A Time for Drunken Horses

recommended

It seems like only a matter of time until the problem of poverty in Iran is solved, what with every doe-eyed Iranian child being drafted to star in feature films. But despite its thematic similarity to other recent imports from that country, A Time for Drunken Horses stands out for its dry-eyed lack of sentimentality and director (writer, producer and art director) Bahman Ghobadi’s effective use of long shots for confrontational scenes, which paradoxically increases our involvement by mimicking the characters’ sense of helplessness. Ghobadi’s restraint is all the more commendable given the ample opportunity for heartstring-tugging; his protagonists are Kurdish orphans on the Iran-Iraq border who desperately need to raise money to pay for a life-extending operation for their severely handicapped brother. Much of the film is set in the snow-covered mountain passes between the two countries, as smuggling is the most available source of income, and Ghobadi, once an assistant to Abbas Kiarostami, subtly turns the snowy expanse into an existential battleground. (He has Kiarostami’s instinct for tableaux without his tendency for self-conscious poetry.) The title, incidentally, comes from the smugglers’ habit of giving alcohol to their pack animals when it’s too cold for them to cross the mountains otherwise, and that sense of desperation pervades the whole film. There’s enough unvarnished cruelty in the film — the handicapped brother sobbing as he’s given an injection, smugglers kicking their mules in the face to get them to move forward — to raise ethical questions in the minds of viewers used to having the comfortable distance of fiction. But Ghobadi, himself a Kurd from a small village, knows the territory and his subjects, and if the situations are uncomfortable, it’s surely not an accident.

—Sam Adams

(Roxy)