BASHÚ, GHARIBEH KOUCHAK (BASHU, THE LITTLE STRANGER)
by BAHRAM BEYZAI (Iran, 1986, 120’, Colour)
restored by: Roashana Studios with the support of the Institute for the Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults (KANOON) - presented by mk2 Films
I'm sorry to say I hadn't seen a single one of Beyzaie's films when he passed away last month, even when owning a copy of
Downpour via
Martin Scorsese’s World Cinema Project No. 3 and even missing the few that screened at MoMA's 2023 program
Iranian Cinema before the Revolution, 1925–1979. An enormous lapse on my part, but I finally caught up to one at To Save and Project, which preceded it with an earlier short:
Amou Sibilou (Uncle Mustache). 1970. Iran. Written and directed by Bahram Beyzaie. With Sadegh Bahrami. World restoration premiere. DCP courtesy mk2 Films. In Persian; English subtitles. 28 min.
Bashu Gharibeh Kouchak (Bashu, the Little Stranger). 1986. Iran. Written and directed by Bahram Beyzaie. With Soussan Taslimi, Adnan Afravian, Parviz Poorhosseini, Akbar Doudkar, Farrokhlagha Houshmand. US restoration premiere. DCP courtesy mk2 Films. In Persian; English subtitles. 121 min.
Both films more or less repeat the restoration credit seen above on MoMA's website:
Restoration in 4K at Roashana Studios with the support of the Institute for the Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults (Kanoon).
I forgot what a former boss of mine told me when I was still in college - he always visited MoMA whenever he was in NYC because he told me the way they arranged their exhibits was always brilliant, which implied I should always try to see the exhibit in the "correct" order to get the entire conceptual and/or narrative flow on display. So not surprisingly, their film programming will often show the same thought in the way film screenings are grouped or scheduled.
The restoration for the short
Amou Sibilou (Uncle Mustache) is beautiful, looking like they had access to original and well-preserved film elements. Besides the picture, the soundtrack is clear enough that it's fairly obvious everything had to be dubbed in after the movie was shot, from the dialogue to the sound effects. Often times it has an eerie, unnatural effect that adds to the more "suspenseful" moments - the same quality can be heard on
Carnival of Souls where the soundtrack was also completely recorded after the fact. But I only use the word suspenseful in describing quiet moments of anticipation and anxiety - the film is actually a comedy. Given the story, it would be a lighthearted comedy except quite a few moments are portrayed in surprisingly dark and unsettling ways. One particular moment juxtaposes an action with an incongruous sound that's especially violent, and this soon gives way to more violent imagery. Given the country's history and how much turmoil it had and continued to experience when this film was made, one wonders if this is the natural result of living through such times, where even the film's children must be familiar with such violence.
This impression soon found physical manifestation in the very opening of
Bashu Gharibeh Kouchak (Bashu, the Little Stranger) - it begins with a series of bombings, revealing its setting during the Iran-Iraq war, and it follows the one surviving member of a family that was basically wiped out by it. In hindsight, the plot and story would feel right at home in a Hollywood film, the kind of prestige picture Spielberg might make, but this is also a cultural depiction of Iran that would never have happened in Hollywood in the 1980s (or the next few decades for that matter) and it's also done with a beautiful sense of poetry. The opening minutes depict a child that's been thoroughly traumatized by war, and when the light is just right (specifically when they're outdoors and the aperture has to be closed down to accommodate the bright midday sun), the boy looked like a charred corpse running in terror, and indeed after this thought came to mind, someone tells him he's as black as coal, not knowing he was covered in soot from the horrors he escaped. (FWIW, it's later revealed that even when washed, his complexion is much darker than everyone else's in his new surroundings, something that they constantly point out in teasing fashion.)
I noticed Jonathan Rosenbaum described Beyzaie as someone who was much more influenced by Hollywood filmmaking than, say, Kiarostami or Panahi, and again the story does evoke Spielberg and (per MoMA's description) Chaplin, but the filmmaking at times recalled Scorsese in terms of the blocking, the camera movements and editing. With few exceptions nearly every Iranian film I had seen until now was made by Kiarostami or Panahi, so it was startling to see so many quick montages, ostentatious juxtapositions, and dynamic tracking shots briskly keeping pace with its moving subjects.
Even Beyzaie's use of sound stood out as an ambitious progression from what he accomplished in the preceding short (which tbf was made almost 20 years earlier). It was the film's most potent depiction of this boy's continuing trauma - maybe it's just me, but I feel like the abstract nature of sound can be more convincing than something as concrete and literal as a visual depiction of mental turmoil. I think hearing a sound immediately puts us in the character's mindset, like we're naturally experiencing it from their perspective, whereas if we see a visual, we're too aware of the filmmaker's hand, that it feels too much like someone trying to impose on us some kind of visual translation of what the character is experiencing. (To use a real life example, when Brian Wilson passed away last year, the obituaries would inevitably discuss his mental struggles which often included hallucinations. In terms of anything he might've seen, it was something I could only process in an abstract sense, uncertain what that experience would actually be like. It may have very well been like Ron Howard's
A Beautiful Mind, but when I try to picture it that way, it feels far too neat, like I'm still missing some vital aspect to the real life experience. But when Wilson described his aural hallucinations as whisperings, of unknown voices telling him awful things, it was disturbingly easy and convincing to imagine what that could be like, and it made it all the more unsettling.)
So besides the aural component, there did appear to be visual depictions of traumatic hallucinations, at least initially, and for the reasons stated above, it played like a less powerful device. But as these visual hallucinations recur, it became clear that these weren't necessarily visual manifestations of mental trauma, especially when we see them in the presence of a different character in the boy's absence. (I should add the first instance of these visuals played more like a dream descending on the boy as he drifted into sleep.) A surprising development, I got the impression there was a spiritual component, as if it was reflecting some cultural idea of the deceased and what happens to them after death, but given my limited familiarity with the religion and the culture at hand, this was all conjecture.
I'm tempted to say the back half became a bit predictable when the story appeared to head down familiar conventions, which made it a little less compelling, but the filmmaking itself never flagged, particularly the way he opened the film's final scene (a beautiful moment that involved a scarecrow, two different jackets and a flute).
The only other thing I have to add is that there's also a beautiful conversation that ditches subtitles for a long stretch, a surprising choice that pays off well. (It culminated in a charming joke that I was able to understand without any fluency for the languages involved. It revealed a surprising phonetic similarity two words had with their counterparts in modern Romance languages.)
The restoration looked amazing - I sincerely hope it finds its way on Blu-ray, a UHD if possible, and I did see Bruce Goldstein on the way out, so I'm hoping he was impressed enough to book this at Film Forum. Beyzaie lived long enough to see the restoration go to Cannes, and I imagine he must've been pleased with the results - it's still sad he's no longer with us, it would've been great to see him present the restoration in-person and introduce it to a whole new audience.