Throughout - notably in an excellent comic scene where the London ghostwriter gets into a scrape at a casino - there are reflections on fate and fortuity, on hazard and the narrative meanings we make of it.
From its burden of guilt flow reflections on fate, religious superstition and the fallibility of memory, with allusions ranging from Thomas Hardy – including a fatefully unread letter – to the Greek furies.
A scene from a relatively modern shooter game – in which you can look carefully at characters' faces only by training your gun's crosshairs on them – is paused for philosophical reflection on the fate of a subsidiary computer-controlled character, who must forever enter and leave a shop according to strict rules: "This tragic constellation reveals to the hero the limitations of human action".
Kiarostami's style is notable for the use of panoramic long shots, such as in the closing sequences of Life and Nothing More and Through the Olive Trees, where the audience is intentionally distanced physically from the characters in order to stimulate reflection on their fate.
It is more the uncanny physical similarity that inevitably prompts reflections on how fate determines the dilemmas of each generation.
Best of all is the title track, a pained and thoughtful reflection on war and fate, as seen by a disillusioned soldier.
But Schamus has abandoned the novel's central conceit that Marcus is telling his story from a morphine haze that he mistakes for the afterlife, and is offering his experience as a reflection on the workings of fate, "the terrible, the incomprehensible way one's most banal, incidental, even comical choices achieve the most disproportionate result".
On the table lies a letter with the year 1514 and the name Smolensk, likely announcing that Poland has lost Smolensk (now in Russia) to the Grand Duchy of Muscovy, causing Stańczyk's sorrow and reflection on his fatherland's fate.
Henry's misadventures abroad awaken his conscience, and the view from the third world prompts reflection on the life he left behind (as it turns out, there are worse fates than having a dull, well-paying job).
A reflection on a window.
