BASHU, THE LITTLE STRANGER
A film review by Mehdi Ahmadi
Copyright 1991 Mehdi Ahmadi
Last night I saw a film called BASHU, THE LITTLE STRANGER in San Francisco. It is a film made in Iran. The "San Francisco Chronicle" had a review of it last week end. It is one of the best movies I have seen in a long time.
BASHU is a fantastically directed and acted dramatic movie about a ten-year-old Iranian boy who lost his family in southern Iran during the war. His village was bombed. He sneaks into the back of a truck to get out of the war area. Traveling north, he ends up in the beautifully green areas of the northern Iran (by the Caspian Sea), where he faces suspicious villagers who distrust him because of his dark face and southern dialect. A young woman villager takes him in, and the story begins.
The story is great. The cinematography is fantastic. Bashu was played superbly. What is interesting that I noticed is that even though the movie did not have a haunting score, the rare occasions of audio percussion were quite moving.
Also in the Thirty-fourth San Francisco International Film Festival, there will be another Iranian movie called CLOSE UP (NAMA-YE NAZDIK). Here is an article from the San Francisco Film Society publication:
"A frustrated young film buff, who had been posing as
Mohsen Makhmalbaf, was arrested. The accused, passing himself
off as the celebrated film director (The Peddler), entered
the life of a well-to-do family with ostensible intention of
wanting to make a film with their participation. All this has
apparently been an excuse for planning a burglary which was
forestalled with the man's arrest." This small item in a
Tehran magazine caught the attention of another venerated
Iranian filmmaker, Abbas Kiarostami and became the genesis of
CLOSE UP.
.
The review above was posted to the
rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the
review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright
belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due
to ASCII to HTML conversion.
Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews