The opening shots of Abbas Kiarostami’s The Traveler, his second feature, are jarring when viewed in hindsight. The boisterous activity of the camera as it documents a children’s football game in an alley is a far cry from the elegant, long-take style that the director would eventually develop as his visual signature. Nonetheless, one aspect of his aesthetic command is already taking shape in the small cacophony of yelling boys that he captures. More than the kinetic editing and hustling insert shots of feet kicking at the soccer ball, the overlapping noise of the kids reflects the energy of their enthusiasm for the sport, embodying the thrill of the game as much as witnessing a league match in a stadium.
That energy informs the obsession of one boy, Qassem (Hassan Darabi), who cannot focus on anything but football. Late for school, he dawdles by a newsstand and haggles with the cashier for a football magazine, promising his father will pay the shortage later. When Qassem finally gets to class, he enters with his head wrapped in a bandage, complaining about a toothache to a teacher who has heard one too many excuses from the boy. Unable to focus, Qassem cannot help but bring out his newly acquired magazine to show a friend, only to have it immediately taken from him by the teacher (who, in one of the many subtle comic twists in Kiarostami’s filmography, proceeds to read it to himself).
Kiarostami’s facility with nonprofessional child actors is on clear display here. Darabi’s awkward line deliveries have the naturalism of a modestly bright child constantly getting lost in his own lies, to say nothing of his total fixation on the thing he loves. The director uses Kuleshov effect shots to assign emotion to some of the boy’s blank expressions, as in a scene where he sits in his family’s spartan living room and insert images of objects in the room visualize Qassem’s POV, rendering ambiguous reverse close-ups of his impassive face as either his dull account of his sorry conditions or even a catalogue of things he might steal to raise money for a trip to Tehran to watch a match. One almost senses a faint trace of hunger in his face as he regards the items around him, conveying a single-mindedness that leapfrogs childish myopia for dangerous selfishness.
That darker side of Qassem’s delinquency is rendered honestly and with a sympathetic eye toward the adults who must contend with him. The boy steals from his mother to raise funds for his bus ride, prompting the despairing woman to appeal to his principal, who can only rage at her for raising such a disruptive monster. Both the man’s anger and the mother’s hurt come off as understandable reactions to Qassem’s behavior. Nonetheless, Kiarostami spares more than a little empathy for the boy’s escapism, especially in an ingenious sequence in which Qassem, urged by his cohort to sell an uncle’s camera, instead hits upon a Tom Sawyer-esque idea to pretend to take their classmates’ photos for a small fee, having the kids pose and smile as he works the film-less device. It’s a puckish sequence, an admitted con but one that is filmed with an upbeat quality. It’s a far cry from an earlier scene where the principal canes Qassem for his theft, a scene that is disturbing enough before Kiarostami cuts to an adjacent classroom where his screams and pleas are clearly heard as the students wince and tremble before a teacher who carries on as if nothing were wrong.
Structured more blatantly as a morality play than Kiarostami’s later, mature works, The Traveler climaxes with a final act in which Qassem manages to buy a bus ticket and slip away at night for the big city. Remarkably, the film verges on magical realism at times, particularly when Qassem stays up late to await the night bus, the air filled with silence as he stares at the clock willing it to go faster and listening for the rush of the oncoming vehicle. When the bus arrives, it seems to slink off into pure blackness, as if traveling through space instead of on a highway. The finale delivers a pat, if relatively harmless, moral reckoning for Qassem’s dishonesty, but the dreamlike sequence that leads to it, of both Tehran’s simple but intoxicating big city pleasures and his nightmare of rejection back home, is a sustained flourish from a man who would later learn to sublimate such flights of fancy into a calmer, more naturalistic milieu. As Kiarostami’s ostensible first “true” film, The Traveler still stands far apart from the likes of Close-Up and The Wind Will Carry Us. But as a demonstration of the director’s early grasp of aesthetic intimation, well-observed child perspectives and gentle social commentary, it is nonetheless a clear harbinger of a career to come.
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