London,

Frontier Blues

Cert: 12A

Description: Hassan was abandoned by his mother and now travels everywhere with his beloved donkey. The mentally challenged man makes friends easily and he also has the support of his uncle, who runs a clothing store. Elsewhere, chicken farmer Alam dreams of a new life with the woman of his dreams in a different village and the local minstrel continues to pick over old emotional wounds that haven't healed after 30 years.

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Dir: Babak Jalali.

Cast: Khajeh Araz Dordi, Behzad Shahrivari, Mahmoud Kalteh, Abolfazl Karimi

Country: Iran/UK/Ita.

Year: 2009.

Duration: 97mins

One of the things emerging from the huge haul of documents released on Wikileaks this week is that Western forces don’t really understand anything about the East.

They spend hundreds of billions bombing and strafing and attempting to change hearts and minds in Afghanistan but they know nothing of the people’s hearts and we don’t really want to.

The same is true of Iraq and perhaps, truest of all, of Iran. We know nothing of the people, its regions, its customs and its cares, but we remain suspicious, harbouring the kind of fears that point the way to future military engagement in the absence of comprehension.

In this context, a film such as Frontier Blues should be received as a godsend, a benison and a miracle.

It is set in the northern frontier of Iran, in the borderlands with Turkmenistan, where a population of Kazakhs, Turkmens and Persians live in a beautiful, strange landscape of arid flatlands and mountains, running to the Caspian Sea.

The film is rich in people looking for love, craving connection, finding a future, and is also rich in the kind of unexpected comedy that can make films great.

Meet Hassan (Abolfazl Karimi), a 28-year-old gentle soul who lives with his uncle and is a supreme loner. He has a donkey and a tape recorder. That is his life, a kind of limbo, yet somehow his search, for God knows what, is compelling and humane. The uncle, Kazem (Behzad Shahrivari), has long hair and he keeps a

Kazem’s life is a small existential pot-boiler: he works all day in the clothes shop, but none of his clothes seems to fit anyone and he can’t sell anything.

Then there is Alam (Mahmoud Kalteh), a young man who lives with his father. They work on a chicken farm where some of the chickens are dying; they fear they may be giving them too much feed. Alam is learning English and he hopes this will help him to marry a girl called Ana. He would like to take her to Baku, where many people are speaking English nowadays.

The final of our four stories involves a fiftysomething minstrel and his group of young friends. A photographer from Tehran is taking pictures of them in different locations. He, too, is dreamy and hopeful, though we learn his wife was abducted years before by a shepherd in a green car.

That’s it. And it’s everything. Writer and director Babak Jalali, who grew up around the area of Golestan where this was shot, has found a kind of poetry in these lives.

The film has stillness and liveliness at the same time, the thing all the great magicians of world cinema from Buster Keaton to Renoir to Lynne Ramsay have tried to capture. I thought of them all while watching this film, the unfolding lives caught with such humour and with such a passion for people’s inner lives.

At one point, Hassan stands at the window of the chicken factory while Alam and his father eat lunch. He plays his tape recorder at the window and a whole universe of yearning seems to grow out of the little scene.

In another one, Kazem, the shopkeeper, throws the garments in his threadbare shop on to the floor. You suddenly feel you are gaining an insight not only into this character, these people, and this region, but into yourself as well. This is the hallmark of cinema at its best.

This is Jalali’s first feature film and, on this evidence, he has a brilliant career ahead of him. Here is an emotional purity shorn of sentimentality, a philosophical lightness that yet brings you something essential about life.

It is a very modern film, taking Beckett and Pinter on to the steppe, bringing a sense of alienation into an ancient culture and making it real. It is, as one character says, “the world of heartbreak and tractors”, and it strikes me that if we are ever to make any real steps towards that fantasy article called world peace, we shall probably have art, not governments, to thank for it.

Frontier Blues is no kind of blockbuster but trust me when I tell you it’s worth a hundred A-Teams. It will warm your heart and stretch your mind at the same time, a goal that too many films no longer even see as being a goal. But if you love cinema and savour how it can operate in your life, then this is a film for you.

In this column — which comes to an end today — I have had much fun lapping up and lampooning the joys and absurdities of the new releases. But, when the cacophony and the publicity dies down, this is what we are holding out for — a film like Frontier Blues, where the little mysteries of existence bloom into life.

These four interweaving stories bring a part of the world into your head that you won’t forget. Every scene is a perfectly judged fragment of Iranian reality, and it comes like a gift, blessed with empathy and compositional brilliance. By the end of this film, I felt I knew these people, knew their struggles and felt glad be reminded there are world-class directors emerging, such as Jalali, quietly going about their artistic business while the world turns and reason burns.

I’m off now, to fulfil my promise to write a play and to get on with my next novel, and to work — heaven save us! — on a film. I’ve enjoyed my stint being your guide to the daftness and glory of what’s on at the pictures. “There’s nothing too small for such a small thing as man,” wrote Dr Johnson, and this is true of the cinema as much as anything.

Down a lane and by a lamppost, there’s a cinema near you that isn’t showing dross and sneering at the notion of quality. They are showing the beautiful smallness of life on a large screen. And this week that cinema will be showing Frontier Blues.

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