Seventeen Years

...And Life Goes On

viewed April 22, 2000 on video

For full information about Seventeen Years, click here

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There is no question that melodrama is a genre worthy of study; it is simply one of the hardest to get right.  Zhang Yuan's Seventeen Years starts off has heavy-handed as they come, with an almost textbook-like depiction of a dysfunctional Chinese family (believe me, I know what I'm talking about on this one).  Two feuding parents pit their daughters against each other, leading one daughter to commit fratricide in a fit of rage.  She is sent to prison and finally granted a home leave seventeen years later.  Unable to find her way home after years of urban renewal have made her hometown unrecognizable, she is helped by a prison warden to find her parents new home.  But do her parents even want to see her again?

It's a delicious set-up and it delivers for the most part in the execution.  The middle section is especially compelling, as we see a strict but not cruel depiction of the treatment of Chinese prisoners.  The film does have a streak of propaganda running through it -- though not so much supporting the government but socially conscious people and the hope they provide to a society whose communal values are being attacked at the core by modernity.  The acting is mannered but restrained with a certain elegance of sentiment, even when the tears are flowing full-faucet at the end.  The pathos are heavy but earnest.  

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Humanist pathos also runs through Kiarostami's film about the 1987 earthquake that rocked northern Iran.  ...And Life Goes On is an intriguing meta-documentary about a director (which may be Kiarostami's alter-ego) driving with his son into the disaster area to find the child stars of his earlier film Where Is the Friend's Home?  Throughout the film there are constant direct references to the previous film, and even about the film they are currently making.  In one scene an old man takes the director to his home, which has remained intact.  When the director asks the man how long he has lived at the house, the man replies that it is not his real house, but is supposed to be for the movie!  

In spite of such bizarre metanarrative stunts, the film clings fast to a humanist agenda, always focusing the camera on passersby as they offer the director directions to the village.  As he works his way through the rubble he notices how people are preoccupied with the most banal things: replacing their toilets, or finding the scores of the World Cup.  It is amazing how little mourning actually takes place in the film, when over 50,000 people died in the earthquake.  People onscreen report that they have lost their entire families, and yet they seem calm, more concerned with the lives they have to rebuild for themselves.  Often clever though not always successful, ...And Life Goes On is an easy pleaser, a kind tribute to the spirit of a people who persevere in the midst of a maddening catastrophe. 

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