A TIME FOR
DRUNKEN HORSES
(Zamani barayé masti asbha)
by Bahman Ghobadi
Review
(modified) by ROGER EBERT of the Chicago Sun-Times
A Time for Drunken Horses supplies faces to go with news stories about the Kurdish
peoples of Iran, Iraq and Turkey, people whose lands to this day are protected
against Saddam Hussein's force by a no-fly zone enforced by the United States
and the UK. Why Hussein or anyone else would feel threatened by these isolated
and desperately poor people is an enigma, but the movie is not about politics.
It is about survival.
In dialogue, in some of the opening scenes, we meet three young Iranian Kurdish
children: Ameneh, a teenage girl; Ayoub, her brother, who is about 12, and Madi,
their 15-year-old brother, a dwarf whose fiercely observant face surmounts a
tiny and twisted body. They live with their father, who, Ameneh matter-of-factly
reports, works as a smuggler, taking goods by mule into Iraq, where they fetch
a better price.
The children work every day in a nearby town. They are child labour, put to
work wrapping glasses for export, or staggering under heavy loads they carry
around the marketplace. Their hand-to-mouth existence undercuts easy Western
theories about child labour; they work to eat, and will be dead if they don't.
We see them in the back of a truck returning to their village, and there is
a shot that emotionally charges the whole film. Ayoub and Ameneh sit close together,
both helping to hold little Madi. Ayoub caresses the hair of the little creature,
and Ameneh gently kisses him.
They love their crippled brother, who never speaks throughout the film, who
must have regular injections of medicine, who needs an operation, who will probably
die within the year even if he gets the operation.
The truck is stopped by guards and impounded. The three siblings struggle together
through the snow, separated now from their father. Their existence is more desperate
than ever. They become involved with mule-trains that smuggle truck tires over
the mountains to Iraq. The high mountain passes are so cold that the mules are
given water laced with alcohol, to keep them going - thus the title. Ameneh
agrees to marry into a Kurdish family from across the mountains, if they will
pay for Madi's operation. What happens then I will not reveal.
The movie is brief, spare and heartbreaking. It won the Camera d'Or, for best
first film, at Cannes this year. Some find it boring, but I suspect they are
lacking in empathy (one Internet critic magnanimously concedes that the movie
"might have contained some appeal" if "my life were pathetic
enough"). A Time for Drunken Horses has the same kind of conviction as
movies like The Bicycle Thief, Salaam Bombay, and Pixote - movies that look
unblinkingly at desperate lives on the margin. The larger message is perhaps
in code. The Iranian cinema, agreed to be one of the most creative in the world
today, often makes films about children so that politics seem beside the point,
even if they are not. First-time filmmaker Bahman Ghobadi, who wrote and directed
this film, may or may not have intended to do anything but tell his simple story,
but the buried message argues for the rights of ethnic minorities in Iran and
everywhere.
His visual style is documentary. There is little doubt that most of what we
see is actually happening, or does happen much as it is represented here. The
sight of the mules with two big truck tires lashed to their backs has an intrinsically
believable quality. As for the children, Madi (Mehdi Ekhtiar-Dini) is obviously
sadly malformed; there is a touching shot of his eyes peering out apprehensively
from beneath the big hood of his coat as he rides in a mule's saddlebag. Ameneh
is played by Ameneh Ekhtiar-Dini, who has the same last name as Madi, and is
probably his sister; I learn from the notes that in general "the villagers
play themselves." I have read about the Kurds being bombed, about the no-fly
zone. All merely words, until I saw this movie. Now I will think of little Madi
peering out to see what luck he can expect today.