GABBEH - DVD review

When I reviewed "A Moment of Innocence," I wrote that Mohsen Makhmalbaf "seems to don a different hat with each new project." "Gabbeh" (1996) provides another example of Makhmalbaf's seemingly infinite adaptability as the director transforms a project which began, at least nominally, as a documentary into a colorful tale of magical realism.

A gabbeh is a hand-knotted carpet, thicker and somewhat less ornate than most Persian rugs, usually woven by the women from nomadic tribes in Iran and neighboring countries. At the start of the film, an old man (and I mean old!) and old woman take their gabbeh to the spring to clean it. When the gabbeh is laid out on the ground, a young woman materializes on it, like a ghost. Her name is also Gabbeh, and she shares her life story with the elderly couple.

Gabbeh is from the Ghashghai tribe of southern Iran. She is in love with a handsome young horseman from another tribe, but her father forbids her to marry until her much older uncle finds a bride (the old couples' gabbeh has a small picture of a man and woman riding a horse; obviously, Gabbeh is telling the story depicted on the rug). The uncle returns home from the big city, and spends his time teaching the children and searching for the woman of his dreams – literally. He dreams of a woman by a spring who sings a beautiful song, and he and the rest of the tribe stop by every spring to help him find a wife. Eventually, he does, but even then Gabbeh's father will not make good on his promise; she must stay to tend to her mother and her family, forever cut off from her lover who always rides alongside the tribe, just out of sight.

The story is quite simple, but the film is deceptively complex. Makhmalbaf uses creative and disorienting editing to imbue the film with a sense of mystery and ambiguity. The film cuts back and forth from the river where Gabbeh speaks to the old couple, and the past events she recounts. Makhmalbaf plays with space and time. When a character looks off-screen we don't know if he or she is looking at something in the present or the past.

Likewise, we never figure out exactly what or who Gabbeh is; is she real or not? In one scene, the old woman places her arms on Gabbeh for support, but we never see her, in a longer shot, we see the woman stretching her hands out into empty space. So Gabbeh is just a figment of her imagination or a ghost, right? Not so fast. In still another long shot, the old woman and Gabbeh stand together in the water as they fill a canteen. If you squint at the movie in a certain way, you might even come to the conclusion that Gabbeh is a memory, that she is the old woman in her youth which explains why the old man is so clearly smitten with the young lady.

"Gabbeh" is a breathtakingly beautiful movie, even more ravishing to the eye than Makhmalbaf's lovely film "The Silence." Gabbehs (the rugs, not the character) are known for their bright colors, and the film features eye-popping reds, blues, yellows and even blacks. Color becomes an obvious central metaphor for the film. In the film's most memorable scene, the uncle lectures a group of schoolchildren about color. He points to the sky and asks them what color it is. "Blue!" they scream, and when he pulls his hand back down, it is coated in blue paint. Then he pulls in handfuls of yellow and red flowers seemingly out of thin air as he continues his lesson. Later in the film, the script is even more direct. As the women weave different colored cloths into their gabbehs, they speak: "Love is color! Man is color! Woman is color!" My words cannot fully do justice to the pictures. Dare I say that you will simply have to see it for yourself?

As for the message of "Gabbeh," I suspect some of it is lost in the translation. Makhmalbaf struggles to get his work approved by heavy-handed Iranian censors, and only got the green light to work on this project by claiming he was working on a documentary about gabbehs. The director often has to be rather oblique about his politics. Gabbeh is repeatedly forced to put her own life on hold because of men. First, she must wait for her uncle to marry; later, her father simply forbids her to wed because he requires her help. I'm not sure what, if anything, Makhmalbaf is trying to say about patriarchal authority in Iran beyond the most obvious point: women are not treated well.

As lovely as "Gabbeh" is, there is a sense that the film is self-consciously artsy-fartsy. A hen lays an egg, and the egg becomes a symbol for the child the old man never had. We return to the shot of the uncle reaching his hand out to a sea of flowers over and over again. Perhaps the film strains a bit too much to be pretty and poetic, but I must admit that it succeeds in both endeavors.

Video

The film is presented in original 16:9 widescreen aspect ratio. The transfer isn't quite as sharp as I might hope, but it succeeds on the most important front, by preserving the gorgeous colors that dominate the film's visual design.

Audio

The DVD is presented in Dolby Digital Stereo. Optional English language subtitles support the audio which is in Farsi.

Extras

Aside from trailers, the only extra is the feature-length commentary track by critic Godfrey Cheshire. Fortunately, the commentary is one of the better examples of its kind. The DVD revolution has changed the film landscape in many ways, but one of the most interesting to me is the way that DVDs provide an outlet for some of the finest film scholarship being produced today. Cheshire's illuminating commentary is a fine compliment to this mysterious and elusive film.

Closing Thoughts

I thought I had Iranian cinema figured out. Abbas Kiarostami was the great poet and painter, while Makhmalbaf was the more prosaic craftsman. Now I realize how wrong I was. In films like "Gabbeh" and "The Silence," Makhmalbaf shows he is every bit the auteur as Kiarostami and just as capable of creating strikingly beautiful images. They are both masters. I've said this before and I will now repeat it: If you are missing out on Iranian cinema, you are missing some of the most exciting and vital films of the modern era.