Breaktime

A young boy is punished, in the school corridor, for breaking a window with his ball. At the end of class, he is on his way home when he is stopped, in the street, by a football match blocking his path. He manages to get by but takes a rough track leading to the city limits…

One might broadly consider Kiarostami’s first two films – The Bread and Alley and the one under discussion here – as variations on the same theme: a young boy goes from one place to another along a route which is wholly familiar, comes across an obstacle that makes him stop (a dog, a football game) and ends up overcoming that obstacle. In the first instance by coordinating his rhythm and covering part of the ground with the very thing which caused the obstruction and distress; and in the second, we will see how.

Breaktime, though, is more sweeping and more universal because it’s not just the child’s distress and the Kiarostamian obsession with tempo which is set into play, but also the topics of the unique object of the passion (the “idée fixe”) and one’s ties to a community of peers.

Breaktime is indeed about a passion, with the ball as cross and delight. Little matter its object: no object is absurd when the passion is true. As with all passions, the thing which saves you is also your undoing. The boy has been brought low, punished, beaten, and winds up going astray because of his ball (he has broken a school window), but it’s thanks to another ball (belonging to the group of children whose football game blocks the street he needs to cross) that he manages to get past the obstacle. The ball is his key to the world; it’s also his cross.

In this short film Kiarostami addresses nothing less than the universal question of the individual’s relation to the community, insofar as it plays out at the frontier of the passion. The biggest moment in this “little” film is when the boy is stopped in his journey, frozen by the spectacle of a game of football being played by boys of his own age. The bottleneck (the street is lined by large, unbroken walls) is all the more clogged and impassable because his very fascination with what he sees paralyses him from the inside. At school, his passion has led to temporary exclusion from the class group: every passion isolates from the social group. He sees his classmates at the school gates before they all go their separate ways, then finds himself alone again when he hears the very noise that signals his attention and passion: children playing football. Then begins one of the most beautiful scenes that Kiarostami ever filmed, his cinema already functioning at full capacity. The obstacle is the thing desired by everyone. That which obstructs is also what fascinates. During this pause the boy’s senses are in overdrive, but solely focused on the game. It’s as though he were selectively filtering out the cries in the backdrop so as to hear nothing but the technical sounds of the match. Through his gaze he is both radically separate from, and at the heart of, the match that is playing out. The kinship group is at the same time very close (by empathy and identification) and inaccessible to the little Kiarostamian hero. The unpremeditated and contingent act (unbidden, he gets the chance to head the ball) by which he manages to overcome the obstacle is an act which allows him to take part momentarily in the game but, at the same time, one which radically excludes him from the little social group of the players. He is chased by a bigger boy for having dared to intervene in this match which didn’t concern him, even if we know that the ball is precisely what concerns him the most.

Inevitably we think of another boy who also ran into other children, smaller than him, playing football. It was in a street amid the ruins of Berlin, in the wake of the war. Little Edmund from Germany Year Zero was unable to join the game, a little girl taking the ball and symbolically refusing him access to this tiny community of children. Several minutes later, his path led him to suicide. As for Kiarostami’s boy, little by little he crosses the rings which lead from the city to the outskirts: rubbish, goats on a wasteland, the continual and impassable flow of cars on a ring-road. During this turbulent journey, when he seems to be seeking his way, he doubtless experiences himself, following these events, as an “always prior exteriority, or as an existence shattered through and through, composing itself only as it decomposes itself constantly, violently and in silence”. This is undoubtedly, as Maurice Blanchot puts it circuitously, the most accurate definition of the Kiarostamian child.