Let's be realistic.

Highly Overrated But Still Good

I saw this movie before reading any reviews, and I thought it was very funny. I was very surprised to see the overwhelmingly negative reviews this film received from critics.

It really made me laugh, but for some moments I was tearing up because I could relate so much.

Made me join IMDb just to say if you have 97 minutes to stick with a slow burner that doesn't drag on and is perfectly balanced in all the characters , sit down to this. The scenes of hallucinatory/dreamy metaphors fit perfectly with the poetry (which I am looking for online) and the performances which relate reality to chaos perfectly. The story needs concentration though is worth effort and gives a raw and real yet still fantastical aspect to the rest of the film and the acting which is by itself very well filmed. It creates a subtle atmosphere of meditation, depression and insanity without overdoing any. A mix which binds humanity, irrelevant of politics. "Only one living on the border will create a land"

I am coming across many people, who are the so-called "critics" and speak lengthily about the hidden beauty of a film, or what the audience should feel or understand. I am an ordinary person and for me that film was stupid. Maybe the story would have been nice, maybe the camera man is good, but as a whole I went out of the cinema regretting those hour and a half. The only good thing about it was Monica Bellucci. Someone tried to make it more poetic, more artistic, but I only saw a man who out of no-where slept with his almost daughter, then a horse, then also this man ran over, yes-ran over a rhino, a rain of turtles...The characters did not act realistically in some cases and it was awful slow. It's like Rothko's paintings but in movies-too expensive, too much praises, but a person sometimes dares to wonder is that really art!

While no one doubts the magnificent cinematography, there is much more about this brilliant masterpiece comparable to the works of great masters such as Angelopoulos. Although the movie events happen in Iran, they are all about universal themes such as love, jealousy, destruction and the desperate search to discover the meaning of the Being. The Iranian revolution and its destructive impact upon the society, the pandemic injustice that the revolution promised to end but did not and yet exacerbated, the hostile environment and its impact upon the afflicted families, are all depicted with rigor and with poetic images, rather than with cliché dialog and rhetoric. The movie manages to keep an appropriate pace letting the scenes find their desired depth and yet avoiding boredom, and the performances are brilliant. What more would you expect from a movie anyway than to show you innovative images and to share a new kind of experience with you, which you would have had to pay a great price to experience it first hand? A master piece 10/10.

When I first saw the trailer ,I thought it would be a great movie because the trailer was good and Martin Scorsese presents it and staring one of the hottest women in the world and also the Persian idol Behrouz Vosoughi gave me every reason to watch it ,Cinematography and set decoration was great ,it was technically good but the script was really weak ,Bahman Ghobadi proved that he is not a good screenwriter the movie was lack of pace ,he tried so much to make the movie look poetic which wasn't really good, the story was good but Ghobadi ruined the story by his primitive script and I don't really think the entire movie is based on a true story I believe Bahman Ghobadi must return to his previous method of filmmaking ,making semi-documentaries.he made great films like Turtles can fly and "A time for drunken horse" in that waySPOILER An Iranian-Kurdish poet is sentenced to 30 years in prison for writing poets against Islamic regime of Iran during 1979 revolution in Iran ,government tell his wife that he has been executed ,after 30 years He is realized and goes to find his wife