Frontier Blues
A man wearing thick black
glasses speaks to camera, telling of how his mother went to Paris without him
and how, in fact, she dislikes him. He then proceeds to take slowly, one by one,
what appear to be car licence plates from a suitcase. He presents each in turn
to the camera for the viewer to read. The numerals on the plates are Arabic, the names on the plates are cities or provinces in
Iran. The number on each plate is five or six digits long. This is the opening
scene of Frontier Blues. Our initial
impressions are that this will not be your typical slice of life flick set in
the Steppe region of the Northern Iranian border region. But maybe that’s just
me.
As things progress we
also gain the impression that the movie’s setting is as or even more important
to the filmmakers as its other facets, be they quirky or otherwise. A viewing
of Heydar – An Afghan in
Tehran, a short film upon which Frontier
Blues seems to be loosely based, reinforces this impression. In both we
have people for whom life in their particular region of Iran has become (maybe
it always was) unsatisfactory. In fact, it’s not just the setting, but the
Turkmen people, that are central to Frontier
Blues (and, I suspect, Heydar.) I knew
nothing about these people before seeing FB.
I know at least a little more now, and I understand that there are significant
Turkmen populations in such countries as Afghanistan and Iran. In Iran, as the
script has it, the region inhabited by the Turkmen is a land of “heartbreak and
tractors”. Nothing we are shown would seem to suggest otherwise.
There are several
interlinking sub-plots in the script. One, which has the least connection with
the others, involves a Turkmen “poet” who is conning a filmmaker interested in
the Turkmen culture. I suppose you could describe the few moments of levity in
this sub-plot as “bittersweet”, because the poet fools the other but clearly is
unimpressed by his own shenanigans. It’s suggested that this could be because
he’s ashamed of traducing his heritage but, if so, that emotion is commingled with
a personal loss he has suffered. Elsewhere in the region :
chickens are dying inexplicably; a man is feeling frustration and vows to leave
for distant shores; a man loses his donkey; a shopkeeper is convinced that XL is the new
M. If these are frontier blues, then they are those of a trailing wake, not a
leading edge. For the viewer, it’s not so bad.