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Time for Drunken Horses, the first film by
writer/director/producer Bahman Ghobadi and the co-winner of the
Camera d'Or at this year's Cannes fest, comes with a built-in
novelty: Ghobadi is the world's first Kurdish filmmaker, and
Horses is the first movie to essentially belong to Kurdistan,
a little-known (at least here in the West) cultural region that
exists in parts of Iraq, Iran, Turkey, and Syria. The Kurds are the
largest ethnic group in the world that don't have a country to call
their own, and Ghobadi as nobly made an effort to bring his people
into view through the devices of fiction filmmaking.
Must he rub our noses in that information? A Time for Drunken
Horses opens on a note of false humility: a title card bearing
Ghobadi's directorial statement. "I made this film as a humble
tribute to my cultural heritage," it states. "The Kurds you see in
this film are not figments of my imagination. They represent real
people, whose brave struggle for survival I have personally
witnessed in my thirty years of living among them."
That's all well and good, if perhaps a bit overzealous. Yet it
becomes an affront once the film begins, for there is barely an
ounce of cultural distinction to set it apart from any other,
non-Kurdish Iranian film. Ghobadi's realist style is
indistinguishable from that of many of his Iranian contemporaries,
at least to a viewer like myself who isn't a scholared expert on the
Middle East, its cultures and its filmmakers, and this film bears
many of the same problems--it is practically plotless, it moves at a
snail's pace, and its characters are poorly etched, at best. At
heart, the film is also inherently, cruelly, manipulative.
A Time for Drunken Horses follows the plight of a family
comprised only of children; their mother is dead, and their smuggler
father is missing, so the younger siblings have taken to addressing
the eldest brother Ayoub (Ayoub Ahmadi) as "Dad". Sparsely narrated
by Ayoub's younger sister Ameneh (Ameneh Ekhtiar-Dini), the film
chronicles Ayoub's desperate attempts to earn money that will fund a
life-prolonging operation for his crippled younger brother Madi
(Mehdi Ekhtiar-Dini). Ayoub first works in an Iraqi bazaar, then
turns to smuggling like his father, making long, dangerous treks
across cold and snowy mountains plagued by mines and ambushes, often
without any guarantee of payment. Eventually, with Ayoub's plans not
working, his older sister agrees to marry, with the understanding
that her husband will pay for Madi's surgery, but that arrangement
falls through as well.
Lightly put, A Time for Drunken Horses is a sad, somber
film, and even in a short 77-minute running time manages to suggest
more suffering and hardship than films twice as long. But does this
bleak view of life (which will probably seem harsher to foreign
viewers) constitute a universal representation of Kurdistan and its
inhabitants. Ghobadi's intentions and played-up singularity suggest
it as so, a situation I'm skeptical of. Even if every Kurd goes
through these tribulations, I doubt that the people, as individuals
and as a whole, are as uninteresting and plain as the film makes
them appear. Ghobadi's removal of real cultural signposts like
music, recreation, history, community--most likely done in order to
pave the way for a more unsparing vision--makes this look at Kurdish
life bland and indecisive.
And why is the film about kids? A Time for Drunken Horses'
narrow, waist-high viewpoint (a popular one among filmmakers of that
region) not only brings in a dubious cast of amateurs (these kids
are all right, but they pale next to those in Zhang Yimou's
memorable Not One Less), but clouds an understanding of the
complexities the Kurdish culture deserves to have accounted for.
Some stories benefit from a childlike, simplistic take on difficult
subjects, but this isn't one of them; the child characters aren't
pliable for such a story. (The film misses the handicapped
child/adult dichotomy Majid Majidi found in the graceful The
Color of Paradise.) It looks like Ghobadi might have chosen
child characters only to wring votes of sympathy from the audience,
a cheap way to make up for the depressing nature of his subject.
A Time for Drunken Horses is playing as part of the
Loews/Shooting Gallery national film series, which means it will
automatically gain more exposure than most Iranian films. Still,
beyond that, it looks less likely to make any kind of impact; as
foreign film goes, this one doesn't have much in the way of
crossover appeal, and those unconvinced of the supposed superiority
of current Iranian films (like me) will find no reason to convert.
As the self-proclaimed World's Only Kurdish Filmmaker, Ghobadi has
handed himself quite a bit of responsibility. Time will tell if he's
up to the challenge; we only know that he's off to a
less-than-promising start.