Through the Olive Trees (Abbas Kiarostami, 1994) (Patreon)

It's taken me awhile to get to the final film in Kiarostami's Koker trilogy, and this is one of those instances when I really wish I hadn't waited. It's hard to say how I would have reacted to Through the Olive Trees in 1994, or 2004, or even 2014, although I'm fairly sure I'd have still considered it the weakest, most pro forma film of the three. Where is the Friend's Home? deftly combines fiction and documentary, and And Life Goes On expands the frame to consider the Koker earthquake as an event that affected hundreds, including the non-professional cast of Where is the Friend's Home? 

But by the time we get to Olive Trees, Kiarostami is at a few too many removes from reality, resulting in a comparatively slick metafiction that takes its own making as its lone subject. Kiarostami goes so far as to have the cast and crew play themselves as the cast and crew, to the extent that Olive Trees' erases the 180° line, using only the thinnest pretext of fiction to consider the impact that working on a film might hypothetically have on ordinary people. And where And Life Goes On is explicitly about the insignificance of cinema relative to affairs of life and death, Olive Trees skirts dangerously close to asserting that cinema encompasses all.

I most likely would have felt this frustration with Through the Olive Trees, and the way Kiarostami seems to employ a Borgesian structural framework to accomplish something that isn't nearly as profound as it seems to think it is, regardless of when I saw the film. But this is 2022, and there is an unavoidable rottenness to the central love story that distinguishes Olive Trees from the other two Koker films. It seems obvious that we are meant to be sympathetic to the plight of Hossein (Hossein Rezai), the lower-class former bricklayer who plays the lead in the film being made by The Director (Mohammadali Keshavarz) onscreen. He is in love with his young co-star (Tahereh Ladanian), and by all appearances she wants nothing to do with him.

Well, it's a bit more complicated than that, but not much. Hossein has been trying for awhile to marry Tahereh, but first her parents (who died in the earthquake), and now her grandmother, refuse to give him Tahereh's hand in marriage, because he is poor and has no apparent prospects. Hossein believes that Tahereh loves him, based on a perceived look she gave him at the cemetary (shades of Wedding Crashers!), and she is only dissuaded by her family's refusal. Thing is, Hossein never stops regaling Tahereh with endless disquisition on why they should be together, how much he loves her, how money shouldn't matter . . . and Tahereh remains absolutely silent.

It's clear that Kiarostami intends Through the Olive Trees to be a gentle fable about star-crossed lovers, or a po-faced meta-rom-com in which a young, somewhat naive romantic wins the maiden over with his ardor and persistence. But Tahereh is never given any character or personality to speak of, apart from her resolute refusal to offer any response to Hossein's entreaties. She shows no signs whatsoever that she wants him, but we are supposed to root for him to wear her down. The fact that they are only interacting on the set of a film makes matters worse. Hossein's behavior toward Tahereh would be considered obvious sexual harassment, were it not for the fact that Iranian society considers women to be property, and the film has no interest in breaking the frame on that.

This hasn't aged well, in other words. And the fact that Kiarostami's collaborator on 10, Mania Akbari, has claimed that the director sexually assaulted her, puts Olive Trees in an even more unflattering light. Nobody really needed a second-rate Symbiopsychotaxiplasm combined with Andrew Marvell's "To His Coy Mistress." And when you consider that Hossein's refusal to take no for an answer is the only thing that distinguishes Through the Olive Trees, it might actually make sense that this was the first Iranian film that prompted Harvey Weinstein to reach for his checkbook.