Through the Olive Trees

A lovelorn village youth gets another chance at romance when he and his disinterested paramour are cast as husband and wife by a visiting film crew in Kiarostami’s wryly romantic, fittingly self-reflective third part of the Koker trilogy, shot in the same village as his earlier Where Is the Friend’s Home? and And Life Goes On. Effectively remixing the entire set-up of And Life Goes On, albeit through the eyes of the nonplussed villagers as opposed to the filmmakers, Kiarostami “evokes at times an Iranian Day for Night” (Film Society of Lincoln Center), and poetically uncovers the way that cinema can reinvent not only landscapes, but lives.