Gabbeh (1996)

Too much of everything

This is How Movies Should Be Made

Intense, gripping, stylish and poignant

A film with more than the usual spoiler issues. Talking about it in any detail feels akin to handing you a gift-wrapped present and saying, "I hope you like it -- It's a thriller about a diabolical secret experiment."

This film was selected as the Iranian entry for the Best Foreign Language Film at the Oscars, but was not nominated, but I found out about it because it featured in the book 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die. A "gabbeh" is a type of Persian rug, usually crafted by women, and much thicker and coarser than other carpets. An elderly couple (Hossein Moharami and Rogheih Moharami) carry their gabbeh to the river wanting to wash it. When the rug is spread on the ground, referred to as Gabbeh (Shaghayeh Djodat), magically comes out of it. Gabbeh belongs to the clan whose history is depicted in the design of the carpet, and it follows her story, including her Uncle (Abbas Sayah) who is hoping to find a bride, and she is longing herself to find a young man she hopes to marry. Throughout it also sees the nomads crafting of the carpets, from shearing the sheep, the spinning and dyeing of wool, and the making of gabbehs. There is not much story as such, it is more about seeing country traditions, apparently this film was banned by Iran for being "subversive", I just remember it because of the colourful clothing of the people, the making of the Persian rugs, and the landscapes, so this is enough to make it a watchable fantasy documentary drama. Good!

Gabbeh is proof that expensive and complicated effects like 3D are no match for pure creativity. Even if you don't understand Gabbeh, which I admit, it will probably take a few screenings before it really makes sense sometimes, the visually stunning aspects of the film were enough to keep the attention of me and my peers. This Iranian gem begs the audience to think less literally and to peer into a foreign society. Gabbeh is in love with a man, who is heard as a wolf's cry in the film, yet her father will not let her be with the man. Stunningly enough, even when the uncle closes his eyes to allow her to leave, Gabbeh stays, illustrating her fearful loyalty to her family and to her values. Throughout the movie a rug is made, a beautiful one at that, and certain colors are weaved in for certain things. To further this aspect, a man teaching children shows colors by pulling them directly from the earth. For example, the man reaches to the sky and pulls his hand back which is now blue, yet the man reaches into a field of red poppies and pulls back a handful of them. These are actually believable instances in the film, showing incredible strength in editing. In other aspects of the film, the landscape that the nomads follow is beautiful and intriguing, from rivers to snowy mountains. Throughout the movie there is a juxtaposition of the young couple's forbidden love with that of an old man and his old wife, who mostly complain and cry a lot. At the end of the film we realize that this is Gabbeh and her husband, who eventually end up together. This bit is a tad confusing, but requires perhaps a few more watches, as mentioned. If you stick with Gabbeh, you wont be disappointed, it is something quite different from anything else you will have seen.

I'm giving this movie a 3 because, despite its esthetic strengths, it's a movie that indulges in self-folklorization and self-orientalism, a movie that depicts a journey by an Iranian nomadic tribe, or rather family, in a folklorizing and essentializing manner: the nomadic tribe is portrayed as an essentially primitive, unemotional, animal-like group of colorful heaps of clothes who don't have a human-like notion of time or space or even a decent grip on reality, who act, sound and move like goats, chicken and wolves. The pseudo- spontaneous esthetics on which this movie relies emphasizes this point by sneaking in convoluted similarities between the nomads and those animals.The esthetics of the movie is so intricately designed and so contrived, but deceitfully left to be seen as 'spontaneous' in order to quench what the filmmakers take to be an unquenchable thirst of European viewers for 'exotic beauty and oriental esthetics', which the movie relatively succeeded in doing, seeing the acclaim it received in European countries.The visual symbolism in the movie is so stark that it borders on being unartistic. The depiction of the landscape is beautiful, but this is something you can get if you watch a NatGeo reportage on 'Peoples and Cultures', and not something you would necessarily demand of a cinematic movie. The movie, to me, was emotionless. It did not harbor any kind of emotion towards the subjects of the movie: hatred, love, empathy, nothing, except probably some curiosity towards those 'cinematically bizarre creatures'.The soundtrack in the movie was boring, sometimes inappropriate and sometimes utterly annoying because of the constant bleats of goats and the irksome inexplicable howls of one of the heroes. Besides, the movie is unbearably boring. The contrived esthetics and breathtaking landscape did not prevent me from feeling utterly bored. I had to resist sleep several times during its relatively short runtime of 75 minutes.I don't recommend watching this movie, unless there's no NatGeo reportage on nomadic tribes in Iran, or you're doing graduate studies on self-orientalism in cinema...

Gabbeh is a groovy kinda flick, very psychedelic coming from a country known for its radical religosity (i.e. they kill people for listening to rock music etc.)It essentially builds up to a climax where this old dude howls like a wolf while beating a gabbeh. Myself and my remarkably attractive friend Andrew were doubled up in laughter at thi scene, following the bleakness of the subsequent happenings of the movie.Overall, I would recommend this to anyone who is tired of being spoonfed bilge from the Hollywood rubbish machine. It has a good heart, and it's not too long either!