Where does the Train Go? A shallow movie review

I watched Deserted Station last night, an Iranian Film directed by Alireza Raisian and starring Leila hatami, Nezam Manouchehri, Mehran Rajabi, and Mahmoud Pak Neeyat, fine actors all.

I watch a lot of movies like that (like that meaning foreign, slow and heavy with either pointlessness or profound meaning, who can tell?). I watch them primarily because I am too cheap to rent a movie, much less pay real money at the box office, so I typically pick up whatever DVD looks remotely interesting at the library -- and also because I am a glutton for punishment, at least for artsy punishment. To be fair though, I am interested in the photographic and literary aspects of a movie. Often the obscure foreign films have interesting sensibilities.

But with Deserted Station, since it was a recent movie from Iran, my immediate interest was to find out if these people were human or simply two-dimensional caricatures of evil as they are portrayed by our government and its news organizations. Since we will soon be killing so many of them and destroying their country, I thought the question worth examining.

The movie opens with titles in a weird, squiggly script of some sort. It was more like art than any kind of alphabet and I cannot be sure if it had any meaning as would a human language, but it was beautiful nevertheless. Then we see a man in a Chevy Blazer driving through a beautiful desert. The man certainly looks human (more than that, he looks a lot like a colleague of mine who I always thought was a nice, regular guy, but now I’m thinking maybe I should report to Homeland Security). And the desert looked like a desert you would find on planet earth. Not just any desert, but a desert nonetheless. And when the man gets out to take a photograph, which is certainly a human activity, the camera reveals his wife who is sleeping in the passenger seat. Some might say that her beauty is inhuman, but that’s just a rhetorical flourish that is not uncommon when describing an actresses. And the fact that the man is a photographer by trade doesn’t say much about his humanity one way or the other. At this point we don’t know what kind of photographer he is, he could be a paparazzi, which would not qualify as human.

All that and much of the rest of the movie (lots of children, etc.) did make it appear that these people were human like the rest of us. But on the other hand, they were unquestionably two-dimensional. It is, however, possible they were two-dimensional due to the nature of the medium (flat screen), so perhaps we should hold off on the mass murder and destruction until we study the question some more.

Anyway, I quickly lost interest in the question of whether Iranians are humans or not and just watched the movie. But in these types of movies you have a lot of time to think as people drive slowly across the desert looking at the gorgeous landscape while bickering in a foreign language, so I thought a little about politics before I could really settle in to the story.

Of course with the whole nuclear thing all over the news, you have to question whether the Iranians are planning to make a bomb or just want to develop nuclear energy for peaceful purposes. The fact that the couple drove an old Chevy Blazer indicates that Iran is heading for a serious fuel crisis no matter how gargantuan their oil reserves. But that, of course, could just be propaganda. Maybe they all ride bikes. How would I know?

But other than the Chevy Blazer, the film’s politics, if any, are not obvious. This is often the case with films made under repressive regimes. If they want to get the film by the censors and stay out of jail, the filmmakers must hide their criticisms deep under a pile of metaphorical layers.

To consider the politics, however, I must get back to the plot. The couple’s Blazer breaks down. Perhaps this was a swipe at the American auto industry meant to appease the authorities, but as anyone who has ever owned an American automobile knows, it is a believable plot device. The man walks to a village for help, then he and the man he finds there go off to get a part and fix the truck. Meanwhile, the woman spends the day as a substitute teacher in the village.

The village is, of course, a strange village. In films cars never break down near normal villages. Anyway, in this strange little village, all the men have gone to the city to work and all of the young women have left to get married. They send their children back to the village to be raised by the old women, who return when their husbands die. There is only one man, and he goes off with the photographer to fix the piece of shit American SUV. One of the old women suggests that a saint is responsible for the car trouble.

Does any of that have political meaning? I don’t know.

There is another scene in which the photographer and the man from the village are riding on a motorcycle and see military trucks transporting young women. The photographer asks the man what’s going on, but the man repeatedly says he doesn’t see any military trucks or young women, even though they are right in front of him. I suspect there is some political meaning there, but can’t say exactly what it might be.

But enough about politics, and story can wait, imagery is what matters here. The early scenes are standard wide shots of the beautiful desert. We get the first hint of things to come when the men leave the Blazer to go find the spare part. The camera is under the truck and catches weird shadows and the bottom half of the motorcycle as it drives off. Then the woman gets to the village and the movie really gets scenic. It is one of those old, walled desert villages made out of mud with a lot of deep, arched doorways and plenty of shadows. Some of the imagery is a bit hokey, as you would expect, e.g. the woman framed in the arch with a strategically placed tree in the distance, but there are many extraordinary images and scenes as well. The children, for example, are grouped and framed in many different patterns and shapes, usually in a circle, sometimes in a snaking line, and individual members may cut off and stand in isolation or the whole group disperse randomly in many directions. Many of the shots of them running are fantastic and even when they are trying to stand still, they bounce up and down, left and right, looking like they are about to jump out of their skin. The children are always in motion.

Motion is, I believe, handled very well in this movie. The children’s movement is important because otherwise the camera doesn’t move that much. It stays steady for long stretches and when it moves, the movement is used to give emotional weight to that particular part of the story. And there is one long pan of the village that is simply great cinema, up there with Orson Wells.

Sound is not pervasive in the movie, but when it appears it is used effectively. One stretch in which the woman is hunting the children among the abandoned train cars is reminiscent of the freeway scene in Solaris.

As for the story, it is a foreign Film and like any English major’s wet dream, you can find meanings all over the place. So if you want to speculate on the plot and its meaning, I’d certainly consider the idea that everything centers around the woman and her relationship with the children. She and her husband are unable to conceive. The children in the village are lacking parents. There is a scene where a stillborn lamb is delivered. The movie ends with a genuinely eerie scene of hide-and-seek among abandoned rail cars and then a long, creepy sequence in which the children chase the couple as they drive away from the village. Is there any meaning there? No doubt. What is it? I don’t know. Are there other ways to read it? Yep, quite a few.

So that’s it. Humanity? -- Yes. Are they human? – Jury’s still out. Story? -- I think. Depth? – make of it what you will. Politics, meaning? -- Don’t know, don’t care. Camerawork, sound? -- Excellent in places.