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Life, and Nothing More... More at IMDbPro »Zendegi va digar hich (original title)

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9 reviews in total

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18 out of 19 people found the following review useful:
9/10, 11 November 2004

Author: desperateliving from Canada

This is the transition from Kiarostami's films about children into his more adult, philosophically ponderous phase (and his bridging of the gap between characters searching on foot, as in the first of the trilogy, "Where is the Friend's Home," and within cars). As with all of Kiarostami's films, it's just beautiful to look at, not so much the way he films it (although this film continues his favorite shot of action taking place extremely far away), but what is filmed. For this reason I almost feel like I'm blinded by the director's name on the film, giving his films such high marks, because he doesn't really DO anything that you can point to. There is no startling mise-en-scene (the nature exists anyway, regardless of his camera). But he repeatedly and consistently creates a tranquil, pure, loving feeling in me. It has to do with his soul: he's putting it up there every time. Not autobiographically, but tonally. It has nothing to do with words like "craft" or "quality."

The simple gesture of a child wanting to raise a grasshopper is enough for Kiarostami to be considered a great realist, an observer. And his film is a connector of people. It might sound simple to say, but for a Westerner with no real idea of what life is like in Iran -- or better, not life, but people -- the simple depiction of it that shows, "Hey, they're basically like us," is invaluable. That's the difference between artists who share what is and artists who create what isn't. And more immediately, within the film, he deals with the public tragedy as great connector, whether it's an earthquake or an act of terrorism. And for us Westerners whose first real impression of that came with 9/11, this film will ring true -- and be remarkable if we consider that things like this happen over there all the time. (Which possibly explains why our main character never seems all that shocked by anything he sees; when a woman cries for her family, he nods his head, but doesn't seem terribly affected by her tears.) One character here asks what Iran has done to anger God and cause the earthquake, but there is little religiosity in the film. Unlike certain recent American films, this film does not have a tendency toward hand-wringing and overwrought seriousness reaching toward the skies. That scene itself is understated like the entire film. The characters here are not spiritual ciphers. They're utterly practical.

As with Kiarostami's two greatest films, "Close-Up" and "Taste of Cherry," the film becomes brilliant when it breaks from its placid realism into self-reference: the main character pulls out a picture of a boy who acted in the real film "Where is the Friend's Home?" and asks strangers where this real boy is, who he says played a role in the film. Is this a real earthquake? Is this actor really harmed? Is this a documentary? Is the main actor playing Kiarostami; is Kiarostami filming this from the passenger seat? Are they really out looking for this boy? But as with those two masterpieces, it's this that borders on insufferable, smirking cleverness on Kiarostami's part that makes me question the so-called honesty of his films. (I find his interviews pretentious and evasive.) Is it possible to be a self-referencing deconstructionist and reveal human truths, not just reveal "the nature of cinema," in an attempt to be the Iranian Godard? This is what lessens my enjoyment of his films, because it lowers my trust. Kiarostami asks a lot of us. "Okay, admit the first film was openly a film, but accept this as a closed film, until I tell you it's a documentary..." There are other flaws. It does get "cute" at times, as when the main character repeats his son's question at a later time ("Why is it coming out of a tap?"). And the boy seems preternaturally wise -- part of the film's "message" is not to discount kids' wisdom: the boy questions the validity of the claim that God caused the earthquake, shocking one woman that he and his father come in contact with throughout their travels.

However, there is so much richness elsewhere (and I'm willing to accept that the layering of the self-reference adds to the film, even if it makes it momentarily annoying) that you can move beyond its flaws (which, honestly, I would accept pretty easily in another film; with Kiarostami you have expectations in the clouds). I'm particularly interested in the way children (and the child experience as remembered or experienced by an adult) are presented on screen, and I'm continually ecstatic that we have Kiarostami contributing to this. (That the main character's son describes one boy from "Where is the Friend's Home?" by his eyes is appropriate, as when we see him they are indeed strikingly beautiful.) The film is also an interesting comment on what happens to people after they work -- Falconetti comes to mind. And the ending is already a classic: it's like the swimming pool scene in "Nostalghia" in tone. Does what happen happen because the film has to end that way, or because of the human spirit? (This is one of the few scenes where music plays under it.)

Even though the movie has no end, only a means, it moves forward like a good documentary. Even though time is not indicated (there are few, if any lapses; time is experienced, as in Tarkovsky), it moves along at a nice pace -- not so much in that the story is brisk, more in that we've settled into its own rhythm. There is no "story," only the story of film as experience. Lots of Big statements could be inferred from the film -- it's about an endless journey with no resolution to a place they don't know how to get to (college students, get your pens out) -- but I take it directly. 9/10

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19 out of 27 people found the following review useful:
The cinema of dull, 12 July 1999
Author: liehtzu from Korea

I had been hearing alot about how Iranian cinema was this great unknown tradition that had been steadily cranking out unseen masterpieces, and how that all changed with Abbas Kiarostami's "A Taste of Cherry" playing at Cannes. Kiarostami's "Life and Nothing More" is, as of this writing, the only Iranian film I've ever seen, though I do look forward to the day I can get around to renting "A Taste of Cherry" or "Gabbeh" now that they're both on video.

"Life and Nothing More" is a unique experience to say the least. The story follows a filmmaker on a journey with his son across earthquake-ravage Iran to find two boys that were in his previous film, to see if they are still alive. In a documentary-like fashion, taking care to include the most boring and uneventful parts of the trip, Kiarostami follows the two in their car as their search progresses and they meet various people displaced by the earthquake along the way. It's an extraordinarily slow process. Now I pride myself in being able to sit through some of the most slow-moving art films known to man, the rare exceptions being Chantal Akerman's insufferable "Je Tu Il Elle" and the beautiful but agonizingly long and slow "Why Has Bodhi-Dharma Left For the East?" "Life and Nothing More" tested my patience to the limit. The funny thing was, though, that after awhile the film reached a tedium that was almost sublime and I finally found myself relaxing and just letting the film wash over me like gently rolling surf. I had become a companion in this dull trip and little by little I began to grasp what Kiarostami was trying to convey. I'm not sure I can explain it in words. It was more of a feeling than a conscious realization of something profound, but by the end of the film as I watched an agonizingly long still shot of a small car attempting to crawl up a cartoonishly steep hill and repeatedly fall back down just as it was about to reach the top I felt strangely satisfied.

Now I'm a more than a little hesitant to go out on a limb and recommend this to anyone, because I doubt very much that everyone will have the same Tao experience I had while viewing "Life and Nothing More," but if someone does decide to see this I urge them to stick through it for those that just might.

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6 out of 6 people found the following review useful:
Absorbing and beautiful, 7 April 2001

Author: JSL26 from Washington DC area

This is the second film in a trilogy. The first one (Where Is My Friend's Home") involved a kid searching for his classmate's house to return a notebook (to save him from the wrath of his teacher). A charming little film.

This one is a faux documentary that follows the director's attempt to find the two boys after the devastating 1990 earthquake. It is leisurely paced (though I would never say it is "dull") but the earthquake scenes are powerful and beautiful. The director's quest is absorbing and he and his son are a likable duo. Also there are some surprising philosophical and comedic interludes.

I would recommend this film highly whether or not you have seen the first.

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7 out of 8 people found the following review useful:
More than meets the eye, 6 August 2000
Author: huxley-4

Life and Nothing More (1992, dir. Abbas Kiarostami) What is so unusual about Kiarostami's films? They seem to to inhabit a world that is so ordinary, mundane even, and yet they are lent a sense of wonder as well. The simplicity of action and story is undermined by circumstances that reveal the courage that it takes just in order to live. Here a man and his son are driving to Koker, a town which has been devastated by the Iranian earthquake. Along the way they come across people who are carrying their belongings, food supplies, heaters, etc. after having lost everything. They stop to ask for directions. One woman can't help them, breaks out in tears, "I've lost 16 people" The man can only say, "May god grant you forbearance." There is no easy sentimentalism. Here life goes on for those that survive in spite of it all. There is still the need to fill ones life with love and joy and momentary pleasure. One man talks of his plan to get married in his hometown, despite the disaster. The son talks to his friend about watching a soccer game. He becomes terrifically excited by the building of an antenna at one of the nearby villages which will allow him to watch the game. You see none of the horrific footage of mangled bodies and uncontrollably hysterical victims that we usually associate with natural disasters. You only see people who have experienced tragedy, but continue to live and endure.

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8 out of 10 people found the following review useful:
A Masterfully Faked Documentary, 8 April 2007

Author: Bill M. from United States

Naturally, before obtaining this film I checked with IMDb regarding its entertainment value. But I mis-read the plot. I thought the director (and his son) played themselves in the film. Now upon re-reading the user comments here, I discover they were played by actors. Very good actors. Also I discover only seven reviews of this work. So I feel obligated to increase that number by one.

If you are a citizen of the U.S. who is registered to vote, you should also see this movie. All the people in this movie live in Iran. Iran is one of those oil-rich countries which is weaker than the U.S., making it an attractive target for American invasion. Iran is a sovereign nation, and should not be invaded.

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4 out of 4 people found the following review useful:
Fantastic, today's Neo-realism, 3 February 2005
Author: GregSinora

Whilst watching this film i was struck by how natural and simplistic the film was. A film director and his son travel through Iran after an earthquake has struck to try and see if the boy who starred in his last film is still alive. That is what the film is, observing people on the road, whose lives have been destroyed, people whose lives still go on. Kiarostami presents life in such a naturalistic way that we are sitting in the back seat of the car taking the journey as well. That is the perfection of the this film, the real life, the carnage of life, the people striving for life, all add up to one up-lifting experience. Like Rossellini with a uplifting finale, and minus the melodrama. Kiarostami seeks to capture reality on film in a similar way as the Neo-realists, through humanity and observation, but while the Neo-realists films can be seen as natural, Kiarostami reinvents naturalism as if nature had shot the film itself. Yet another piece of perfection from Kiarostami, not to be missed.

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3 out of 3 people found the following review useful:
A drive through areas devastated by the 1990 earthquake in Iran, 6 March 2007

Author: rasecz from United States

There is a long intro before the title. A film director and his son are shown driving in a small beat-up car to northern Iran soon after the 1990 earthquake. When the car enters a long tunnel, the camera keeps rolling and on the darken screen the titles finally appear.

The film director is nominally Kiarostami, but played by an actor. Typical for his films, the documentary genre blurs with the fictional account. The devastation that we see from the moving car is real, though the lamentations we witness are probably staged, which does not diminish the sense of suffering of the affected local communities.

The impetus of this travelogue through a torn landscape is to locate at least one of the kids that was his main character in one of his previous films, "Khaneh-je doost kojast?". That quest is the director's central preoccupation, so much so he does not recognize another boy, who he gives a lift to, that had a secondary role in that film. If you see the aforementioned film, you will clearly remember the face.

The quest is made difficult by roads that have been gutted or blocked by rock and earth slides, and by the steep mountainous terrain of his goal, the small town of Koker. As he gets tantalizing close, we root for him.

The way the film ends may be disappointing to some, but I found that it matched the title of the film, "And Life Goes On". For the survivors of the earthquake there is mourning for the dead, but at the same time the 1990 World Soccer Cup is going on. What team will make it to the final? While houses have to be rebuilt, it is also important that TV antennas be lifted so that all can see the games in the evening. The director will make more films but now he is concerned about the well-being of that child actor. So life goes on, the quest must go on. There is no ending.

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The Koker Trilogy, 9 October 2011
Author: tieman64 from United Kingdom

*** This review may contain spoilers ***

"I believe the films of Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami are extraordinary. Words cannot relate my feelings." - Akira Kurosawa

Abbas Kiarostami directed "Where is the Friend's Home?" in 1987, the tale of an 8 year old boy who embarks on a quest to find his friend's house. The film took place Koker, a village in northern Iran. The village was devastated three years later by the 1990 Manjil-Rudbar earthquake. This earthquake prompted Kiarostami's real-life return to Koker, a journey in which he attempted to locate the young stars of his 1987 film, all of whom were actual Koker residents. Kiarostami's 1992 film, "Life and Nothing More", reconstructs this journey. His 1994 film, "Through the Olive Trees", is partially about the making of "Life and Nothing More". This trilogy of films marks a larger shift in Kiarostami's filmography: a movement away from neorealism and toward postmodern self-referentiality.

Unlike most "natural disaster movies", "Life and Nothing More" quickly forgoes condescending gestures. Kiarostami has little time for either noble sufferers or canned sorrow. Instead he focuses on two characters, an unnamed film-maker (a stand-in for Kiarostami himself) and his young son, both of whom travel to Koker in a rickety yellow car. Landslides and traffic hamper their journey, but pretty soon they arrive in Koker. They then embark on a mission to locate the two young boys who appeared in the director's "Where is the Friend's House?" Both films offer similar journeys and tell tales of, not human beings conquering adversity (both quests fail; the boy never found his friend's house, and the film-makers never find the boys) but of characters persevering despite obstacles. Climbing is thus a repeated motif, Kiarostami treating us to long-shots of vehicles trekking up mountains and characters who either push unrelentingly onward or clamber out of rubble. Kiarostami's camera lingers on debris and collapsed concrete, Koker's residents like solitary weeds sprouting weakly upwards after a drought.

Later, a woman tells us she lost her home and family, but declines outside assistance. She will get by on her own. "If the dead could return," another haggard character tells us, "they would appreciate life more." This character, who plays himself playing himself, was cast in Kiarostami's previous film, where he was made to look "older and uglier". "That is not art," he states. "If you make an old man young and handsome, that's art!"

"Life and Nothing More" traces something similar; an attempt to tease out something handsome and dignified amidst perpetual calamity. But this reflexivity is then complicated. The man may have been made "uglier" on film, but, as he now reveals, the previous film lied by suggesting that he lives in a house rather than a simple tent. This tension – art which ennobles, searches for truths, but also lies and perverts – increasingly obsesses Kiarostami, as his films become less neorealist, more Goddardian and more reflexive. Indeed, increasingly his films don't ask us to enter worlds but instead obsessively revolve around characters who skirt around the edges of worlds, places and actions. They are spectators like us. The car in "Life and Nothing More" is itself a glorified camera mount, shielding both us and its occupants from the outside, even as we and our heroes try in vain to establish contact with the outside world. Kiarostami's films may be structured as games of searching, finding and looking, but are increasingly about the very postmodern problem of seeing, subjectivity and the limits of knowledge. He's the Iranian Atom Egoyan.

Postmodern cinema plays up self-reference, homage, pastiche, nihilistic self absorption and a detachment from the social. But while Kiarostami's films increasingly call attention to themselves as representation, and are increasingly self-reflexive (they do not quote films outside of Kiarostami's filmography), they mostly lack the smug sense of self-conscious sophistication (and knowingness) which postmodernists trade in. Where central to postmodernism is the gap between the image of reality and what is reality – with the sign always victorious over essence – Kiarostami's work searches out that essence with the assumption that everything is capable of being at least somewhat true or containing truths.

The third film in what is often called "the Koker trilogy" (it is also three steps meta-removed from the original film), "Through the Olive Trees" opens with a movie director (Kiarostami's surrogate) conducting a casting call. He's looking for a female villager to play the leading role in his new film. He finally selects a woman called Tehereh. She will play a bride. Off-set Tehereh is similarly courted by a man, Hossein, who seeks to make her his bride. The film's great joke is that Hossein is also cast in the film within the film and that Tehereh refuses to speak to him as a co-star; he's poor, homeless and illiterate and Tehereh's parents disapprove of his marriage requests. What Kiarostami is concerned with, though, is the way comedy conceals tragedy, the way the fictional film conceals what it also unintentionally documents and how this tug-of-war itself results in Koker's rebuilding in the wake of the quake.

In all three films, Kiarostami's visuals are wonderfully minimalist, though this tone often gives way to either surreal moments or visual gags. Recall surreal shots of a man carrying a urinal, footpaths which zig-zag up hill-faces and the way matter-of-fact dialogue offered by various civilians clash with the earthquake's horrible aftermath.

Heavyweight film-makers like Godard, Kurosawa and Antonioni (Kiarostami's "Close Up" in many ways is influenced by Antonioni's "Blow Up") have all expressed a fondness for Kiarostami's films. Kiarostami's "Life and Nothing More" was retitled "And Life Goes On..." in the West, a less gloomy title which, in a way, sums up the kind of art-house sentimentality that is responsible for Kiarostami's popularity. Kiarostami's next feature was the audience polarising "Taste of Cherry".

8.5/10 – Worth two viewings.

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1 out of 14 people found the following review useful:
Trumped up American Reality TV, 22 September 2003
Author: Lance Johnson from Notre Dame, IN

*** This review may contain spoilers ***

Unlike his earlier film, Where is the Friend's House, Abbas Kiarostami's Life, and Nothing More fails to enrapture viewers with the real life of contemporary Iran. While Friend's House was a moving film rooted in the Iranian child's sense of responsibility, Life is little more than a trumped up Iranian version of American reality TV. For the entire film, we are literally dragged along while a man, portraying Kiarostami, and his son go in search of the two young actors from Where is the Friend's House following a devastating earthquake. We accompany them as they sit in traffic jams, take side roads that seem to go nowhere, and get directions from people who don't know anything about where the roads lead. During our busy lives, we experience enough traffic jams or wrong turns without having to sit through them during a film. Along the way, the director and his son give rides to various characters, which inevitably leads to trite dialogue reminiscent of the pseudo-philosophical talk you would hear in the living room of the Big Brother house. In addition to the one-dimensional characters, the use of classical music in three different scenes of the film is completely inappropriate and throws the viewer even further out of the already palsied narrative.

*** possible "spoiler" follows ***

Kiarostami's choice of ending destroys his final chance at redeeming the film by failing to leave the viewer with any resolution. After leaving his son to watch the football match on TV in the tent-camp, and finding the road to Koker, the director must match his old car against a daunting hill. After several failed attempts at climbing the hill, he turns around and drives back the way he came. Naturally, the viewer assumes that he has given up finding the boys and is going to return home, but moments later we see him come back and make one more attempt at conquering the hill. This last attempt is successful, and in the final shot, we watch the car stop to pick up one final passenger and then drive off-screen in the direction of Koker. The viewer never learns whether or not the boys are alive, or even if the director makes it to Koker. While even an ending where the director gives up would not be satisfactory, leaving the film's central question unanswered makes the 95 minutes spent watching the movie an unjustifiable waste of time. In the end, the film amounts to little more than an undeveloped `reality show' with the cliché message of `it's the journey that counts.' Your time would be better spent watching the re-run of Who Wants to Marry a Multi-Millionaire.

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