Abbas Kiarostami's The Experience is a beautifully constructed coming-of-age story that is viewed almost entirely through a social-realist lens. The story of a young boy from a lower class whose mundane existence is disrupted by the promise of young romance, The Experience is carefully crafted, exhibiting its social drama and thematic elements through an understated narrative framework that devastates in its denouement. Kiarostami's formal schematics manage to be observant yet pointed in the themes he wishes to illuminate largely through a sense of repetition and hopeful allure brought by the promise of romance. Youthful idealism - and arguably naivety depending on your perspective - is established and slowly eroded across the course of its narrative as this boy's hopes and aspirations for something more slowly come into focus as a romantic notion but not one rooted in the material conditions of his environment. Establishing the tedium of daily routine through narrative repetition, Kiarostami juxtaposes this stagnation with spontaneity and blissful uncertainty brought by this young boy's budding sexual desire and romantic longing. Kiarostami's film never feels weighed down in melancholy or a sense of absolution, instead, the film provides a sense of hope throughout, instilled with the same sense of youthful idealism in which its character elicits after he begins to long for this upper-class adolescent girl. Perhaps from the viewers perspective, this fascination offers only a slight reprieve from an existence of repetition in which his future feels predetermined by the social and economic environment which he inhabits, yet it feels surmountable for much of the film's running time, as one is instilled with a sense of hope that he could be one of the few exceptions before the gut-wrenching finale.
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AuthorLove of all things cinema brought me here. Archives
June 2023
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