It’s Winter

From it’s opening frame, when Mokhtar walks out into the snow from an old warehouse that’s being locked up for the day, this is a movie that echoes Thoreau’s creepily prescient take on our states, that ‘the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation’.

The prematurely middle aged Mokhtar (Ashem Abdi) then arrives at his isolated home near a railway track, where his handsome wife Khatoun (played by an eloquent eyed Mitra Hadjar), his little daughter and his tired mother-in-law weren’t really expecting him. The first spoken sentence in the movie is, 'What are you doing here?' He has lost his job. There aren’t many more in Teheran that he can do, or wants to. He is tired, at the end of his forbearance and he's decided to go abroad to seek a decent living. Mokhtars face, from its beaked nose to its unforgivingly deep sockets, could be carved from a weatherworn tree. The family accepts this in silence. He leaves from a desolate Railway Station, and as Khatoun watches silently from a distance, he kneels amidst the snowdrifts and hugs his daughter briefly. Parting words would be a luxury.

The camera cuts abruptly to the arrival in town of a young man looking for work. He’s handsome, and from his slickly greased hair and his long sideburns, to his casually worn suit jacket, is also aware of this. He seeks lodgings at a dormitory in a local teashop, and strikes up a friendship with a reticent young worker named Ali Reza (Saeed Orkani). His name is Marhab (Ali Nicsolat).

This devilishly charming young drifter, a ‘specialist mechanic’ who can ‘repair anything’, is turned down wherever he seeks employment, and is quickly reduced to washing the windscreens of passing cars and trucks for a pittance. One morning, he spots his friend on a sweeping rut of sandy road, trudging to work, whistles, and as he waits, catches up at a flailing run, all slim limbs and flying coat. The frame might have been a painting.

Ali Reza finds him a job at the automobile workshop that he works in. As winter fades into dry, dusty summer, Marhab spots Khatoun waiting for a bus, and is taken. Six months have passed with neither word nor money from her husband. She now works as a seamstress in a garment factory. But this money is not enough and her mother must sell chairs from their spartan home, so that they may survive.

She still has a zest for the islands of exuberance around her, and wanders into a weekend market, and spots a tiny red sweater. This is the brightest colour in the movie, and as only a flaming red can, it brings together all the players. She can't afford to buy it for her daughter, but Marhab has spotted her. He buys it and takes it to the child, under the pretence that her mother had left it in the market.

The child is entranced. She wants the sweater. But her suspicious grandmother rejects it. Stonewalled, Marhab is forced to return. But he is not about to give up. However, this is also not a man who endures his frustrations as he waits. And this leads to a crossing of paths with a local prostitute. Was this planned? Serendipitous? Both? Either way, the momentary spark that passes between them is inciendary. The woman, who is veiled, wears lipstick. Again, it’s red.

He eventually gathers that the husband is dead, which spurs him to his first argument with an exploitative employer. He wants money, to buy a carpet. Carpet on shoulder, he heads purposefully to Khatouns. Eventually, he proposes. When she finally accepts, after a brief, happy courtship, her words are drowned in the snarl of passing traffic. But she smiles. And we know.

But this is just the beginning of a story with more than fleeting echoes of the Martin Guerre legend. And inevitably, it has to end with winter. But the movie imposes nothing on the viewer; merely inviting her/him to observe these lives untranslated and draw their own conclusions about a society that allows such despair. And like all great cinema, it subtly enlists you until you are a protagonist.

This is also a movie that talks to you through its silences, through things left unsaid. And like Shaji N Karun’s Piravi and the Coens’ Fargo, it also talks to you through its colours and its weather; its snows, its dry suns, its dusts and its heat. But where Karun and the Coens use the monsoons and the snows as both foreground and background, Pitts uses it sparsely, almost like reluctant parentheses, and with an elegantly powerful minimalism. The music, by the legendary Hossein Alizadeh (if you aren’t listening to him, you should be), is plaintive, powerful, timeless.

This is direct, realistic moviemaking in the finest traditions of the Iranian New Wave, of Kiarostami and Makhmalbaf. And fittingly, the cast of It's Winter are non-professionals, directed with sensitivity by Rafi Pitts, who learnt his craft at a Central London film school. It is a spare movie, for it’s spare in all senses, from it’s storytelling to its budget. It would be artless to call it a movie about Iran. Its context is universal. And it epitomizes movie making at its terse best.

It’s Winter (Zemestan); 2006; 82 mins

12A; In Farsi with English subtitles

In theatres since December 15

Director: Rafi Pitts

Based upon the story
Safar by Mahmoud Dowlatabadi

Music: Hossein Alizadeh & Mohammad Reza Shajarian