road and into a mound of sand, which scrapes up the bottom of the car and cripples it. The man walks to the nearest settlement, where he�s told that a man named Feizollah can help him fix his car. The settlement is full of women (of all ages) and children, but emptied of men, who have all left the town in search of work, with the exception of Feizollah, who serves as teacher for the children. His work as a mechanic is a sideline. Feizollah and the man (who introduces himself as Manouchehri, the same name as the actor who portrays him, another Kiarostami touch) ride a motorcycle back to the stranded car. Feizollah examines it and agrees to fix it, but he says it will take him most of the day to do so, and he�s reluctant to the leave the children without a teacher. Manouchehri says that his wife used to be a school teacher, before her doctor prohibited her from engaging in work (again, a hint at fertility concerns). It is agreed that Manouchehri will drive her on the motorcycle back to the settlement and establish her there as the children�s teacher for the day before returning to the car to assist Feizollah. For most of the rest of the movie, we watch the woman�nameless, as far as I recall�as she interacts with the children and the women villagers.
That�s it, in terms of plot; it�s not so much a plot as a premise. Like a number of the Iranian movies that I�ve seen (and a disproportionate number of them have been directed or at least written by Kiarostami), there�s little in the way of �action� in this movie. It�s a film to contemplate rather than to �follow,� and the protagonists, who don�t have that much to do, are engaged in a similar state of contemplation. The woman�Mrs. Manouchehri, let�s call her�turns out to be pregnant, as she has been twice before; both of those previous pregnancies resulted in miscarriages, and so the purpose of her and her husband�s pilgrimage is not so much for fertility as it is for the preservation of a child already conceived. In a town of seemingly orphaned children�their fathers gone to look for work, many of their mothers apparently dead (the children in the school never seem to get connected to any of the women who live in the town)�this woman on the cusp of motherhood has much to think about.
The Deserted Station also features the Kiarostami trope of the educated city-dwellers interacting with the more practical, down-to-earth residents of rural Iran. Much as the documentarian in The Wind Will Carry Usspends a good portion of the film desperately trying to maintain his cell phone signal, so Manouchehri is at a loss when it comes to fixing his car; it takes the rural denizen and local jack-of-all-trades, Feizollah, to extricate him from his predicament. We see a similar town-and-country dynamic at work in Mrs. Manouchehri�s interactions with the local women. Our heroine watches impotently as the village women assist a sheep which has gone into a particularly difficult labor. One of the local women states that she�s given birth eight times and asks Mrs. Manouchehri how many times she�s given birth. The latter responds with some embarrassment, �I haven�t.� The local woman then advises Mrs. Manouchehri not to watch the sheep�s painful delivery, as it certainly won�t help her in the lead-up to her own eventual labor. We see at play here the simple and universal theme of the formally educated city-dweller learning life lessons from the rural agrarian type, whose lack of formal education is compensated for by her practical life experiences. As former Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide once said, �Analphabete, pas b�te,� which means, �Illiterate, not stupid.� If it seems pretentious to present the quotation first in the original French, I only did so because in French, it rhymes.
Now, is this the lesson that the Manouchehris have set out to this isolated village to learn? I don�t know. In an American movie with that premise, the Manouchehris would come fully decked out with a wardrobe of clich�s, chatting on their Bluetooth headsets, drinking Starbucks coffee, and holding the locals in contempt. That way, the lesson learned is more dramatic (imagine the pathos of Mrs. Manouchehri hurling her Bluetooth to the ground and crunching it beneath her Ugg boots; on second thought, don�t imagine that). But part of the Kiarostami approach to cinema is restraint; the actors don�t need to engage in histrionics and the films are confident enough to lapse into that thing which is so lacking in American cinema: silence. And surely silence is a fertile breeding ground for contemplation, the mood (or perhaps the mindset?) into which the viewer of The Deserted Station is plunged.
I fear that in this review I�ve spoken more of Abbas Kiarostami than I have of this film�s director, Ali Reza Raisian. The latter certainly deserves credit for the lovely compositions and simple but effective tracking shots that make up this film. I would also like to praise the subtle expressiveness of Leila Hatami�s performance, which is also on offer in her latest star turn, Ashgar Farhadi�s A Separation, which won the Oscar for best foreign language film and which, not to boast, I saw �before it was cool.� I hope to speak more on that at some future date.
