Stuart Jeffries
Saturday April 16, 2005
Guardian
Since Taste of Cherry won the Palme d’Or, Kiarostami has made several highly regarded films: In 1999, he directed The Wind Will Carry Us, a feature unusual because many of the characters are heard but not seen; at least thirteen to fourteen speaking characters in the film are not seen.[30]
Geoff Andrew, TimeOut: Another subtle, deceptively simple and richly rewarding work of genius from Kiarostami, this Venice prizewinner opens on a long shot of a car negotiating a dusty mountain road, with driver and passengers arguing about where they are. Once the car reaches the Kurdistan village of Siaf Dareh, the ambiguities and mysteries proliferate and interweave. Are the men treasure-hunters, as they tell a boy, the telecom engineers the villagers assume them to be, or something more sinister? Why is their apparent leader curious about the boy’s dying grandma? And why, when Tehran calls on his mobile and he needs to move to higher ground, does he always drive to the cemetery, where an invisible man sings from a hole in the ground? This engrossing and beautiful film succeeds on many levels. As witty, almost absurdist comedy, it offers lovely visual and verbal gags. And as an ethnographic/philosophical study of the relationships between ancient and modern, rural and urban, devotion and directionlessness, it’s intriguing and illuminating.
Invited by the U.N.to document the fate of Uganda’s nearly two million AIDS orphans, Kiarostami made ABC AFRICA (2001). He turns his first feature shot on video into a reflective work that considers his own position as a privileged filmmaker in impoverished circumstances—not unlike the central characters in Life and Nothing More through to The Wind Will Carry Us. Made over ten days, this journey uncovers an indomitable life force in the children, their joy conveyed by a nearly goofy looseness in front of the camera, and group performances that can’t help but transfix the viewer.
In Ten (2002) Kiarostami made a film that used digital cameras to virtually eliminate the director. Kiarostami fastened cameras to the dashboard of a car, and then allowed his actors to act. There was no film crew in the car, and no director. There is no camera movement, other than the movement of the car which carries the camera. There is minimal cutting and editing.[31] For Geoff Andrew, whose book on the film is published by the British Film Institute, this is Kiarostami’s best. It consists of 10 scenes set in the front of a car, shot in digital video as a woman drives around Tehran with various passengers – her son, a friend, a prostitute and an old woman. It is, on the face of it, the most overtly political of the Iranian’s feature films. The driver, who has divorced her husband, at one point complains about Iran’s “stupid laws” that forbid her to divorce unless she charges her husband with abuse or drug addiction. And it depicts, upsettingly, the consequence of that divorce in the form of her aggressive son who treats his mother disrespectfully from the passenger seat, having seemingly internalised the licence of a sexist society.
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Ten |
Was the film drawn from your own marital experiences? “Definitely,” says Kiarostami. “I never reflect or convey that which I have not experienced myself. I divorced 22 years ago.” In Iran, while women can sue for divorce, they are not economically able to look after their children afterwards and as a result often see their children only rarely. “Women, after divorce, lose their independence and therefore they are less and less able to take responsibility for their children. It often results in tragedy for all concerned and I was trying to explore that.”
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Ten |
Following Ten, Kiarostami directed one of his most daring experiments. FIVE DEDICATED TO OZU (2003) comprises five sections, all in fixed continuous shots focusing on moments with microscopic detail. The camera trains on driftwood floating in the water, or human passersby at the beach crossing paths with ducks, a moonlit pond whose serenity is disrupted by the croaking of unseen frogs. or a finale landscape before dawn where slivers of light become the stuff of pure visual drama.“Five” had neither character, plot nor dialogue.
Although the film lacks a clear storyline, Geoff Andrew argues that the film is “more than just pretty pictures”. He adds, “Assembled in order, they comprise a kind of abstract or emotional narrative arc, which moves evocatively from separation and solitude to community, from motion to rest, near-silence to sound and song, light to darkness and back to light again, ending on a note of rebirth and regeneration.”He notes the degree of artifice concealed behind the apparent simplicity of the imagery.[36]
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Mr. Kiarostami’s “Five,” a video piece dedicated to the Japanese director Yasujiro Ozu.CreditMuseum of Modern Art |
In fact, Five proved to be a pivotal work for Kiarostami in many respects. It marked the beginning of an extended period during which Kiarostami escaped from the world of theatrical art cinema and into the world of museums and galleries, where he exhibited many of his own landscape photographs and created many film-related installations (including a series of video “letters” exchanged with Spanish filmmaker Victor Erice). And when he started to make his way back to theatrical filmmaking with Shirin (2008), he significantly did so by focusing on theatrical filmgoing as a subject.
But first Kiarostami further explored his new-found fascination with digital video in 10 ON Ten (2004) as he returns to the locations of his international breakthrough hit The Wind Will Carry Us. Always an artist unafraid of turning the camera on himself—or at least an alter-ego—he carries on a kind of dialogue with the audience, egging them on to ask questions about the cinema and its purposes, either as a means to uncover a new reality, or as a powerful way of telling a story. In his inimitable way, the filmmaker’s questions only open up further questions.
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Tickets |
Tickets (2005): One segment of a three-part film, each of which concerns numerous characters riding a rail train through Europe. Ermanno Olmi and Kenneth Loach directed the other episodes. In Kiarostami’s story, a woman in late middle-age, with white hair and a string of pearls, boards the train with a host of suitcases gamely carried by a young assistant. She treats him as a lover, a toyboy, a kept man; but it later transpires that he appears to be on some form of national service, and that she is a widow on the way to a memorial service for her army-general husband. Silvana De Santis plays the woman with sweaty, angry energy; nothing will stand in her way and she will co-operate with no one she considers beneath her. The young man, played by Filippo Trojano, has a sad expression and beautiful eyes, which are later accentuated by the flat lighting Kiarostami deploys when the man is talking to a young friend of his sister whom he meets in the corridor (and of whom De Santis’ character is jealous).
By the conclusion De Santis and Trojano’s characters have argued and separated. She leaves the train alone and unaided, but not before one of the best sequences in the film, which harks back to one of the Iranian director’s longstanding obsessions and involves an argument over mobile phones (Kiarostami considers them a curse of modernity).
In Shirin (2008), over 100 Iranian female actors of the stage and screen, and one notable European star, are observed as they witness the (off-screen and thus unseen, but heard) performance of a live drama based on a 12th century work by Nazami Ganjavi, the master of romantic epic Persian poetry. There’s an unmistakable link, for Western viewers at least, to Shakespeare in both the play’s thematic anticipation of the tragedy of doomed young love in Romeo and Juliet and the way Kiarostami honors the place and power of actors.
We watch their reactions and hear only the soundtrack of the film, using their expressions to help us imagine the story. Here are defiant women from a strict Islamic society revealing their faces, and their emotions, with a few menacing out-of-focus glimpses of men in the background.
Agri Ismaïl for 3:AM on Shirin: “What makes Kiarostami’s movie interesting with regard to the mutable Shirin myth is the fact—never disclosed in the movie—that the actresses weren’t actually watching a Khosrow & Shirin adaptation at all. The film’s soundtrack was recorded only later, and the women are in fact looking at some dots above the camera, responding to the director’s prompts. That the story of Khosrow and Shirin was ultimately selected was a fortuitous fluke: an early sketch of the movie shown at Cannes used the soundtrack from Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet instead, before Kiarostami decided to switch to his own country’s equivalent.”
Shirin which in some ways I regard as his most radical film. The limitations in this case, at least for me, is that its achievements are mainly theoretical and technical rather than emotional or philosophical.
In 2010 he made “Certified Copy.” in Tuscany…An antiques dealer (Juliette Binoche) and a philosopher (British opera star William Shimell) appear to meet for the first time following one of his lectures, but soon we begin to suspect that there is more to this couple than meets the eye. Are they in fact husband and wife engaging in an elaborate charade?
Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian: …persistently baffling, contrived, and often simply bizarre – a highbrow misfire of the most peculiar sort. …the simple human inter-relation between the two characters is never in the smallest way convincing,
His final film, “Like Someone in Love,” (2012) filmed in Japan, was an elliptical study of identity, its main characters a Japanese student moonlighting as a prostitute and her elderly client.
Ian Buruma NYR 11/13/12
The call girl (Takanashi Rin) is on her way to the apartment of an elderly professor (Okuno Tadashi). They have never met before. He doesn’t want to sleep with her. They make small talk. He has laid the table and opened a bottle of champagne, as if to recreate a long-ago scene of romance before he dies. The girl falls asleep in bed. The dinner is never consumed.
The professor drives the girl to her college the following morning. Her jealous boyfriend watches them arrive. The girl brushes him off. While she is taking an exam inside, the boy steps into the car, mistaking the professor for her grandfather. Later, when the boy finds out who the professor really is, he launches a violent attack on his home. What happens after that we will never know. What the professor wanted remains a mystery. In fact, we don’t know very much about the lives of the main characters at all. Pasts are only hinted at. And yet we pick up a great deal, from their conversations, their habits, their fears, their obsessions. Knowing little, we still feel at the end of the film that we know them.
This is the peculiar genius of Kiarostami. He explores human character, and the vagaries of human lives, without explaining, without turning the lives into neat stories with a beginning, a middle, and an end. Life isn’t logical, nor are our encounters with others. People are rarely what they seem to be—to themselves, or to others. Which is why Kiarostami’s films, though often detached, even artificial, still feel like life.
One way he achieves this effect is to withhold the story from his actors even as they are making the film. They are given their lines on a daily basis. As in real life, they never know what will happen next. The most extraordinary performance in Like Someone in Love is given by Okuno Tadashi, a professional film extra who had no idea he was being cast for a main part. His confrontation with the jealous lover, in the car, has all the tentative awkwardness and misleading intimacy of a real close encounter with a stranger.
5 STAR FINAL 