From American standards like Annie to more recent imported schmaltz like Mondo, cinema is full of rote stories about wide-eyed orphans who soften hearts, break down grim emotional barriers, and change lives for the better, generally by bringing a little needy, desperate love into the lives of the loveless. The cliché is so firmly entrenched that it's a small wonder when a film can bring something new to the story, let alone make it work. Leave it to Iran's Abbas Kiarostami to find new inroads into an old story.
The children of Deserted Station—a 2002 Iranian film directed by Alireza Raisian from a Kiarostami treatment—aren't precisely orphans, but they've been all but abandoned by their families, left behind in a rural oasis so desolate that it converts individuals into ideas. The film opens with a photographer (Nezam Manouchehri) and his pregnant wife (Leila Hatami) on a pilgrimage to seek a blessing for Hatami's unborn child. After multiple miscarriages, she's grown abstracted and melancholy, prone to staring out at the landscape without necessarily connecting with it. When their truck breaks down, Manouchehri seeks help in a nearby enclave whose men have gone to work in the city and whose women are deeply engaged in the business of daily living. He and the local schoolteacher (Mehran Rajabi) seek out a replacement part for the truck, leaving Hatami in charge of the village's band of children. She engages them with a sort of distant wonder, while they seem cautious of the stranger but eager to absorb her into their world. The relationship is intense and surprisingly unsentimental, and it leads to a series of dreamlike explorations as Hatami follows the children around the various corners of their small world, including the train station of the title.
Channeling much of the minimalist style of recent Iranian cinema, Hatami conveys a wounded fragility without histrionics or lengthy speeches. Raisian wraps her in a colorful scarf, then shoots her against breathtaking but stark and sandy desert landscapes, giving her the look of a primal, grieving Madonna who qualifies as the only real person in a world of ghosts. A few of the children differentiate themselves, but for the most part, they act as a mob, often demanding but just as often mute. Which may be the key to Raisian and Kiarostami's eerie, hypnotic success with Deserted Station: Their symbolic children are neither cute nor cloying. They're almost a primal force, one that Hatami appears to understand—and, gradually, to accept—all too well. Deserted Station plays out like a dream, but Raisian moves comfortably between fantasy and nightmare, real and surreal.