Blackboards is at its best when considered a dreamy, surreal take on real-world issues. It's a shame though that the film's style doesn't match it's content if it had then it could have been truly affecting and memorable. As it is, it pairs the visual and conceptual silliness of men running around with blackboards strapped to them, and the visual and conceptual non-silliness of innocents meeting trouble on the hills of the Iran/Iraq border, which confuses the message. Further, shooting the otherwise farcical adventures of the blackboaders in the (ever popular) faux-documentary realism style undermines Samira Makhmalmaf's attempt to consider issues such as imprisonment, gender equality, education and communication, which are all jumbled around in the text fairly loosely, and not in the regimented way the style would have enhanced.
Not only are these issues trampled on by the blackboarders, but the characters are not exactly equipped with the faculties to make them engaging for 85 minutes. They are moronic, moribund individuals, trapped on empty endless hillsides or engulfed in smoke which might as well be a metaphor for their foresight. They are not interesting. The trouble is it's unclear whether the director is mocking them or pitying them. One assumes the former, but unfortunately the message is, like the writing on the boards, incomplete.
Not only are these issues trampled on by the blackboarders, but the characters are not exactly equipped with the faculties to make them engaging for 85 minutes. They are moronic, moribund individuals, trapped on empty endless hillsides or engulfed in smoke which might as well be a metaphor for their foresight. They are not interesting. The trouble is it's unclear whether the director is mocking them or pitying them. One assumes the former, but unfortunately the message is, like the writing on the boards, incomplete.