Abbas Kiarostami’s rural drama is warm, quietly affecting and occasionally too patient for its own good. The nonprofessional performers make it worth the time, though its slight action leaves some stretches feeling longer than they need to.
Through the Olive Trees is an affecting, sometimes over-patient drama whose people give us good reason to stay. Abbas Kiarostami brings fiction and rural life into close contact, with little conventional action to hurry either along. The interest lies in the inhabitants and in the business of turning their lives into something we can watch. His curiosity about those people sustains the film through most of its slower stretches.
With a Film Director (Mohammadali Keshavarz) among the characters, the business of making a film is never far from our thoughts. Hossein Rezai plays Hossein, Tahereh Ladanian plays Tahereh and Farhad Kheradmand appears as Farhad. Those shared names make the overlap between person and part especially noticeable. They cannot tell us how much is invented, of course. We were moved by the nonprofessional performers, whose connection to the rural community gives the film a closeness that no elaborate plot could guarantee.
That closeness matters because a film about filming other people can become pleased with its own cleverness. Here, the rural inhabitants have enough presence to keep that tendency in check. Their resilience is affecting, though the question of what has been invented occasionally becomes a distraction. Once we have registered the uncertainty, we are ready to get on with knowing them.
Hossein Jafarian and Farhad Saba’s cinematography makes the rural setting feel inhabited. We are interested in it because of the people who live there, which seems the right measure of the photography’s success. Abbas Kiarostami also handles the production design, and there is no sense of the surroundings competing with the cast for our admiration. The place holds our attention without becoming the only thing there is to look at.
The main reservation is pace. He also edits, and across 104 minutes the slight action sometimes leaves our attention with too little to do. The writing, credited to Hengameh Panahi and Abbas Kiarostami, gives the overlap of fiction and lived experience plenty of attention. There are stretches when we feel we have understood the approach and are waiting for our understanding of the people to deepen.
The music, credited to Chema Rosas and Amir Farshid Rahimian, does not make us feel instructed in how to respond. Our affection stays with the performers. The film belongs with dramas that ask us to take everyday lives seriously without promising a succession of large events. Such films still need movement, and this one occasionally mistakes our willingness to wait for an unlimited supply of patience.
We would recommend it to anyone with a taste for quiet, self-conscious drama and an interest in how people appear before a camera. The slow stretches are part of the price, and we cannot pretend every one of them earns its place. Do not choose it to fill the time while doing something else.
