Gabbeh (1996)

Director:

Mohsen Makhmalbaf

Writer:

Mohsen Makhmalbaf (writer)

Release Date:

25 June 1997 (USA)

Genre:

Drama

Plot:

An elderly couple go about their routine of cleaning their gabbeh (a intricately-designed rug), while bickering gently with each other...

Plot Keywords:

Wool | Courtship | Old Woman | Marriage | Carpet

Awards:

4 wins & 1 nomination

Cast

Abbas Sayah	...	Uncle
Shaghayeh Djodat	...	Gabbeh
Hossein Moharami	...	Old Man
Rogheih Moharami	...	Old Woman
Parvaneh Ghalandari

Also Known As:

Gabbeh (France)

Runtime:

75 min | Japan:73 min

Country:

Iran | France

Language:

Persian

Color:

Color

Aspect Ratio:

1.85 : 1

Sound Mix:

Stereo

Certification:

Canada:14A (Ontario) | Iceland:L | South Korea:All | Argentina:Atp | Australia:G | Chile:TE | Finland:S | Portugal:M/12 | Spain:T

Company:

MK2 Productions

Trivia:

Influenced by Sergei Parajanov's Sayat Nova (1968)

Vivid colors woven into a poetic epic marked by pseudo-spontaneous esthetics, self-folklorization and self-orientalism

I'm giving this movie a 3 because, despite its esthetic strengths, it's a movie that indulges in self-folklorization and self-orientalism, a movie that depicts a journey by an Iranian nomadic tribe, or rather family, in a folklorizing and essentializing manner: the nomadic tribe is portrayed as an essentially primitive, unemotional, animal-like group of colorful heaps of clothes who don't have a human-like notion of time or space or even a decent grip on reality, who act, sound and move like goats, chicken and wolves. The pseudo- spontaneous esthetics on which this movie relies emphasizes this point by sneaking in convoluted similarities between the nomads and those animals.

The esthetics of the movie is so intricately designed and so contrived, but deceitfully left to be seen as 'spontaneous' in order to quench what the filmmakers take to be an unquenchable thirst of European viewers for 'exotic beauty and oriental esthetics', which the movie relatively succeeded in doing, seeing the acclaim it received in European countries.

The visual symbolism in the movie is so stark that it borders on being unartistic. The depiction of the landscape is beautiful, but this is something you can get if you watch a NatGeo reportage on 'Peoples and Cultures', and not something you would necessarily demand of a cinematic movie.

The movie, to me, was emotionless. It did not harbor any kind of emotion towards the subjects of the movie: hatred, love, empathy, nothing, except probably some curiosity towards those 'cinematically bizarre creatures'.

The soundtrack in the movie was boring, sometimes inappropriate and sometimes utterly annoying because of the constant bleats of goats and the irksome inexplicable howls of one of the heroes.

Besides, the movie is unbearably boring. The contrived esthetics and breathtaking landscape did not prevent me from feeling utterly bored. I had to resist sleep several times during its relatively short runtime of 75 minutes.

I don't recommend watching this movie, unless there's no NatGeo reportage on nomadic tribes in Iran, or you're doing graduate studies on self-orientalism in cinema...