The Runner movie review & film summary (2022)

Capturing one of the key paradoxes of childhood, “The Runner” paints Amiro’s existence as one of both freedom and confinement. Because he has no adult telling him what to do, the boy can range exuberantly across a stunning landscape of sea, plains, and city. Yet he’s smart enough to know that this place offers him no future and that poverty is the ultimate trap. His gaze repeatedly returns to means of escape—trains, ships and, most entrancingly, airplanes.

Throughout, what Naderi shows us of Amiro’s life is not nearly as compelling as how he shows it. Rendered in Firooz Malekzadeh’s exquisite color cinematography, Amiro’s environs are full of dazzling light and colors, with the clear edges of a hyperrealist painting. But Naderi’s most distinctive technique lies in his use of motion (here again Scorsese comes to mind), especially rapid lateral tracking shots and shots, for example, from the inside of a train as it speeds away from a crowd of boys running pell-mell after it. Obviously the peripatetic Amiro is the runner of the title, but the same word could fit the film itself, which has a breathless headlong gait (the editing is by Bahram Beyzai, one of Iran’s greatest filmmakers).

Lest anyone suspect that Naderi stumbled upon this riveting visual language on his own, it’s worth noting that he was known as the most avid cinephile among major pre-Revolutionary directors. In Iran, I heard the story of how he once drove a VW bug from Tehran to London to be first in line for the opening of Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey.” When Iranian films began reaching international festivals in the ‘80s, critics often detected the influence of the two most significant previous movements in post-WWII cinema, Italian neorealism and the French New Wave. “The Runner” evidences the impact of both. Like De Sica’s “Shoeshine,” it was shot on real locations and uses nonprofessional kids in a tale of social outcasts. As in Truffaut’s “The 400 Blows,” its story is derived from the director’s own life. (The influence of “Pierrot le Fou” and other Godard films may be felt in the film’s visuals.)

During the Iranian New Wave period, Naderi directed big movies with movie stars, but he also started the autobiographical strand in his work with a film called “Harmonica,” which also features a character called Amiro. (His teenage years were dramatized in “Experience,” which he scripted and Abbas Kiarostami directed.) After the Iranian cinema was effectively destroyed in the 1979 Revolution, there was some doubt whether it would be resurrected under the Islamic Republic. In May 1981, Naderi, Kiarostami, Beyzai and other New Wave veterans published an open letter urging the regime to reconstruct the film industry. Within two years, their advice was heeded and filmmaking resumed in Iran.