At #157, we get to this Abbas Kiarostami movie. I’ve seen a couple of Kiarostami’s other movies — Close-Up and Taste of Cherry — and they’re both films with a meta-fictional element to them (Close-Up is like meta-meta-fictional), so I wasn’t expecting what I got here, which is: A straightforward little story about a boy trying to return his friend’s notebook.

As the story starts, we’re in a schoolroom in an Iranian village. One of the boys left his class notebook at his cousin’s house and did his homework on loose-leaf paper, and the teacher is an absolute motherfucking tyrant about it, just brutally dressing the boy down, and ultimately threatening him with expulsion if it happens again.

When school’s out, that boy and our protagonist (another little boy — I’m guessing they’re in that 8-to-10-year-old range) are walking home together, and there’s a bit of a trip-and-fall incident, and turns out that when he gets home the protagonist realizes that he has his friend’s notebook (in addition to his own).

And the feeling he has here is one that I think many people can remember from being a kid: When there’s something that is super-important to you, absolutely critically important, but the adults in your life just kinda dgaf about it. Panickedly, he tells his mom that he needs to take this notebook to his friend’s house. She’s like “you can play later, do your homework now” (while also assigning him chores that interrupt his attempts at doing his homework). He can’t concentrate, and he keeps trying to explain it to her and begging to let him give it back, and she refuses.

So when she sends him out for bread, he just… takes the notebook with him and sneaks off to his friend’s. His friend lives in another village (Poshteh), and he has to go over a hill and some distance (maybe like a mile or so? they establish early-on that it’s a 30-minute walk for a kid) across the countryside to get there. And when he gets there… uh, turns out that Poshteh is big enough to have different neighborhoods, and he has no idea where this kid lives.

The rest of the movie is pretty much what the title promises, as he asks people if they know this kid’s family, and follows various leads and misleads, and ends up in the wrong places and even runs back to his village and then back again, chasing someone who he thinks might know. It’s getting late, and he’s getting really worried, and… well, I’m not going to spoil it from there.

The thing about this movie is that it seems really simple — it’s literally just a story about a kid trying to return a notebook to his friend — but it’s just so well done. Kiarostami films the locations perfectly such that you know perfectly where the kid is (when you should) or feel unmoored and lost (when you should); and they’re interesting locations, too.

But what’s really great is the acting. This is a movie that would absolutely die if its child actor lead wasn’t up to it, but he delivers this absolutely incredible performance, where you can just feel his nervousness and frustration and everything else. And it’s not just the lead — the kid who loses his notebook is crying when the teacher is scolding him, and it’s completely convincing (to the point that on reflection, I really hope they were super-supportive and kind to the poor kid around the filming of that scene). The adults who appear are convincing, too — the busy mom, the kindly but unhelpful old man, the brusque workman, the cruel grandfather — but it’s the kids who shine.

Really, the only “negative” I have is that the movie is so tense that it’s sometimes hard to watch. But I’m not sure that “this movie is effective in evoking the emotions it’s trying to evoke” is exactly a heavy criticism.

Kiarostami has two “sequels” to this, each of them more meta-fictional than the last, apparently; I probably won’t get to them until I’m done with this list, but they’re definitely on my to-watch list after this.