Deserted Station: film based on Kiarostami's story...

Watched "Deserted Station" (Istgah-Matrouk) starring the preternatuarally lovely Leila Hatami
and Nezam Manouchechri (who plays her husband, Mahmood) in lead roles, directed by Alireza Raisan from a story by Abbas Kiarostami. A beguilingly simple story-- so simple and spare in fact that one wonders how the director decided to make a film out of it. Hatami and Manouchechri (a photographer in the film) are headed towards the holy shrine in Meshad when they take an unsued road and drive into a small hillock while trying to avoid a deer that suddenly springs in their path. The jeep refuses to move after that mishap and the husband goes out looking for some sort of a mechanic. He comes upon a nearby village and is directed to Feizollah, the local teacher who also doubles as a mechanic-on-demand, as the highway by the village often has many disabled vehicles and there is no repair shop nearby. Feizollah accompanies Manouchehri and concludes that a part will need to be replaced. Both the men decide to fetch the part on Feizollah's motorcycle and Feizollah suggests that Hatami can take over his role as a teacher as she had been a teacher herself.

Hatami hesitatingly agrees. She finds a sprighly but respectful bunch of kids in the school who make up Feizollah's class. One peculiarity of the village is that all the men are away to the city, working as laborers. The village comprises mud houses which seemed to be carved out of some cliff or something. The kids are enthusiastic learners and there are several levels simultaneously in class. There is even a kid with disabilities who happens to be the top performer in his level and recites poetry. What a wonderful detail...

The scenes where Hatami interacts with the kids are particularly beautiful in their simplicity and the overpowering sense of community: the whole village is a large family and everyone knows about everyone else. The kids have duties outside the classroom such as minding fields and cattle and, to them, school fits just perfectly in the midst of all their other tasks. Feizollah, their regular teacher, even attends to some of their routine needs such as cutting their hair and trimming their nails. There is also strangely touching scene in which the ladies of the village help a sheep of Feizollah's in labor deliver its young one -- alsmost as if it were human and part of that extended family. They then invite Hatami to lunch in one of the houses when school breaks for the lunch hour.

After school the kids along with Hatami go across the rail tracks near the village to locate one of their colleagues who was supposed to be minding Feizollah's fields. This kid has a reputation of running away from home. On this occassion he is found on the fields and Hatami asks him why he runs away. "To see where the trains go," he answers. The kids later lead Hatami to a deserted station nearby where there are deserted train coaches and they play hide and seek with Hatami; she also is lost in thought as she wanders inside the empty coaches.
...

The movie has an ending that clutches at one's heart and one admires Kiarostami's grasp of the psyche of kids and their complex world of relationships...as Hatami and her husband begin to leave in their jeep, the kids run after them. There was a tender scene before in which Hatami says her goodbyes ("Khoda Hafez") to the kids who stand transfixed. But as soon the jeep begins moving they start following after it, in a logic that is entirely that of children...Hatami asks her husband (Mahmood) to stop several times, and when the kids draw alonside she asks them not to follow...but they continue to do so each time...