Device Notes

In Abbas Kiarostami's films, cameras and cars are similar machines.  People use them to single things out: a car has its destination, a camera has its subject.  This film and 1992's Life and Nothing More... especially involve the use of cars, each consisting of a person's journey driving on winding roads through mountainous terrain.   The one in this film, Mr. Badii, drives around looking for people to talk to so he can ask them to do a job for him.  He intends to kill himself.  He's dug a hole under a small tree just off the road, far from any sites where people would be.  He'll lie down there at night, then at dawn, his hired hand will show up and check to see if he succeeded in ending his life.  If they find him alive, they're to help him out of the hole, and then both parties will go their separate ways.  If they don't, they're to bury him under 20 spadefuls of earth.  Either way, they'll be paid 200,000 tomans. Badii doesn't want j...

The unusual thing about this film—about Bresson's filmmaking in general—is that it restricts the imagination. The omnipresent, redundant narration leaves little room to speculate about what the nameless country priest is thinking, and singles out things for us to pay attention to. He’ll lean against a wall and we’ll hear his narration: “I leaned against the wall." Notably, this is only something Bresson does before a certain point. He dispenses with the narration starting with The Trial of Joan of Arc, and begins telling a different kind of story, where ethical struggles like the one depicted in this film don't matter because modern life is simply too complex and heteronomous for it to matter. If there is consistency between the different sides of Bresson's filmography, it's his effort to show "movement from the exterior to the interior."  This is the direction in which this film illustrates the priest's struggle of mind and body.  This struggle is no...