The White Balloon

(Jafar Panahi, Iran, 1995)

Much of the journalistic talk about national cinemas is rather spurious: French cinema is going through a depressive, anti-humanist phase this year; new German cinema captures something of the Teutonic character; Australian films are all heading off in the same bold new direction at the moment.

What usually makes such comments so transparently stupid is that they are based on a pitifully small sample of films. I love it when commentators murmur, for instance, that Italian cinema is in decline, nothing up to the standard of the great days of Fellini and Visconti – and that judgment is based on three or five Italian films, sometimes just one; in other words, the only Italian films that have managed to make it to our Fatal Shore.

And then there's national cinema trend-spotting. As one smart wag put it, with total accuracy: one acclaimed film from Sweden about juvenile gangs is a singular phenomenon, a cultural event; two such films is a veritable movement of overwhelming proportions, a genre unto itself – in fact, a national Zeitgeist. This is the kind of logic that allowed some journos to write about the All-New Australian Cinema in the mid '90s, after having seen just Muriel's Wedding and (1994) The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (1994).

But let's indulge the luxury of extolling one particular national cinema, or at any rate a properly demarcated slice of it: that of Iran. Since the late '80s, many serious filmgoers have taken note of what indeed seems to be a movement, some kind of New Wave in Iranian cinema. The films are often about children, and they seem to have been made for children, since they're signed by the Institute for the Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults. We sometimes read in newspaper reports – and I don't know how true this is – that making films for children is sometimes the only way that Iranian directors can get to make their movies. These films also have a shared, discernible style. Critics point to this style as a rebirth of the Italian neo-realism of the 1940s: filmic tales of ordinary people and everyday life.

In fact the specific stories and the narrative structures of these films tend to be more neo-realist than neo-realism ever was. There's a story of a boy, for instance, who goes wandering into the next village, looking for his friend's house, to give him his homework book (Abbas Kiarostami's Where is My Friend's House? [1987]). Or there's the story of a little child locked inside his home apartment, looking all over for the key, and then not being able to reach up and get it (Ebrahim Forouzesh's The Key [1987]). Or a love story where a man keeps trying to woo the girl he loves, tries just to talk to her, and she never answers him, because she's forbidden to; she never answers him, and that's the sole intrigue, the sole tension of the story (Kiarostami's Through the Olive Trees [1994]). Here, neo-realism shades into minimalist art, and what absolutely absorbing minimalist art it is.

Of course, this is not the entirety of Iranian cinema. And this small movement – if that's not too grand a term for it – tends to be, really, a kind of spontaneous school or family happening around one person, a key figure in Iranian cinema. This figure is Kiarostami, whose other films as director include Homework (1989) and And Life Goes on... (1992). As a writer – more, it seems, an oral storyteller – he is credited with The Key and a beautiful new film, The White Balloon (1995), which marks the feature debut of Jafar Panahi, the young guy who assisted Kiarostami on Through the Olive Trees.

But let's stay with Kiarostami for a moment. He is not only a key figure in Iranian cinema; I think he is incontestably one of the half dozen most significant and remarkable filmmakers in world cinema today. He's already become a formidable, almost mythical figure to many hardcore cinephiles and critics, the kind of filmmaker who gets described in magical, visionary terms, like he's not quite of this earth. Kiarostami has been acclaimed as a deathless Master after only a handful of films – where Alfred Hitchcock or John Ford, in their day, probably needed to get a few more movies under their belts before they were smothered with such fulsome, breathless praise. And how completely against the spirit of Kiarostami's films – how completely contrary to the humble air of the man himself – to praise the films in such lofty, sublime terms, given their modest, simple and utterly grounded tone.

But, finally, I would have to agree that Kiarostami is indeed a great filmmaker, and his films are indeed sublime. They creep up on you in a way that few movies do. In Kiarostami's films, little details accumulate, the seconds pile up. A whole world of emotion and adventure opens up from these simple, suspenseful premises: getting a key, speaking to a girl, walking from one town to the next. It's neo-realist and minimalist, but it's also fantastically excruciating to watch, a bit like a Hitchcock thriller, in fact: there are always detours, frustrations, reversals of fortune, strange encounters with unlikely characters. All along this line of suspenseful engagement, we never cease being aware of the sounds, the textures, the rhythms of a real world: a world that is always crowded and chaotic, in which every person seems to carry around with them their own story, their own terse and surprising pathos, like a flower within them that may or may not ever get the opportunity to bloom before our eyes. Kiarostami's films are teeming with life, and yet they are so simple. Another master, Akira Kurosawa, was right to compare Kiarostami to Satyajit Ray.

There's a certain moment that arrives in the Western-style discussion of certain national cinemas – and I feel myself sliding toward this moment right now, despite myself – when a certain plaintive note of romance creeps in: the romanticisation of national cinemas and film styles that are tacitly assumed to be simple, primitive, peasant-like, pre-modern or pre-industrial, pre-high technology at any rate. This is an airy hankering for a Third World ambience, a cultivated taste for a backwoods squalor and a supposedly uneducated, uncultured, unspoilt folk wisdom.

This kind of patronising nostalgia trip happens often in relation to works of Indian, African, Armenian, even some Chinese cinema. It is possible that the members of the Kiarostami Family sometimes create or encourage this primitivist impression (hence all those charges – dubious to me – that they "make their films for the West"). It's an impression that can be easily packaged off and sold to film cultures like our own as some quaint novelty from an exotic world.

This taste, in the West and elsewhere, for the simple, primitive and pre-industrial tends to go hand-in-glove with a studied preference for mono-cultural societies. Not multicultural societies or hybrid cultures formed from a clash or mixing of traditions and influences, but static cultures with a single stream, a unified national image. This, of course, has to be an illusion, and a carefully touched-up illusion at that. How many pristine mono-cultures, removed from time and history, are there left in the world today? Probably none. That's why, when you pass from a nightmare film-event like Il Postino (1994) – a film which was sold to us in Australia by an American distributor (Miramax) as a primitive, timeless fantasy of the simple Italian peasantry – to Tony Gatlif's proudly multicultural film about gypsy life, Latcho Drom (1993), or the kinky, neon-city, cultures-in-collision films of Wong Kar-wai, it can be a bracing and necessary shock.

Of course, not all Iranian cinema can be in the simple, pure, observational, neo-realist mode that I've described. I haven't, for instance, mentioned the other key Iranian director of the '90s, Mohsen Makhmalbaf. His incredible Salaam Cinema (1995) is aggressive and psychodramatic, almost as if to directly confront the restrained, patient elements of Kiarostami's style. And Makhmalbaf is sophisticated, too, in his use of paradox, contradiction and juxtaposition, more sophisticated than many supposedly modern cutting-edge, Western filmmakers one could name. Kiarostami, himself, when you take a proper look, is no primitive. In films like Close-Up (1989) and Through the Olive Trees he gives us stories that float strangely in between documentary and fiction, spontaneity and contrivance, naturalness and artifice, shifting between levels of movie fantasy and chaotic reality. You never know exactly where you are, where you stand as a viewer in relation to these films, and in many ways that moment of confusion is the quintessential characteristic of modernist art.

The White Balloon is the first Iranian film to get an arthouse cinema release in Australia, which is some kind of milestone (not necessarily a comforting one). A little girl, Razieh (Aida Mohammadkhani), longs to own the lovely goldfish that she's spotted in a shop window. After nagging her mother and getting her way, Razieh sets out for the shop. But, along that path, she gets distracted (first off, by a pair of snake charmers), and a little later she realises that she's dropped the money entrusted to her by her mother. Most of the film's action – in that disarming, neo-realist, minimalist mode – is devoted to Razieh's excruciating attempts to find and then secure the elusive legal tender.

Panahi brings a beguiling humour, poetry and strangeness to this tiny, everyday story. Apart from emotions of suspense, frustration and relief, the film conveys, above all, a truly magical sense of encountering places and people through a child's eyes. But make no mistake, there is a great deal of dread mixed into this magic, as there was in Kiarostami's Where Is My Friend's House?. In these particular Iranian films, adults tend to be, as seen by children, fuzzy, fascinating creatures; they're frightening strangers one moment, tender angels the next. This random procession of adults (also older kids) brings in to the child's fragile circle of experience traces of a mysterious social order, of law and prohibitions, games and seductions, war and romance. It also lets in the traces of a modern and multicultural society, as for instance here with the intriguing figure of a young Afghan street seller.

So this limpid, adorable film is also a tough, matter-of-fact portrait of the everyday, not a sentimental, redemptive whitewash. Razieh experiences happiness and wonder in her journey, but also indifference and cruelty. The overall mood is a lot gentler than, say, Vitali Kanevski's Russian film about childhood initiation Freeze, Die, Revive! (1989). But there's still some grit, and a definite melancholy, that stays with you long after the movie is over.

It is important to say something about the endings of Iranian films, at least in this School of Kiarostami that I have been evoking. Kiarostami's own endings are always sensational: simple and understated, but welling with such force, poignancy and deeply satisfying finality (even in their very open-endedness). When I saw Through the Olive Trees for the first time, on video, I literally had to watch the ending (a single four minute take with the lead characters about a mile away from the camera) three times straight through – because it is like a miracle, an apparition, a vision. And I guess that's why people want to call Kiarostami a visionary.

The simple things in these particular Iranian films really matter: the end point, so limpid and logical and yet so full of the mystery and magic of life, loops back to the very starting point, which is the film's title. Titles like The Key, The Jar and especially The White Balloon always seem to hide something, referring to a secret, some possibly overlooked dimension in the story that we have followed in its unfolding. In this story, the white balloon has nothing to do with the little girl and her goldfish. Its presence near the end of the tale, finally frozen in the very last frame, points to another story of the everyday, a story with a perhaps even harsher pathos than that of the girl.

These artful games with titles and endings come to transform everything that falls between them. I inevitably wonder if that is part and parcel of some ancient folk art of Iranian storytelling. After all, that's what Kiarostami, with his casual and modest air, always calls himself, a humble storyteller; that's why he speaks his scripts out aloud, spins them in the air, rather than writing them down. If this is tied to some ancient storytelling technique, then it must be an extremely sophisticated folk art – like, indeed, most folk arts.

© Adrian Martin September 1996