A Time for Drunken Horses tells the story of a family of orphaned Kurdish children who survive by smuggling tires across the border between Iran and Iraq. Its style is spare and unsentimental, with a subdued, documentary aesthetic that relies on the snowy landscape and the children’s stoic faces to evoke its bleak emotion. Although the story seems ripe for proselytizing about the plight of poor Kurdish children everywhere, it avoids this opportunity for social melodrama and focuses resolutely on its particular cast of characters. But, like that of any good realist fiction, the film’s particular story is intended to implicitly exemplify much broader issues, and the scenes that stand out most in my memory are those that subtly and affectingly suggest this connection between the particular and the general.
There’s a scene early in the film when a child is questioned by an off-screen interviewer, possibly the director himself. This bit of metafiction could be off-putting to some, since it makes no literal sense in the film’s fictional story. (It also might tempt some to write a review based on Baudrillard’s notion of simulacra and Iranian films’ tendency to blur the line between fact and fiction…but I’ll resist that temptation.) However, the scene is not emphasized, nor does it wink slyly at the audience; instead, it serves to momentarily reify the film’s documentary style. This momentary shift reminds us of the film’s context: the characters are played by amateur actors, and their lives are the lives of many real people. Suddenly this context is no longer a lens through which the film might be analyzed, but an inextricable part of the film itself that cannot be ignored. Such a deformation of the film’s topology affects every scene, knotting the film’s realist form to the social issues implicit in its story.
But far more memorable is the final scene. After a withering series of disappointments and hardships, one of the children sets out on a last-ditch effort (though all of the children’s efforts seem to be such) to raise money for his ill brother. The band of smugglers he is with are ambushed and killed, leaving just him and his mule. The final shot watches, stilly, as the boy walks away into a snowy field filled with landmines. It is devastating in its evocation of hopeless lives in which people have no choice but to strive. But it is simultaneously profoundly humanistic in its display of this striving as a striving for the benefit of another—and a striving that continues even in the face of despair.
