Frontier Blues

"Welcome to the land of heartbreak and tractors," says a Turkmen musician standing in the midst of his sparse, flat landscape. Nothing much happens here, at the Iran-Turkmenistan border, and if it did happen, this film didn't notice. Instead we get fixed-camera sketches of lonely, frustrated ordinary men. It's probably supposed to be a deadpan comedy but it's more an exercise in audience frustration. Scene after scene drifts by listlessly. A dimwitted young man drifts around with his donkey; his uncle stares at the ceiling fan in his badly stocked clothes shop; the musician poses irritably for the staged shots of a Tehran photographer; a chicken farmer longs for the hand of a Persian beauty (the only woman in sight). You'd be surprised if anywhere on earth was really this dull and depressing. There aren't even any tractors.