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A Few Kilos of Dates for a Funeral

I’ve always found Iranian cinema to posses a kind of freshness that is rarely seen. In a country like Iran where there are a lot of rules imposed on the art of cinema, it is astonishing to see what level of storytelling some of its filmmakers have reached. Take the shining example of A Taste of Cherry (1997 Palm d’Or winner), the quintessential Kiarostami masterpiece is set mostly inside of a car and yet goes to places where cinema has never gone before. Such is the case with A Few Kilos of Dates for a Funeral (Chand kilo khorma baraya marassem-e tadfin).

I watched this great film at the highly disappointing 2008 Hyderabad International Film Festival, where it served as the closing film. I had the great company of Faramarz K-Rahber, an Iranian-Australian filmmaker, who was equally impressed with the quality of the film. The entire film is shot in a beautiful black and white world where everything seems tastefully artistic. It is one of the rare instances in film where I can assure you every single frame of the print is beautiful photograph on its own.

The story is set in a deserted area in Iran where Sadry and his new assistant must run a petrol station. They hardly have any customers and the differences in their personality results in each of the two men spending most of their time alone. A third major character is a postman who keeps paying them a visit every once in a while on his bicycle. The three men have separate dreams for themselves. The postman would really love to upgrade his bicycle to a motorcycle, the assistant is in love with a woman in the city who he keeps writing letters to but never gets a reply and finally there’s the one-eyed, jaded Sadry who secretly prays to god for snow to keep the only thing he loves alive. The object of Sadry’s affection is the dead body of a female journalist who had died when her car crashed in the snow. Sadry had kept her buried in the snow and did not reveal her presence to the local mortician who also happens to be his friend.

The character of Sadry is perhaps the most complex and also the most interesting in the film. He is an old man, living in isolation in the middle of nowhere and is always struggling with the weather to keep his petrol station running. He quickly finds solace in the dead woman. In a way he is identifying his lifelessness with the lifelessness of the dead body and forms a strong sense of sanctuary with it. He sits with it for hours at a stretch and talks his heart out, he prays for the snow to stay longer so that the body might remain unaffected an attempt that is ultimately futile but at the same time not so. To understand what I mean, you simply must watch the film.

The other two major characters: the assistant and the postman also have their own sub-plots dealing more with love and relationships. The assistant is in love with a woman whom he once met briefly near her home and writes to her regularly in highly romantic words. He has a deal with the postman where he pays him a certain amount every month to deliver the letter to her in person. The postman has other plans. He takes the assistant’s letters and passes them off as his own and eventually gets married to the woman. Things take a drastic turn when the assistant takes a leave to go into town and visit the woman he’s in love with and finds out that the postman had married her. It is only revealed later after a physical confrontation between both the men that the woman the assistant is in love with is not the one the postman had married. In fact, the first time the postman had come to deliver the letter he had found that the woman it was addressed to did not live there.

The film essentially deals with the hopelessness of its three protagonists and how in the end they find solace in hope. It deals beautifully with the weakness of human beings that is human emotion and how sometimes we find comfort in the most bizarre places, bizarre but real. The film’s beautiful black and white photography is admirable and Saman Salour does a great job as the director.

I would put this film right next to the best works of Abbas Kiarostami, Mohsen and Samira Makhmalbaf. Built with simplicity and such sensitivity towards human vulnerability, it reminds us once again why some of the films of Iran are such world masterpieces.