Frontier Blues

The new movie from Iranian director Babak Jalali. It is a fun and interesting film, a nice digression on formalism and place, on localism.
We have the long long shots of people who remain pretty still. When they do walk, they walk like puppets, often from a wide view. They directly address the camera (the talking photographer) on occassion. The dialogue is stilted and largely consists of non-sequiters.
As a formalist piece we enjoyed this very much. It might not have a huge amount to it in that sense, but it sure gave the images a good run at us. The balance and harmony were all there, quite self consciously so on occassions.
The use of these formalist tropes was nicely deconstrcuted on occassions, as indeed was the whole filmmaking process. We were always aware of the presence of the camera, recording these blank gazes.
It has a real deadpan humour to it, the 'performances' are completely underdone, which stops it getting all too ridiculous. The most interesting questions are well framed, the stasis and ridicuolous wish of ours to capture some 'colourful' or 'exotic' locales.
Obviously long shots with no story to speak of can be argued to get a little tedious, but this wasn't really the case in our viewing experience. The pretty darn horrendous locations, the repition, and the blankness of the whole piece gave it a real hypnotic quality, like tuning in and out. We won't pretend our mind didn't wander on occassion, but in the nicest way, the film sort of washed over us a little.
A few notes; there is an obvious Herzog reference, and the blankness, if not the actual shots, can remind one of him. This film is like 'Fata Morgana' except where they shoot is not spectacular.
There are also a couple of (to be honest, mildly annoying) Kiarostami references, with the photographer and the plant-motorbike. They also had a moment or two of Kiarostami-esque camera work during dialogue, but in general it was a mention rather than a stylistic homage.
A film of rythm and mood, a formalist piece, really, but this may have helped convey the realistic atmosphere better than other techniques. Interesting and worth seeing.