Frontier Blues (2009)

directed by Babak Jalali
Iran
95 minutes
4 stars out of 5
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So this movie is set in and around Iran's northern border with Turkmenistan, and it involves issues of both countries but the main theme is universal human boredom and isolation. It follows four different men (mostly- the other people around them are sometimes involved as well) whose stories overlap with each other as they go about their routines, stuck in a place where it's hard to live and be anything other than "stuck". This is not presented as overtly tragic nor is it something to look down on as inferior, it's simply a look at a region that's barren and dry in many senses of the word.

It's difficult to believe that this was Babak Jalali's first film because it's so good at framing shots and putting unspoken yet intimately understood information and implications in shots that, at first glance, just look sparse- people isolated against an expansive steppe landscape, a man and his donkey, life inside a chicken factory, all of these things become more than they are when put in the context of something like Frontier Blues. It not only has a keen understanding of what it's like to live in boredom but also a sharp and occasionally absurd sense of humor to accompany the feelings of loneliness on that frontier.

I really appreciate that Jalali is an Iranian-born director who put a character in this movie who is from Tehran and is a portrayal of the way foreigners come to someplace they deem to hold some element of exoticism that they couldn't find in their home country and photograph people in situations intended to show the reality of their country that are, in actuality, totally set up by the photographer, and not anything that would occur in real life. The Iranian photographer in Frontier Blues follows around a Turkmen guy and four children and tries to capture them living "authentic, majestic Turkmen life" which is really a background propped up by what the Iranian guy believes Turkmen life to entail. The Turkmen guy is not amused by this.

It would seem that in attempting to capture the folly of people attempting to capture the magical spirit of whatever region of the world they romanticize, this film has accurately captured something of the actual spirit of the few-man's land between Iran and Turkmenistan.