By Jim Ridley

A Time for Drunken Horses

dir.: Bhaman Ghobadi

NR, 80 min.

Opening Friday at the Belcourt

For a few years now, since the American cinematic community first became aware of the remarkable movies being made in Iran, we’ve been playing a delightful game of catch-up. The works of pioneers like Abbas Kiarostami stretch back into the 1970s and have spawned dozens of followers, creating a lot of old ground for the neophyte to cover. Our situation in the States has become like that of latecomers at a feast; gorging ourselves with what we’ve missed, we can sometimes be dismissive of the courses currently arriving at the table.

So it is with the American cinephile who turns up her nose at yet another Iranian film with children at its center. The White Balloon, Children of Heaven, The Color of Paradise—been there, seen that. But it would be a grave mistake to let genre satiation rob us of a genuinely new experience like Bhaman Ghobadi’s A Time for Drunken Horses, the first feature of a Kurdish filmmaker who apprenticed under Kiarostami. In this brief, stark tale, part autobiography and part allegory, Ghobadi displays the sure hand of one who has learned his lessons well and is ready to strike out on his own.

The title refers to the bitter winter weather in the mountains that separate Iran from Iraq. There Kurdish smugglers must mix vodka with their mules’ water to keep the animals going for the border crossing. As the film opens, Ayoub, a boy in his early teens, loses his father to one of thousands of land mines strewn across the borderlands, left over from the Iran-Iraq war. He and his older sister are left in charge of their three younger siblings—one of whom is mentally and physically handicapped, and desperately in need of an operation. Ayoub must take up smuggling himself to raise the money, but he is at the mercy of capricious employers, border raids, and the conflicting plans of other members of his family.

The plot may sound like a tearjerker, and Iranian films are certainly known for their deep reliance on audiences’ emotions. But as Ghobadi shoots it, against the empty white hills, twisted black trees, and gray rocks of Kurdistan, the family’s plight seems all too easily lost in the vastness of the landscape. Sentimentality is swallowed up by the tightly focused ideology that Iranian filmmakers have inherited from the Italian neo-realists: In the struggle for survival, there is no time to weep for others, only for oneself. It seems a miracle, a moment of grace, that Ayoub’s story has been preserved among the thousands or millions of similar stories that we’ll never hear.

Ghobadi, a 30-year-old Kurd who has been making short films since 1995, signals his arrival with an opening that consciously makes the transition from the style and voice of his mentor, the old master Kiarostami. A Time for Drunken Horses begins in the busy commercial district of an Iraqi town, with the children industriously earning their keep by wrapping shoppers’ glassware purchases in newspaper. The feel is familiar to anyone who’s seen a film by Kiarostami or his successors Majid Majidi and Jafar Panahi—an urban setting in which children threaten to disappear under the trampling feet and shouted instructions of busy adults. But after the Kurdish kids make their way back across the border to their rural village, the city becomes a distant memory, although an ever-present goal—it’s the only place where they can earn money, and the rest of the film is spent chronicling their efforts to get back.

After such delectable morsels as Iran has been serving to us in quick succession, it’s easy to see what’s now before us as just another sweetmeat, too much like the last to deserve much notice. With A Time for Drunken Horses, however, we have a chance to witness the growth of a new Iranian talent from the very start, one with a distinct message and style to bring to his inherited genre.

Demasiado

The first big scene of The Mexican is a total gas. Brad Pitt plays a shambling no-account named Jerry who’s been doing odd jobs for criminals ever since he accidentally rear-ended a mob boss. When we first meet him, he’s trying to explain to an upper-level lackey (played with amusing terseness by Bob Balaban) that the reason he didn’t make his last appointment was because his emotionally needy girlfriend hid his car keys. The situation is ridiculous to start with, but the actors and director Gore Verbinski work every angle—deadpan reactions, inappropriate reactions, rapid-fire exchanges, pregnant pauses—to get every possible laugh.

Then we meet Jerry’s girlfriend Sam, played by a jumpy Julia Roberts, as he stands outside their shared apartment and tries to explain that he has to go to Mexico to retrieve an antique pistol, and therefore has to cancel their trip to Vegas. Sam throws his clothes off the terrace and shouts meaningless relationship psychobabble to him, about how his fear of getting rubbed out is just symptomatic of his chronic selfishness.

Roberts and Pitt are very funny in this scene too, and The Mexican proceeds through a string of well-played scenes with striking bits of verbal or physical business. My favorites include Roberts idly flipping two creamer packets while sitting in a diner with a hit man (played by James Gandolfini); a put-upon Mexican car-rental clerk who rolls his eyes at the ignorance of slumming gringos; and Jerry’s first visit to a seedy Mexican cantina, where he slaps down $20 for a shot of tequila and gets two pesos change.

But all of those moments occur in about the first 40 minutes, and though there are other unusually crafted scenes in the next 90 minutes of The Mexican’s two-hour-and-10-minute running time, there’s not enough going on plot-wise to link up the good parts. Jerry and Sam bicker, Jerry goes on his mission, Sam is kidnapped, and everyone chases after a pistol that has some heavy backstory. To sustain the action, Verbinski and screenwriter J.H. Wyman allow the pistol (called “The Mexican,” by the way) to change hands several times, even though the guy who ultimately owns it really never should’ve lost it but once in the first place.

The other major false note is how the two leads, drawn into the criminal life by circumstance, end up taking to violence with little lingering anxiety. Corpses don’t pile up as egregiously as they do in some crime sagas, but the indifference with which they’re dispatched in The Mexican lessens the overall impact of the film and makes it seem more callous than it needs to be.

But my main complaint is simple: The picture is just too damn long. It’s just a procession of offbeat exchanges, and as soon as it becomes apparent—at about the hour mark—that there’s nothing more to the movie, the freshness of those exchanges becomes less and less inherently exciting.

Gore Verbinski did promising work on his feature debut Mouse Hunt, and that promise is not dulled by the follow-up. He clearly knows how to stage a comedy, and this film has more brains behind it than, say, 3,000 Miles to Graceland. But maybe Verbinski’s problem is that he’s so attuned to what he can make of each individual scene that he can’t pull back long enough to see what’s happening to the overall design. While he’s working every angle, his line is getting tangled.

Too cool for school

Last year, Nashville lost all its discount moviehouses, as Carmike Cinemas closed theater after underperforming theater in the midst of financial woes. These weren’t always the plushest of theaters—Cinema North had all the amenities of a post-apocalyptic bus terminal—but it was worth some discomfort to get a second crack at films you missed the first time around. For that, we must now rely on Nashville’s college cinemas—and the good news is that they’re offering first-rate second-run films and more.

The “more” is amply provided by Vanderbilt’s Sarratt Cinema, which has doubled its attendance this year through a series of shrewd programming strategies—split showings every Friday and Saturday, extended runs, encore Sunday matinees. As second-run films go, Sarratt’s post-spring-break lineup is outstanding. It starts Tuesday with Quills and includes current Oscar contenders Wonder Boys (March 15-23), You Can Count on Me (April 5-8), and Billy Elliott (April 5-14). There’s also the Nashville Film Society’s return engagement of one of last year’s most underattended movies, Claire Denis’ Beau Travail (April 24, 25, and 29).

The prizes, though, are a trio of first-run films that escaped Nashville theaters. The reissue of Jean-Luc Godard’s seminal gangster homage Breathless runs March 20, 21, and 25, followed by Lars von Trier’s Dogme 95 outrage The Idiots April 10, 11, and 15. Best of all is the first Nashville showing of The Wind Will Carry Us, the latest film by Iranian master Abbas Kiarostami; it screens April 17, 18, and 22. These films are all sponsored by Nashville Premieres, the grass-roots kino-club that has experienced surprising success with movies thought too esoteric to play commercial theaters.

Sarratt is also sponsoring an early-April student film festival, which includes a competition for on-campus filmmakers as well as appearances by author Gilberto Perez (The Material Ghost) and producer Lloyd Silverman (Snow Falling on Cedars). Complete schedules are available at the front desk of Vanderbilt’s Sarratt Student Center. At $5 for non-students, the student cinema remains one of the cheapest movie dates in town.

But if that’s still too much to fork out, the Watkins Film School’s well-chosen Friday-night video screenings are free, and they’ve been drawing bigger and bigger crowds. Friday’s offering is My Best Fiend, Werner Herzog’s 1999 “tribute” to the late actor Klaus Kinski, and coming weeks will bring the 1988 Herzog-Kinski collaboration Cobra Verde as well as Fritz Lang’s swan song The 1,000 Eyes of Dr. Mabuse. For a Watkins schedule, stop by the school’s lobby across from 100 Oaks.

But if that’s still too much to fork out, the Watkins Film School’s well-chosen Friday-night video screenings are free, and they’ve been drawing bigger and bigger crowds. Friday’s offering is My Best Fiend, Werner Herzog’s 1999 “tribute” to the late actor Klaus Kinski, and coming weeks will bring the 1988 Herzog-Kinski collaboration Cobra Verde as well as Fritz Lang’s swan song The 1,000 Eyes of Dr. Mabuse. For a Watkins schedule, stop by the school’s lobby across from 100 Oaks.