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MovieMail's Review
It’s Winter begins with one man’s look that sends another on his way to unpaid uncertainty and so sets the film in motion. It is a look that understands the hardship that will follow, accepts the regret and sorrow, and knows there is no other way forward. The employer finishes his cigarette, gets up and padlocks his warehouse doors; the man walks home through the snow.
It’s Winter is a modern folk tale but its stories are ancient, destined to be repeated in different places at different times. One man leaves the city to look for work, another arrives to look for work. The first man’s wife continues working, gets by. The second man desires her. The film’s choice is an old one: between the promise of going abroad to look for work and staying at home, doing the rounds, finding work but not getting paid, showing ingenuity, willing and initiative, and all to no end.
The most poignant moments of this story of unemployment in modern-day Tehran are set against the words of a winter song, sung by Mohammed Reza Shajarian to the doleful accompaniment of an oud.
Should you extend a friendly hand
they won’t stretch one back
for the cold is too bitter, too harsh
the breath coming out of your chest
turns into a dark cloud
that stands before your eyes like a wall
when your own breath is like this
what can you expect from distant or close friends?
Allied to the words about breath, a dawn train pulls into the station and gives off steam. The train will come in many times more and take many more away. Others will arrive by road and take their place.
This is pared-down cinema, a minimal neo-realism if you like that has an ancestor in de Sica’s Bicycle Thieves. It understands how economic hardship alters the way people regard each other, understands the separateness that arrives with poverty. The film is filled with people looking at each other, wondering if they will go, stay, return; wondering whether to allow themselves to trust once again, having been betrayed before and knowing that they must. Throughout, the movement of looking for work is set against the still points of wondering faces.
Though the film is attuned to the measures of melancholy, it is not despairing, nor hopeless. This special atmosphere comes through the use of the song, which is central to the film, altering its scale, placing it in a larger cycle of events. For if this story comes from the middle of winter, both actual and metaphorical, then other seasons will follow in their turn and bring a time of reconciliation and greeting, bounty, celebration and praise. For now, the voice and the notes of the oud are earthbound, and travel only as far as the muffling of winter snow will allow.
A poignant tale of unemployment in present day Tehran, which, in its use of traditional song in the soundtrack, gives the feeling of a very old story. One man leaves the city to look for work, another arrives to look for work. The first man’s wife continues working in the city. The second man desires her. These characters' stories are told in a kind of minimal neo-realist manner which has its ancestry in De Sica's Bicycle Thieves.
