Gabbeh (dir. Mohsen Makhmalbaf, 1996)

[First posted on the academic film blog, Dr Mabuse]

I have seldom been as blown away as I have by Mohsen Makhmalbaf's Gabbeh. The lavishness of his film colour palette, the complexity of his metaphors, the elegance of his narrative structure, the richness for its interpretation and understanding. The film is so simple and so complex - a story woven (no pun intended) out of an old couple washing a rug (gabbeh) in the stream; a story of a girl, also named Gabbeh, who pines to be with her lover, a figure on horseback who calls for her in wolf howls, but whose union is thwarted again and again - by an uncle's marriage, by her mother's childbirth, by a sister's tragic death, by her sister-in-law's illness; a story that is a story and yet a memory, as we eventually realise the girl is really the old woman washing the rug, and yet a way of life, as the colours and patterns of the rugs are infused with icon and symbol, with tradition and custom, passed through generations.

Unexpectedly, much has been made of its dense narrative layers - for example, Adrian Martin, taking the idea from Jean-André Fieschi, discusses, fairly convincingly, I thought, the "imaginary space" occupied by the narratives of Gabbeh: an imaginary space which "is constructed from the way that the story, the physical geography and geometry of scenes, and finally the editing patterns create certain irrational, charged 'matches', connections between characters in vastly different places......"

Thematically, too, there have been comments on its political aspects, particularly the role of women in society. To me, though, this is also an incredibly sentimental love story... not of the young girl, Gabbeh, whom we last see riding off into the desert with her lover, but of the old couple: as the old woman finally takes on the voice-over of the young girl, we realise their stories are one and the same, up till and including the happy ending specifically narrated by the old woman (that the girl's father didn't kill the eloping lovers after all). And that they had remained together, right until the present, old and toothless, squabbling over who has sore feet and who should wash the rug. Ergo, life is not just colours encapsulated in an artifact of wool and thread, but the realness of each mundane day after day, loving, squabbling and washing rugs in streams.