“Through the Olive Trees” - Abbas Kiarostami (1994)

Abbas Kiarostami’s Through the Olive Trees (Zire Darakhatan Zeyton, 1994) was one of the veteran director’s films that first attracted international attention and elevated him to star status.  It was his third film – coming after Where Is the Friend's Home? (Khane-ye Doust Kodjast, 1987) and Life, and Nothing More... (Zendegi va Digar Hich, 1992) – that was shot in and around a rural village in northwestern Iran, Koker, that was the site of a devastating earthquake in 1990.  It was undoubtedly the earthquake, which killed 35,000-50,000 people and injured more than 100,000, that led Kiarostami to revisit Koker and to fashion films that considered what matters in life. These three films set in Koker are sometimes referred to as the “Koker Trilogy”, although Kiarostami, himself, apparently doesn’t consider them to be a trilogy [1].  In fact, though, the three Koker films are definitely linked, and Through the Olive Trees is a story associated with the making of Life, and Nothing More....

Kiarostami is famous for his distinctive cinematic style, which features static long takes, often lasting several minutes, as well as reflective, semi-documentary styled stories that sometimes explicitly self-reference the making of the film that is shown. This has attracted the fascination of some intellectually-oriented international film critics who see his work as examining or questioning the reality of what can be told [2].  But in my view Through the Olive Trees is not so much about the nature of reality as it is about personal engagement.  And that is where its charm lies.  I will try to elaborate on that below.

The story concerns the making of a film (evidently Life, and Nothing More...) in Koker after the earthquake disaster, and it opens with the actor who plays the director of the film to be shot  speaking directly to the camera about the open-call casting interviews he is conducting. Note that the role of the film director, whose name is never given but who presumably represents Kiarostami, is played by the only professional actor in this film, Mohamad Ali Keshavarz.  All the other roles are performed by nonprofessionals, as is customary in Kiarostami films. This includes not only the locals, who simply play themselves, but also members of Kiarostami’s own film crew, such as cinematographer Hossein Jafarian (Crimson Gold, 2003; Fireworks Wednesday 2006; About Elly, 2009; Gold and Copper, 2011) and assistant director Jafar Panahi. 

Following this opening statement to the film’s viewers, the film director turns around and begins scanning the faces of the assembled young ladies hoping to be chosen for a small role in the film.  He clearly has a picture in his mind of what he is looking for, as he briefly queries a few girls before ultimately choosing a young woman named  Tahereh Landanian. We soon learn, though, that Tahereh is somewhat stubborn and self-centered and thus not necessarily the kind of cooperative person who will take direction when the camera is running.  But the film director has his own intuition and has made his choice.

So the beginning of the film establishes the primary narrative thread: the director’s task of making a film in the earthquake-ravaged village, where most of survivors are now living in tents because their homes were destroyed.  For example the task of just creating the right setting of a normal home means having to gather potted plants from neighboring areas, and the director’s rigorously and energetic production manager, Mrs. Shiva, takes care of such details by getting some help from two local boys, Babek and Ahmed Ahmed-Poor (who we might recognize as the principal characters of Where Is the Friend's Home?). 

Getting the locals to act naturally is another problem, and the film director patiently persists through numerous retakes of a simple shot because his local actor stammers in front of women and so cannot utter his few simple lines to Tahereh. (The tediousness of watching these many retakes unconsciously highlights in the viewer’s mind the differences between spontaneous reality and  the artificiality of narrative retelling.)  The film director is finally persuaded to replace the actor with a backup local, Hossein, and so Mrs. Shiva drives away to fetch him.  As she drives back to the filming setup with Hossein in tow, she chats with the man, and this is the beginning of a fundamental shift in the story.  From now on the narrative focalization will primarily be on Hossein.

When they go ahead and reshoot the earlier scene now with Hossein, still another problem emerges to block progress.  It seems that Tahereh is familiar with Hossein and refuses to speak to him.  Hossein explains to the director that just before the earthquake he had proposed to Tahereh’s parents for her hand in marriage, but he had been refused because he was illiterate and didn’t own a house. Tahereh’s parents had perished in the earthquake, but Hossein's reissued proposal to the girl’s grandmother after the quake was also rejected.

But Hossein doesn’t give up.  He is patient and courteous but almost maniacally persistent in his attempts to win his beloved.  Hossein fell passionately in love with Tahereh just because he saw her reading a book one day and thereby knew that she was a well-groomed, literate young woman.  With absolutely no encouragement from the girl – she refuses to speak to him or look at him – the young man stubbornly perseveres in what seems like a hopeless quest.

We now start to get a feeling of what this film is ultimately about and how the two narrative threads, that of the director and that of Hossein, are linked.  The director, who is an observant and reflective sort of person, came to Koker to see how the earthquake had affected the people who lived there.  What he sees and encounters in his various conversations with the locals is that the people remain composed, kindly, and civilized, but the horrors of what has happened seem to have left them withdrawn and resigned to their fate.  They seem almost shell-shocked when they matter-of-factly mention to the director that their spouses and parents perished in the event. 

For example when the director talks to an elderly man named Bagheri who almost offhandedly remarks that his wife was killed in the event, he asks him if he intends to find another companion. No, that wouldn’t be right, Bagheri passively tells the director.  But the director urges him to embrace the life-world in front of him and to reconsider his position.
 

The film director sees that the bulk of the people he meets have stoically survived the quake, but they have become so withdrawn that they will likely miss out on what life further has to offer.  And this is where Hossein offers a contrast to this withdrawn passivity.  The young man is passionately committed to his romantic quest, almost irrationally so. But his passion for engagement is what seems to be lacking among the people around him.  It is this passion for life that the director sees in him and wants somehow to encourage.

Mrs. Shiva’s coercive persuasion manages to get Tahereh to recite her few lines to Hossein, and the filming of their scene is resumed. During the setup when Hossein and Tahereh are momentarily out of sight from the crew, Hossein continues to beseech the young woman to consider his proposal.  But she still refuses to speak to him or even look at him when she is not required to do so by the film script.  Hossein tells her that even though the grandmother has rejected him, he wants to know what she, herself, thinks.  Is it ‘yes’ or ‘no’?  But the girl doesn’t respond.

In some sense we might compare Tahereh’s non-responsiveness to Hossein’s entreaties to the perceived non-responsiveness of God to our prayers.  Just like Hossein, many of us have fashioned a love for God based on very little evidence.  We beg Him (or Her) to love us, or even to give us a sign, any sign, that He hears our pleas.  And when we don’t get any response, we still go on believing and loving Him.  We know He must be the perfect loving Being that we feel within our hearts has to be out there somewhere.  So, like Hossein, we don’t give up.
                   

After the first shot of the scene, Hossein, who also works for the film crew as a servant serves tea to everyone on the film set.  This is presented in a long and memorable 60-second moving-camera shot, with the tea tray always in closeup as Hossein moves about the set.  This was my favorite of the many well-executed long-take shots in this film.

Finally they get setup for the second shot of this sequence [3].  In the take Tahereh refuses to address Hossein as “Hossein Agha” (“Mr. Hossein") as the script required.  But Hossein, ever the gallant gentleman despite his lower-class status, sticks up for her reading, and the film director accepts the shots as a successful “wrap”. 

Now with their parts of the film finished, Hossein and Tahereh get ready with others to be driven back to their homes in a pickup truck.  There is some delay, though, and the impatient Tahereh sets off on foot, using a shortcut she knows about through the olive groves, to catch a minibus.  The film director, noticing her departure and the opportunity to encourage the one passionate local he has seen, suggests to Hossein that he also take that path home.

Hossein sets out in hot pursuit.  This is his last chance to be around the girl.  After he almost catches up with here, there is a four-minute sequence of alternating medium shots of the two of them – Tahereh silently walking ahead and Hossein respectfully following – showing him making his last desperate pleas. Also interested to see if she will ever respond, the film director watches them from a safe distance.  Finally Hossein despondently gives up and appears headed back to the pickup truck. But then he has a last-second, impulsive change of heart and again runs after her.

The final shot, which is the signal moment of the film and lingers in one’s memory long afterwards, lasts four minutes and shows Tahereh walking far away in the distance with Hossein in pursuit.  We finally only see the two of them as little more than little dots in the distance that have almost merged with the arboreal countryside landscape. It is difficult for the viewer to make it out because the principals are such tiny images, but it appears that Hossein catches up with her and perhaps there is some kind of engagement.  Hossein comes rushing back through the meadow toward the camera as the film ends.

There has been considerable commentary about that last shot and what it means.  Did Hossein finally make contact with his god(dess)?  Can we?  All we can be sure about is that the full, soulful engagement between two people is what the film director, Hossein, and we, are always looking for. 

★★★½

Notes:

1. Godfrey Cheshire, “Taste of Cherry”, The Criterion Collection, (31 May 1999).
2. Acquarello, “Through the Olive Trees: Life as Art…as Life”, Senses of Cinema,   (September 2000).
3. Interestingly, if, as indicated by the film clapperboard that is shown, this second shot is to come directly after the previous shot, then it suggests a jump cut will be needed.

"Where Is the Friend's Home?" - Abbas Kiarostami (1987)

Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami began writing and directing films, both features and documentaries, in the 1970s, but it wasn’t until his seventh feature, Where Is The Friend’s Home (Khane-ye Doust Kodjast?, 1987) that he established his reputation outside of Iran.  Like many modestly budgeted Iranian films of those days, including Kiarostami’s earlier works, this film is a child’s story, presumably for the reason that such subjects are less likely to involve social restrictions than would stories about more mature men and women. 

Since then Kiarostami’s reputation soared, and he has gone on to receive considerable international acclaim for a string of uniquely stylized successes, including Close-Up (Nema-ye Nazdik, 1990), Through the Olive Trees (Zire Darakhatan Zeyton, 1994), Taste of Cherry (Ta'am-e-Gilās, 1997 and winner of the Palme d’Or at the 1997 Cannes Film Festival), The Wind Will Carry Us (Bād Mā-rā Khāhad Bord, 1999), and 10 (Ten, 2002).  All these films have been characterized by his signature self-reflexive and long-take cinematography, along with overt invocations of Iranian poetry and mystical philosophy – the summation of which give his films a distinctly intellectual air and which has drawn the admiration of intellectual critics the world over. Indeed, in the fashion of many well-educated Iranians, Kiarostami has multiple cultural inclinations that include poetry composition, painting, and graphical design, and these interests are reflected in those later works.  In contrast with those subsequent films, the present film under examination, Where Is My Friend’s Home?, is a more modest and straightforward movie.  Nevertheless, I think it is Kiarostami’s most entertainingly satisfying cinematic experience for the viewer.

In some ways one might compare Kiarostami to Luis Bunuel.  Both of them were obliged to work in conventional commercial formats (in Bunuel’s case, as an expatriate in Mexico), and then both subsequently received accolades that gave them the latitude to try more intellectually adventuresome and personally expressive works.  And yet, for both, those early constraining production circumstances may have somehow contributed to their producing their best work.  In the case of Where Is the Friend’s Home?, what we have is a deceptively simple little story that seems trivial: an eight-year-old schoolboy has mistakenly taken his friend’s schoolbook and has to return it to him.  But this film benefits from not straying far from its straightforward goal that everyone can understand; and that is what carries the narrative along.  As the film progresses, though, we gradually detect a deeper theme: this boy’s sense of “doing the right thing” is almost continually in conflict with the confusing world of rules and duties that are imposed on him by the adult world.

The film narrative proceeds in five parts.

1.  The problem

In the small northern village of Koker (Kiarostami would later situate some other films in this village), Ahmed Ahmadpoor and Mohamad Reza Nematzadeh are two boys sitting in the local schoolroom (not surprisingly, boys only) and listening to the stern admonitions of their strict schoolteacher.  Mohamad Reza again hasn’t written his homework into his school workbook and is warned that one more such violation and he will be expelled from the school.  When the school bell rings and the boys run outside, Mohamad Reza drops his workbook, and in the ensuing commotion, Ahmed mistakenly goes home with both his and his friend’s workbook.

At home Ahmed’s mother, busy with housework, continually gives her boy menial jobs and refuses to let him go outside and return Mohamad Reza’s schoolbook.  Among the chores, though, is to go fetch some bread from the local bakery, and Ahmed seizes this opportunity to rush outside with the schoolbook in search of his friend’s home, whose location he only knows to be in the neighbouring village of Poshteh.

2.  1st trip to Poshteh

Poshteh seems to be a couple of kilometres away from Koker, and Ahmed runs all the way there to look for his friend’s house.  As Ahmed runs across the countryside, the viewer gets a feeling for the pastoral life in this locale.  Once in Poshteh, Ahmed asks around, and we see that the adults have little time to pay attention to the questions of an 8-year-old boy.  But by luck Ahmed happens onto a classmate who lives there but who only knows where Mohamad Reza’s cousin Hemmati lives.  When Ahmed finally finds that house, though, he learns that Hemmati has just gone off to Koker.  So now Ahmed has to run all the way back to Koker.

3.  Return to Koker

As he runs past a storefront in Koker, Ahmed passes by his grandfather, who sternly questions why the boy has gone outside the village. Afterwards, when Ahmed is out of earshot, the grandfather tells an elderly friend that all young people need to be continually disciplined in order to grow up properly.  In fact, he says, it is generally good for a boy to be beaten every two weeks, come what may, whether he has misbehaved or not.

A tradesman shows up at the storefront, and during a bit of rural local color as the man tries to hawk his iron doors, Ahmed overhears the surname Nematzadeh mentioned and tries to speak to the man.  But here, as elsewhere, the adults pay no attention to the boy other than to give orders and recommend punishments.  The tradesman brusquely gets on his donkey and heads off to Poshteh, with Ahmed, thinking that he may have found Mohamad Reza’s father, in hot pursuit.

4.  2nd trip to Poshteh

Back in Poshteh, Ahmed finally finds the tradesman’s son, but it is not Mohamad Reza.  By this time it has become dusk, but Ahmed does manage finally to find a man who will talk to him and who promises to show him his friend’s house.  But it turns out that this is an old man who just seems to be looking for anyone to listen to his tales about the virtues of his former craft, making traditional wooden doors, which, he complains, are now everywhere being foolishly replaced by the more “modern” iron doors, even though the traditional wooden doors (a symbol for the traditional Iranian ways that are being replaced by imported modernity) are more beautifully crafted.  Although this old man is friendly, Ahmed begins to suspect that the man just wants a listener and doesn’t really know where his friend lives.  He finally discontinues his quest and runs all the way back to Koker in the dark.

5.  Back in Koker again

Back at home, Ahmed’s parents are occupied with their own routines and again pay no attention to him, and he still hasn’t done his own homework or managed to do the right thing by his friend Mohamad Reza.  But a schoolboy who has spent the whole day trying to solve a problem is not just going to give up just like that.  You can see the film, yourself, to find out how things turn out the next day in school.

Kiarostami’s cinematography is straightforward and intuitive in the film.  The focalization is almost entirely that of the boy, Ahmed, and we see everything from his anxious perspective, where things that may seem trivial for adults can have considerable magnitude.  To maintain this sense of immediate involvement, Kiarostami doesn’t employ the long, fixed-camera takes that characterize his later films.   Here instead,  the visual continuity is well motivated, and even the many shots of Ahmed running across the countryside are smoothly and naturally executed.

There are some interesting moral issues in Where Is The Friend’s Home?.  Ahmed is always utterly sincere and instinctively honest towards everyone.  But sometimes there are higher principles than literal honesty. His ultimate goal is one of compassion: to help his friend, Mohamad Reza, and this is manifested in Part 1 when he helps his friend after he has fallen down and dropped his schoolbook.  In so doing, though, he accidentally walked away with his friend’s schoolbook, and now his primary goal is to return the book.  This is not just to expunge his own guilt, but represents a continuation of his sincere concern for his friend’s vulnerability of expulsion from school.  Adherence to this higher goal trumps more mundane rules that one follows.  So although he is instinctively honest, Ahmed, in pursuit of the higher good, does hesitantly make compromises with literal truth at several turns.  In Part 1 he is supposed to get bread and pretends to do so, but instead rushes off to Poshteh with his friend’s schoolbook.  Later in part 4 he effectively lies to the old man by implying that he has found his friend’s house and returned the book.  And there is still one further lie to come.
★★★

"The White Balloon" - Jafar Panahi (1995)

After studying directing at a film college, making several documentary films, and serving as Abbas Kiarostami’s assistant director in Under the Olive Trees (Zire Darakhatan Zeyton, 1994), Jafar Panahi made his directorial debut in 1995 with The White Balloon (Badkonake Sefid). The film was co-scripted by Kiarostami, who would later also write the screenplay for Panahi’s Crimson Gold (Talaye Sorkh, 2003), and the film followed the customary pattern of Kiarostami’s productions by employing almost exclusively nonprofessional actors essentially playing themselves. But even in this first production, Panahi displayed a mastery for visual narrative and humanistic portrayal that distinguished him from Kiarostami. This distinction is also manifested in their two contrasting camera styles. Kiarostami’s cinematography has often employed static, long-take close-up shots depicting lengthy statements by individual characters, which were frequently intercut with very wide shots depicting the environmental landscape. From the outset, however, Panahi displayed a more fluid and dynamic visual style. He uses moving camera tracking shots so skilfully that they compare to studio shots undertaken on camera tracks, and his dynamic editing maintains an interactive narrative discourse without interrupting the “realist” setting. When you watch The White Balloon, you are seeing the camera work of someone who has already mastered the craft.

Filmmaking in Iran is undoubtedly fraught with extra difficulties, and Iranian filmmakers have always wrestled with the severe restrictions imposed on them by government censors, particularly during the years outside the relatively tolerant and humane period corresponding to Mohammed Khatami’s presidency (1997-2005). In many cases the safest option was to tell stories about children, which led to some creative productions along these lines, such as Kiarostami’s Khane-ye Doust Kodjast? (Where Is My Friend’s Home?, 1987) and Majidi’s Children of Heaven (Bacheha-ye-Aseman, 1997). Panahi’s The White Balloon and his subsequent The Mirror (Ayneh, 1997) were additional entries in this Iranian film genre. In the case of The White Balloon, we have almost a textbook case of how one can make a film of interest out of everyday, mundane events. The key to The White Balloon and what makes it charming, though, is that while the events are mundane from an adult’s perspective, they are highly dramatic, with huge ups and downs, from the perspective of the child protagonists.

The story is set on the day before the Iranian New Year (“Nowruz”) and concerns a seven-year-old girl, Razieh, who wants her mother to purchase a colorful goldfish for the festivities. The Iranian Nowruz takes place on the first day of spring and is the principal holiday period in Iran, with the Nowruz holiday season lasting two weeks. It can be compared with Christmas in Western countries, since it is the major gift-giving holiday. This ancient holiday tradition is pres-Islamic and celebrates the annual rebirth of nature. The mythical figure of Nowruz is “Haji Firuz”, who is usually colorfully dressed and in blackface. During this period one often sees figures dressed as Haji Firuz on the street, dancing gaily and making raucous music with tambourines. Iranians traditionally decorate their home with a “haft sin” table that features seven food items that begin with the letter ‘s’ (in Farsi, ‘sin’) which have the symbolic meaning of renewal and good fortune for the coming year. The table also traditionally includes a goldfish in a bowl, symbolic of life. Thus in the spirit of the traditional holiday festivities, Razieh wanted the family haft sin table to display a truly grand goldfish for the occasion.

Note that the Iranian calendar is slightly more accurate than the traditional Western Gregorian calendar, and the moment of New Year takes place precisely at the moment of the vernal equinox. This means that it can happen at any time of the day on the eve of Nowruz. In The White Balloon the viewer is informed that the New Year will begin in less than two hours on that afternoon. The film then proceeds in real time, in the sense that the film duration parallels diegetic time. Thus in the first shot of the film, Haji Firuz clowns are seen on the street while the viewer is informed by an offscreen radio voice that the new year will begin in seventy-eight minutes, and at the very end of the film the same radio voice announces the beginning of the new year..

Although the storyline may at first seem to be somewhat ad hoc, it is actually organized into six structured episodes:

1. Introduction – Wanting a Goldfish (18 minutes). Razieh is seen tagging along after her mother on the street and nagging her about getting a nice, “chubby” goldfish for Nowruz. This scene provides the background for the family home, which is in a compound close to a local bazaar. Razieh’s mother is played by newcomer Fereshteh Sadre Orafaiy, a superb, natural actress who would later star in The Circle (Dayereh, 2000) and Café Transit (2005). Razieh has an older brother, Ali, who is about ten or eleven, and has a rather demanding father, who is heard but never seen onscreen in the film. Razieh’s mother is busy with holiday preparations and sees no point in purchasing a new goldfish from the market when the family already has a goldfish pond full of fish. But Razieh whines that she is not satisfied with their own ponds’ population of “skinny” goldfish, she wants to buy a chubby one that she saw in the market. Finally after strenuous remonstrations, Razieh gets her way and is given a 500-toman note and told to buy the desired goldfish for 100 tomans. (The “purchasing value” of 500 tomans at that time might have amounted to a couple of dollars.) The task goal for this episode was to get permission to buy the goldfish, which was accomplished The goal is now to go out and purchase the goldfish.
2. The Snake Charmers (7 minutes). Razieh, now wandering towards the bazaar on her own, succumbs to the forbidden temptation of watching two scruffy snake charmers performing in front of a crowd of idlers on the street. The snake charmers immediately incorporate the frightened Razieh into their act and snatch her 500-toman banknote as part of their show. This is a charming scene, and it shows the strange and threatening world outside home, as seen by a young child. After more tears and protests from Razieh, she gets her banknote back and moves on. The goal of this episode was merely to survive the events in tact, and that at least was accomplished. The goal remains to go out and buy the fish.
3. Losing the Money (16 minutes). Razieh makes her way to the fish shop and identifies her “chubby” goldfish, but now another disaster strikes: she has lost her banknote somewhere on the way. A kindly matron offers to help the again-tearful girl, and they retrace Razieh’s steps from the time when she last remembered having the money. They do manage to find it on the street, but it has fallen through a drain grating in front of a closed-up shop. The lady talks to the shopkeeper next door, a busy tailor named “Bachtiari”, who agrees to assist Razieh. But after the lady leaves, Mr. Bachtiari is too preoccupied with arguments in his shop to attend to Razieh, and she doesn’t know what to do. The goal of this episode had been to find the lost money, which was accomplished, but now the remaining task is to retrieve it somehow from the drain.
4. Ali Comes to Help (13 minutes). At this point Razieh’s brother Ali, who has been looking for her, finds her on the street. The older and more assertive Ali tries his hand with Mr. Bachtiari, but he doesn’t make much headway. After a failed attempt to fish out the money from the drain, Ali is merely instructed by Mr. Bachtiari to wait until after the Nowruz season is over when the neighbour shopkeeper is likely to return. This might make sense to an adult, but to the two children it would spell absolute disaster if they were to return home to their demanding parents without the money. Ali then goes off to see if he can find the address of the owner of the closed shop that has their money under its drain grate. So the goal is now to find the missing shop owner.
5. The Soldier (13 minutes). Razieh is now approached by a drafted army soldier from the provinces, who wants to chat with her. This is another scary episode for Razieh, who, like most well-bred young children, has been instructed never to talk to strangers. Indeed the soldier’s motivations are unclear: he might simply be bored and lonely; he may be after the banknote; or perhaps there is something worse on his mind. Gradually he wins Razieh’s confidence against her will, but Ali returns to the scene to terminate their colloquy, and the soldier moves on. Again an uncertain distraction has been dispatched, and the goal remains to recover the money from the drain.
6. The Afghani Boy (11 minutes). Now they spy an Afghani boy selling balloons on the street, and after a scuffle over the boy’s balloon pole, they begin working together to use the pole to retrieve the money from the grating. It is agreed that chewing gum stuck on the end of the pole should do the trick, and Ali is momentarily tempted to steal some gum from a blind street seller. But he changes his mind, and in the meantime the Afghani boy has bought some gum. Quickly the money is then retrieved, and the problem has finally been solved. Their goal achieved, Ali and Razieh joyfully run off to get their goldfish. The final shot shows the abandoned Afghani boy standing there with his one, unsold balloon, a white one.

The charm of The White Balloon is that the “small” world of children is presented precisely in the dramatic way that it is perceived by them. The camera framing and perspectives are entirely from the level of the children and what they see. The narrative mood is sustained by Aida Mohammadkhani’s determined performance as Razieh, which presumably was carefully managed by Panahi.  Her tears in the snake-charmer’s scene appear quite genuine, just as do her sudden flashes of joy when she sees her fish or when her lost money is discovered. All the other performances by the nonprofessional cast also have the look and sound of authenticity. Panahi’s well-crafted mise-en-scene and cinematography make this small story come alive. Although his techniques are different from those of the Italian neorealists, the comparison of this first work of Panahi’s to theirs is apt: they both sought to uncover the humanity of the everyday.

But upon reflection, this small world of children is not really so small, after all. It includes all the fears of the bizarre and the threatening, as well as the anxieties concerning financial ruin and punishment. It also includes the joys of opportunistic encounters and fleeting friendships that all-to-quickly pass away before we know it. It is the same world of human values and experiences that we all live in, whether on the city streets in a country far away or in your own local neighbourhood.
★★★½ 

"Taste of Cherry" - Abbas Kiarostami (1997)

Taste of Cherry (Ta'am-e-Gīlās, 1997), a film produced, directed, written, and edited by Abbas Kiarostami, won the Palme D’Or at the Cannes Film Festival and has been hailed as a masterpiece by major critics and media outlets. In addition it has drawn fulsome praise from iconic film auteurs, Akira Kurosawa and Jean-Luc Godard. But it may not be to everyone’s taste.

The structure and story of the film follow Kiarostami’s stylized and minimalist aesthetics. Shot in his usual quasi-neorealist style and with nonprofessional actors, the film follows a middle-class man, Badii, as he drives around the outskirts of Tehran in his expensive SUV, looking to hire a working-class labourer for a job he wants to have done. Note that although Homayoun Ershadi, who plays the role of Badii, had no professional acting experience, his restrained but intense performance was sufficiently effective that he went on to appear in a number of other films, including Mehrjui’s Derakhte Golabi (1998) and Forster’s The Kite Runner (2007). Given the contemporary social environment of Iran, there are practical reasons why shooting movie film of people inside motor vehicles is convenient, but Kiarostami has become the specialist, par excellence, of this mode of visual expression. His film, “10” (Ten, 2002), for example, was shot entirely inside an automobile. In Taste of Cherry most of the footage comprises lengthy medium close-up shots of the driver or his given passenger as they engage in rather drawn-out discussions. These claustrophobic close-up shots inside the car are intercut with extreme long-shots, showing wide open spaces, of the same vehicle as it meanders through the back roads and sometimes desolate landscape outside the big city. Another characteristic Kiarostami technique is the use of slow-disclosure: it takes a long time for the viewer to figure out what Badii is up to, because, as usual, no real backstory is provided. In fact, in common with the subsequent Silence of the Sea (2004), by the apparently Kiarostami-influenced Vahid Mousaian, the key motivational information for the principle quest in the film is never provided.

As the film begins, Badii is seen driving around urban areas where unskilled workers gather looking for jobs. It soon becomes clear that he wants to hire someone, but he appears uncertain as to what kind of person he wants. Ultimately Badii will approach five different people to do the job, and with each successive encounter, he will have a deeper and more significant interaction. He is willing to pay 200,000 tomans for a day’s work (this would amount to a several hundred dollars, which would be very substantial for a lower-class labourer), but he is evasive concerning exactly what the job entails. The first person he talks to is suspicious of Badii’s evasive behaviour and dismisses him as a weirdo or a deviant. Following that brushoff, Badii looks for less-suspicious, more provincial types. He next approaches a young man from provincial Lorestan that he finds picking over rubbish heaps, but the man shies away and won’t get into his car. Only at this point, ten minutes into the film, does the film title sequence appear on screen, and the audience still doesn’t know what Badii wants to have done. The remaining three encounters with candidates for his job constitute most of the rest of the film.

Badii’s third encounter is with a young soldier from Kurdistan whom he picks up along the road and offers a ride. The soldier is reserved and polite, so Badii does most of the talking and leads the halting conversation as he finally outlines what he really wants done, now fully twenty minutes into the film. His intention is to commit suicide. He will take an overdose of sleeping of pills and then lie down to sleep in a deep hole in the countryside and have someone shovel twenty spadefuls of dirt into the grave the next morning. But he explicitly leaves a curious alternative in this specification: if by chance he is still conscious in the morning, his hireling is instructed to help him out of the grave.

The Kurdish soldier, who had gradually been growing more friendly with his driver, is naturally horrified to be involved in such a macabre operation, and he flees the scene at the first opportunity. Badii next offers a ride to an Afghani seminarian, to whom he also presents his bizarre proposition. This conversation is more engaged and involved than the one with the Kurdish soldier, but it is also more psychologically distant and analytical: the discussion with the Afghani seminarian turns to the Islamic strictures opposed to suicide. The Afghani refuses to abet such a sinful activity and offers his polite reasons for refusing to cooperate.

Finally Badii propositions an elderly and loquacious man of Turkish descent, Mr. Bagheri, who agrees to do the job requested, because he needs the money to assist his ill son. Mr. Bagheri is a thoroughgoing pragmatist; he will do the job for the money, but he urges Badii not to throw away his life. In an eloquent passage that represents the high point of the film, Bagheri recounts in his rustic fashion how he almost committed suicide thirty-seven years earlier. Due to his troubles at that time, he had intended to hang himself from a mulberry tree, but when he climbed the tree to secure the rope, he happened onto some mulberries and ate a few. Then he began noticing the sunrise and the abundance of the natural world around him, including young schoolchildren who asked him to give them some mulberries. With his mood thoroughly changed, he abandoned his morose plans and returned to life.

Badii listens to Bagheri’s testimony attentively, but remains on his suicidal mission, although he urgently reiterates the instructions about waking him up in the morning in the event that he is still alive. After leaving Bagheri at the natural history museum (where he works in support of the laboratory instruction), Badii returns to his apartment and prepares himself. Then he watches his final sunset before going out to his grave hole in the mountainside outside of town, where he smokes his last cigarette and then settles himself into his grave to await his end. The camera holds for a long time on Badii lying in his grave, illuminated only by moonlight or occasional lightning flashes. Finally the screen falls into complete blackness for a full minute, and only the sound of light rainfall is heard. With such a long hold on stillness and darkness, the viewer may become thoughtful or restless at this point. Then there is a fade-in to the same hillside, but with an entirely different and jarring perspective. The scene shows Kiarostami’s film crew actively working on a shot showing soldiers marching and chanting along the hillside road (associated with the Kurdish soldier sequence). The hillside is now the scene of bustle and activity. It is shot with a handheld camcorder with a smudged lens protector, giving the scene an amateurish, on-the-spot feel to it, and it is further jarred by the background jazz trumpet music of “Saint James Infirmary”. This goes on for a couple of minutes, before the film closes, not with a fadeout, but with a cut to black.

Although Taste of Cherry examines the always-present option of suicide and the countervailing reasons why one might turn away from suicide and live life again, the film, itself, is afflicted with the very same disorder that troubles its protagonist – the intellectual distancing from genuine human involvement. In fact the film appears to appeal primarily to those viewers whose experience and appreciation of film is not direct and intuitive, but must always be mediated by intellectual reflection. Indeed to a certain extent the film illustrates the difference between the aesthetic qualities of film and text.

The film experience, I contend, is something more than a textual reading (although many critics have artificially tried to expand the definition of ‘text’ and ‘reading’ to encompass almost all of mindful experience, thereby skirting the issue). By way of comparison, consider a great text, such as Dostoyevski’s The Idiot, which has sometimes been characterized as a sequence of extended and interesting conversations. Because it is a text, the reader reflects on the richness of those conversations in the context of the story. Taste of Cherry, too, features a sequence of extended conversations, but its conversations, as such, are not so interesting or bipartisan. The only interesting ‘text’ is Mr. Bagheri’s monologue to Badii towards the end of the film. But the rich, interactive, dynamic nature of cinema is not utilized in this film. Instead we have a schematic, artificial situation that engenders a sequence of artificial, non-interactive encounters that are presented for the viewer’s intellectual contemplation. All of this is then followed by an even more artificial coda.

That coda, incidentally, is a further illustration of my overall point. The narrative scheme to the film came to an end with the ending of the character Badii. Within the logic of the narrative, there is a possibility that Badii might survive, but that was apparently incidental to Kiarostami’s purpose, and so he had no use for the character anymore. He has built up the possibility that Badii might survive, but then abandons that thread and pulls the rug out from under the viewer. Instead, Kiarostami wanted to continue his intellectual themes, and so included the artificial and viewer-distancing coda. The shot of the hillside in that final coda scene shows the landscape relatively green, with grass and new foliage, suggesting we are now in a rainy season, which of course displays a vibrant contrast to the somber, gloomy scenery that dominated everything that came before. In fact, given the fateful clock times explicitly mentioned in the film (6 pm and 6 am), which are subsequently depicted to occur in darkness, we can assume that the seasonal period of Badii’s excursion was roughly in the winter time. The final coda, on the other hand, seems paradoxically to be in springtime. Why? It may have been useful for Kiarostami’s intellectual theme to show Badii’s excursion in a dry, dusty, lifeless environment and the coda in a green environment, but this lacks narrative motivation. Similarly, the intrusive, nondiegetic score of “Saint James Infirmary” is more for ironic reflection than for narrative enhancement. It appears that this entirely unnatural final scene is simply put forward to the audience in order to state, “life goes on”. In other words, the whole coda is a stunt put forward only to make a trivial point. Such things are not what constitute either great texts or great cinema.

Admittedly there are elements of the mise-en-scène that buttress the prevailing theme of depressive isolation in the film:

• The feeling of isolation is enhanced by the many sounds that are dissociated from their images, i.e. the source of the sound is off-camera. This includes the background sounds of nature, particularly the sounds of birds. All of this suggests the richness of nature, of which Badii seems oblivious.
• The stark contrast between shots showing the confinement inside Badii’s car and the concurrent shots showing the sweeping landscape as his car wheels along mountainous roads is an effective visual metaphor.
• The numerous shots of heavy earthmoving equipment in the industrial area outside Tehran might suggest both (a) the futility of man’s attempt to alter the course of nature and (b) the religious acceptance of human fate inevitably traversing the course of “earth-to-earth, ashes-to-ashes, dust-to-dust”.

But as a narrative, what do we really have in Taste of Cherry? It is odd that the initial meeting with Mr. Bagheri is not presented in the film. With all the incidental and trifling activities in the film that are fully played out in every detail, why omit the most important meeting in the narrative? In addition the viewer is never informed of the original circumstances behind Badii’s death-wish. There is no backstory, no motivation, that might help engage the viewer to empathise with Badii’s life context. Perhaps this absence of specific motivation for suicide is undertaken in order to disengage the notion of suicide from any individual circumstances and make it available for abstraction contemplation. But this represents a flight from film and a movement towards text. And in this case, the text isn’t very compelling.

Taste of Cherry has sometimes been compared to Antonioni’s Red Desert (Il Deserto Rosso, 1964), but there is a world of difference. Antonioni’s film uses the film medium to convey a more direct sense of alienation and isolation. Kiarostami’s Taste of Cherry only presents a schematic outline for intellectual contemplation. Fortunately, Kiarostami would go on to do much better (but with fewer accolades) with his subsequent offering, The Wind Will Carry Us (1999).
★½

"The Wind Will Carry Us" - by Abbas Kiarostami (1999)

Many Iranian filmmakers, reflecting the general inclinations of their Persian culture, make movies with distinctly philosophical themes and undertones. Their films often explicitly confront issues of life, death, and the meaning of existence. Abbas Kiarostami belongs to this grouping, but his films have attracted an additional interest among the more cerebral film-goers and critics, thanks to his distinctive, reflexive style of filmmaking. The fascination lies in the way his films explicitly call attention to the manner in which the world is depicted on film and, by extension, to the way reality is understood by all of us. This adds a further dimension to the philosophical inquiry: under examination is not only the meaning of life but also the phenomenological nature of experienced reality. But this kind of intellectualizing about cinematic reality has the danger of being overly schematic – which is precisely the mode of engagement that Kiarostami would seem to be wanting to overcome. The problem is that the narrative possibilities of film are examined explicitly in these exercises, but they are not exploited in the cinema-viewing experience. Another cinematic exploration precisely along these lines, but one of Kiarostami’s most successful efforts to establish a narrative context and still engage in his thematic inquiries, was The Wind Will Carry Us (Bād Mā-rā Khāhad Bord, 1999). The film, written and directed by Kiarostami and shot with nonprofessional actors, features evocative cinematography of the Iranian countryside by Mahmoud Kalari, who has also worked on Leila (1996), The Pear Tree (Derakhte Golabi, 1998), The Willow Tree (Beed-e Majnoon, 2005), and Offside (2006). The assistant director was Bahman Ghobadi, who would soon emerge as a first-rate director in his own right and would further propel images of Kurdistan to worldwide audiences.

The story of The Wind Will Carry Us begins with long shots of a car passing along winding roads through the Iranian countryside, while the passengers engage in idle conversation about their itinerary. The film narrative technique of slow disclosure, wherein a setting is established and the viewer is forced to piece together a narrative backstory on the basis of slowly revealed contextual clues, is used here, but Kiarostami pushes this to an extreme. It takes a considerable amount of time before the viewer can piece together what the point of this journey is all about. Eventually, it is revealed (but only obscurely) that the travellers are headed for a remote village some 700 kilometres from Tehran, carved into the side of a mountain in Kurdistan. Their task is to record a traditional funeral ceremony that is anticipated will take place following the death of a very old village woman who is expected to die very soon. Since there are three men in the team driving to the village, the assumption is that this is to be a documentary film about the event, although no cinematic equipment is ever seen in the film, only the still camera of the principal character, Behzad. Funerals are held quickly after death in Iran, so the camera crew has to be on the spot and ready at the time of death.

When the men reach the village, they are greeted by a young schoolboy, Farzad, who has been assigned by the local contact to be their guide. Behzad immediately asks Farzad about the condition of the old woman, Mrs. Malek. It becomes apparent that the sooner this woman dies and the ceremony is held, the sooner the men can complete their mission and return to Tehran. But the woman isn’t quite ready to die, and the men have to cool their heels in the village until she does.

As the film proceeds, it gradually becomes clear that Kiarostami’s story is not really going to be about the pageantry of a death ceremony or the filming of it, but about what Behzad sees and what is on his mind. So Behzad has to wait, and time passes. While idling around, Behzad pokes about the village, talking to Farzad, drinking tea at a local tea house, and looking for some milk to add to his tea. Periodically he is interrupted by cell-phone calls from his impatient producer, Mrs. Godzari, back in Tehran. In order to get adequate reception for the call, Behzad has to jump into his truck and drive up to the top of a local hill where the cemetery is located. On these phone-call occasions at the hilltop, Behzad befriends a ditch digger, Yossef, and has some conversations with him. Yossef, imbued with the characteristic Iranian traditions of courtesy and hospitality, invites Behzad to get some milk from his “woman”, Zeynab (perhaps his betrothed), in the village. So Behzad seeks her out, and he converses with the young lady as she milks a cow in a darkened stall in order to provide him with some milk. Little by little, Behzad is getting involved with the village and its life. Eventually, a cataclysmic event occurs – Yossef is trapped when the tunnel that he has been digging caves in. Behzad rushes to the village and recruits rescuers and summons a doctor to save the ditch digger.

After Yossef is saved, Behzad accompanies the doctor on the back of his motorcycle to a larger town in order to get some medicine for Yossef. Along the way they have a signal conversation about what is important in life. Behzad asks the doctor what inflicts Mrs. Malek, to which the doctor replies, simply, “old age!” There is no recovery from old age, the doctor reminds him, but he says there is something worse than old age – death. Behzad remarks that some people assert that after one dies, one goes to a better place. But the doctor points out that noone has ever come back to verify such tales; it is better to get the most of this world, the one in which we are alive. He then quotes a quatrain from Omar Khayyam’s Rubaiyait:

They tell me the other world is as beautiful as a houri from heaven!
Yet I say that the juice of the vine is better.
Prefer the present to those fine promises.
Even a drum sounds melodious from afar.

When old Mrs. Malek finally does die at the end of the film, Behzad has lost interest in the funeral ceremony. He is more interested in photographing all the women of the village marching towards the ceremony.

Kiarostami employs some accentuated stylistic techniques in the film that steer the viewer in the direction he wants:

1. Slow disclosure. As already mentioned, slow-disclosure is extended throughout the film. The viewer only gets little scraps of information from time to time that reveal some of the goings-on in the village. This works, because Kiarostami has given us one key narrative target for Behzad: the impending death of old Mrs. Malek. This narrative element is what makes The Wind Will Carry Us one of Kiarostami’s most effective film experiences. As we scrutinize all the details for more information about her, we pick up other nuances along the way.

2. Behzad’s Reactions. Films commonly use point-of-view shots, followed by reaction shots of the onscreen observer in order to depict the dialectic of observation. But in The Wind Will Carry Us, we are given mostly reaction shots, without seeing clearly what is going on and what is being observed. Many presumably significant characters are never seen, or at least their faces are never seen, even in conversation. These include

• Mrs. Malek and her family
• Behzad’s two film crew companions,
• The schoolboy Farzad’s father
• The ditch digger, Yossef,
• Yossef’s woman, Zeynab
• The producer, Mrs. Godzari

When Behzad converses with some of the these people, the camera focusses on Behzad’s reactions to what they say. Behzad is different from everyone around him – not only is he the only clean-shaven one, he is the inquisitive one, the seeker.

3. The Watchers Watched. Behzad is an observer, a watcher, and we, the viewers, are observing him as he watches others. In addition, three village people who are shown in full face are, in one way or another, observers, themselves. These are the only people in the film that we really get to see, besides Behzad.

• The elderly lady who operates the tea house is an outspoken critic on all that goes around her. She admonishes Behzad for expressing surprise at seeing a woman serve him in a commercial setting, criticises her husband, and rebukes drivers who park their noisy and air-polluting cars near her shop.
• Farzad’s schoolteacher, who has a conversation with Behzad about the local funeral ceremony, sees things critically. For him the funeral ceremony is not a colorful pageant but a dysfunctional mechanism of the local economy. People use it merely to demonstrate their loyalty to the local landlords and bosses. The ceremony from his perspective is not an expression of spirituality, but simply an opportunity for expressions of fealty to the local “warlords”.
• Farzad is an observer, too. He’s studying hard at school (and so far, according to his marks, not doing very well) in his efforts to learn more about the world. He innocently reports what he sees and what he hears.

4. Symbols.

• Clean-shaven. Behzad’s bespectacled and clean-shaven face clearly differentiates him from the other adult males of the area – he is from the more educated, elite portion of society. And this is accentuated by the several scenes showing him in the act of shaving. The villagers respectfully address him as “Engineer”, thereby giving him the appellation of someone presumably technically trained and capable. But the village doctor reminds him not to exaggerate these differences, but to plunge into the whirlpool of life.
• Elevation. Behzad is constantly going up to the hilltop, where there is a cemetery, to communicate with the outside. This might suggest our rituals to find heavenly messages. But this communication turns out to be fruitless. His most effective observations and interactions are in the downward (and down-to-earth) direction, particularly when he communicates downward with Yossef in the ditch and when he converses with Zeynab in the stall.
• Light and Dark. The people with whom Behazd interacts best, Yossef and Zeynab, are surrounded by darkness, but he is nevertheless reaching out to them and having sincere and meaningful interactions. This idea is highlighted in the title-evoking poem by Forough Farrokhzād listed below.

On the whole, The Wind Will Carry Us is a mission of discovery for Behzad. Little by little, Behzad, the observer and watcher, gradually becomes more enmeshed in the life of the village and feels the need to take action in order to save Yossef. He comes to realize the truth in the doctor’s recommendation that the vital present, not in the ceremonies and treatises on death and the afterlife, is where to find God. And it is with Zeynab that he makes an uncertain contact when he recites to her a poem by the famous 20th century woman poet, Forough Farrokhzād.

In my night, so brief, alas
The wind is about to meet the leaves.
My night so brief is filled with devastating anguish
Hark! Do you hear the whisper of the shadows?
This happiness feels foreign to me.
I am accustomed to despair.
Hark! Do you hear the whisper of the shadows?
There, in the night, something is happening
The moon is red and anxious.
And, clinging to this roof
That could collapse at any moment,
The clouds, like a crowd of mourning women,
Await the birth of the rain.
One second, and then nothing.
Behind this window,
The night trembles
And the earth stops spinning.
Behind this window, a stranger
Worries about me and you.
You in your greenery,
Lay your hands – those burning memories –
On my loving hands.
And entrust your lips, replete with life’s warmth,
To the touch of my loving lips
The wind will carry us!
The wind will carry us!

It is true those are only words, but they point in the right direction: towards life, love, and the present wonder of existence. And as Behzad points out to the 16-year-old Zeynab, it is not necessary to be a scholar in order to write and appreciate words like those in that poem. Forough had only a 9th-grade education, but she published her first volume of poetry at the age of twenty and went on to become one of Iran’s great modern poets before her tragic early death.
★★★½ 

"Close-Up" - Abbas Kiarostami (1990)

Close-Up (Nema-ye Nazdik, 1990) was perhaps Abbas Kiarostami’s most critically-acclaimed film, and yet it was apparently something of an opportunistic spur-of-the-moment production that was made without much prior planning. Kiarostami, who was born in 1940, had been directing mostly documentaries, along with a couple of neo-realist-styled fiction films, since the 1970s, but he only first came to the attention of European and American audiences with his innocent and unassuming Where is the Friend’s Home (Khane-ye Doust Kodjast?, 1987) about an eight-year-old boy in the northern Iranian town of Koker. He was making plans for his next feature, Life and Nothing More (Zendegi va Digar Hich), also to be shot in Koker, when he heard about a news item in Tehran that interrupted his plans and led him to make Close-Up based around that event first.

The story concerns an out-of-work printer’s assistant and film buff, Hossain Sabzian, whom a certain Mrs. Ahankhah, who is sharing a bus seat with him, observes reading a screenplay by Iranian filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf. When she asks him about the book, Sabzian impulsively tells her that he, himself, is director Makhmalbaf. The woman is highly impressed and invites him to her house to visit her sons, who are film enthusiasts. Over the following week Sabzian maintains the charade, visiting the Ahankhah house many times and generally sponging off their hospitality. To pique their interest, he tells the family that he is interested in making his next film at their home and starring the family. Eventually the family becomes suspicious that the man is only a fraud, and they have him arrested. When Kiarostami read an article about the case, he went to the authorities and obtained permission to film the trial of Sabzian, and much of the resulting film covers Sabzian’s testimony during this trial. The film closes with Sabzian being released from jail and having an emotional meeting with his hero, the real Mohsen Makhmalbaf.

To a degree, Close-Up is a defining film for Kiarostami. It attracted serous critical attention from film scholars (especially the French) when it was released, and examining the film today still offers an occasion for looking into the nature of Kiarostami’s style and his unique popularity in film scholarship circles. There are indeed some unusual aspects to the film. First of all, the film does not easily fall into a simple classification, because although it could be considered a documentary film, many of the scenes are dramatized reenactments of real events, and yet these dramatic reenactments are performed not by hired actors but by the very same people that were involved in the original events. Secondly, Kiarostami reflexively calls attention to the filmmaking process in Close-Up, a breaking of the “fourth wall” that would become almost a Kiarostami trademark.

For me there were three general aspects of the film that I found particularly interesting: (1) the multiple narrative structures, (2) Iranian cultural background issues, and (3) the aesthetic issue of realism in Kiarostami’s films.

1. The Multiple Narrative Structures of Close-Up.
In most films or stories we can speak of two types of narratives, syuzhet (sjuzet) and fabula. The syuzhet is the plot of the story as it is given in the text. The fabula is the full story that is constructed in the mind of the reader or viewer. When the fabula is mentally constructed, the viewer “fills in the blanks” of the parts of the story that are missing from the presented plot, but which are usually understood from common knowledge. In Close-Up, however, there are (at least) three narrative structures:

1. The syuzhet as it appears in the sequence of images presented to the viewer.
2. The fabula that we, the viewers, construct concerning the original events of Sabzian impersonating Makhmalbaf.
3. The fabula that we also construct concerning Kiarostami’s cinematic reconstruction of what happened. This is significant, because Kiarostami, who is both the author and a viewer, turns out to be one of the principal characters in this multi-layered story.

The structure of fabulas #2 and #3 make things more complicated, because we may have difficulty drawing the line between artifice and our presumptions of reality. The film opens with a 15-minute sequence covering Sorush magazine journalist Hossain Farazmand’s taxi trip with two soldier-policemen to the Ahankhah’s house to make the arrest on Sabzian. Because of the camera shot setups, the film editing, and the fact that Farazmand’s chatter to the two soldiers provides the necessary background concerning the reasons for the arrest, it is clear that this opening segment is a fiction-film beginning, not a documentary. But at the end of that opening fiction-film segment, the film titles finally roll across the screen, after which we switch over to documentary-film mode, as Kiarostami begins interviewing the police and the Ahankhah family in order to get his own background information on the story. We will later switch back and forth between documentary-filmed testimony in the trial and reenactment scenes dramatically recreated later by Kiarostami which visualize and flesh out some of Sabzian’s testimony.

Although Kiarostami blends these two narrative streams together relatively seamlessly, the viewer is still likely to be aware of the shifts and mentally occupied with the context switches between the two narratives (the two fabulas under construction) as he watches it play out. In fact the viewer is never absolutely sure if even the supposedly documentary-style segments are truly authentic or are themselves artfully staged (I will assume that they are authentic). So this is one aspect of the film that has fascinated the more intellectually-minded cineastes: the reflective game-playing with film narrative. The degree to which Kiarostami had self-consciously mapped out the nature of this reflexive narrative is unclear, however.

2. Iranian Cultural Issues.
When Kiarostami first interviews the accused, 22 minutes into the film, Sabzian plaintively asks him, “can you make a film about my suffering?” Later in his court testimony, Sabzian says that he admired Makhmalbaf, because of that filmmaker’s depiction of the sufferings of the underprivileged. “That film is a part of me,” Sabzian asserts. His entire defence, in fact, is to claim that the reason for his crossing the line of lawful behaviour was because he had so thoroughly identified with his idol, Makhmalbaf, that he wanted to emulate him. Though about ten years younger, Makhmalbaf was an apt role model for Sabzian, because his filmmaker hero had also been an uneducated youth from an impoverished background, and, like Sabzian, was a hardline religious conservative. His most recent film, which had so thoroughly captivated Sabzian, had been The Cyclist (Bicycleran, 1987), which depicted the sufferings of an impoverished Afghan refugee.

Because of Sabzian’s obsession with the sufferings of his condition and his readiness to quote classical poetry in the courtroom, many Western critics have championed Close-Up as a film that recognizes the redeeming and ennobling powers of art and the soulful potential of the common man (and thereby the commonality of all men). However, before one’s emotive feeling run to far in that direction, one should reflect somewhat on Iranian popular culture. Compared to most Americans and Europeans, Iranians, and this cuts across a wide spectrum of popular culture, are more given to philosophical speculation. They are also much given to meditating on the presumptively tragic and fatalistic circumstances of life. In addition, poetry has a much greater presence in everyday interactions in Iranian culture than in the West, so Sabzian’s poetic sensitivities were not so unusual in the Iranian context – in fact Kiarostami, himself, is a published poet. But Sabzian does seem to be somewhat unusual in other respects. Although uneducated, he seems unusually articulate and highly reflective. Moreover, his behaviour and statements suggest that he is not so much a man of the people, but more the opposite – something of a narcissist. In Chokrollahi and Mansouri’s 1996 documentary, Close-Up Long Shot, which interviews Sabzian several years later, these aspects to his character are apparently more clearly revealed. What Kiarostami had under his microscope in Close-Up, then, was not the noble, common man of the working class, who was speaking for all his “brothers”, but instead appears to have been more of a loner obsessed with his own victimhood. In fact Sabzian strikes me as a poseur who habitually plays a role in order to fool others and perhaps himself, too. Such a person, who is always “on stage”, tends to make a better actor than do most people, and this is undoubtedly why Sabzian’s performance is so seamlessly effective across the interleaved documentary and reenacted segments of the film. Kiarostami implicitly acknowledged this when he asked him during his court testimony whether he (Sabzian) wasn’t an imposter and still acting even at that very moment, while talking to the judge. Thus the bottom line is that we cannot say Close-Up is an authentic paean to the sufferings of the common man; it is actually an examination of a single, self-pitying individual.

Another interesting cultural element on display in Close-Up, though admittedly it is only tangentially significant to the subject of Kiarostami’s style, is the presentation of the court trial. (I assume that this part of the film was an authentic documentary-style recording of a real event and not artificially staged.) What interests me is the contrast between the Iranian Islamic court procedures on display in these sequences and the legal systems common to English-speaking countries. In the film we see an evidently learned Islamic magistrate taking the lead in the court proceedings and cross-examining all the parties to the dispute. The court procedures seem to be largely informal and are not driven by references to legal precedents and narrow legal protocols. The goal is for the magistrate simply to arrive at the truth, and also to see if he can work out some sort of accommodation on the part of the parties that is mutually agreeable. It is almost like a schoolmaster resolving a dispute between two of his pupils.

In the West, by contrast, we might have expected Sabzian’s type of offence to be addressed in a civil, not a criminal, lawsuit. In fact in a Western context, we might expect the aggrieved party to be Makhmalbaf, since Sabzian has falsely assumed the film director’s identity and threatened his public reputation. In the Close-Up case, though, Sabzian is not being sued for damages, but instead for having committed the crime of fraud and for presumably “casing” the Ahankhah house for the location of valuables in connection with a planned future robbery. In the event the Iranian magistrate (a) listens to Sabzian’s testimony, (b) becomes convinced of his sincerity and relative innocence, and (c) ultimately persuades the Ahankhahs to drop the court case. In this kind of situation shown in the film, everything works out pretty satisfactorily, (after all, the Ahankhahs did get to be in a film), but the process strikes me as heavily dependent on the wisdom and wise judgment of the presiding magistrate. He has a considerable degree of latitude to invoke his own prejudices.

3. Realism in Close-Up.
The notions of cinema vérité, which actually go back to the work of Dziga Vertov and his Russian colleagues in the 1920s, became popular in France during the 1960s. The goal was to capture objective reality, “the truth”, with the camera. When the popularity of cinema vérité spread to the US, it became known as “direct cinema”, but there was an often-overlooked difference. The American filmmakers adopted a “fly-on-the-wall” approach: they wanted to make the camera so inconspicuous, so “invisible”, that the subjects being filmed were not consciously aware of its presence. The camera was to be an objective record of reality. But of course this is a fiction: the camera always has its presence and its point of view in any filmmaking activity. The French cinema vérité documentarians tended to acknowledge explicitly this presence of the observer, and they incorporated their own observations into their recordings. Kiarostami’s work definitely follows along the lines of the French tradition, but he sometimes crosses the lines, and there are sequences of seemingly direct cinema or even fictionalized accounts mixed into his films. This, of course, raises questions concerning what is truly real in his films.

One could speculate that every single shot in Close-Up was a staged recreation of events. However, I am willing to believe (essentially this is my personal construction of fabula #3) that several sequences were initially shot in typical (French cinema vérité) documentary fashion (with the filmmakers’ presence explicitly acknowledged) and in the following order:

• the initial interview of Sabzian in jail.
• the interview with the Ahankhah family at their home.
• the court case featuring the testimony of Sabzian and the Ahankhah family.
• the final meeting between Sabzian and Makhmalbaf.

After shooting these sequences, Kiarostami shot as dramatic reconstructions

• the opening fifteen-minute scene covering Sabzian’s arrest from outside the Ahankhah home. (Although it is a dramatic reconstruction, Kiarostami has shot and edited the sequence to emphasize the humdrum and undramatic particularity of the everyday. The taxi driver idly waits outside the Ahankhah home and stares at a jet plane overhead. An empty aerosol can falls from a rubbish heap and rolls slowly down an inclined street. The reporter, Farazmand, rings neighbours’ doorbells to see if he can borrow a tape recorder.)
• the associated scene of the arrest shown later from inside the Ahankhah home.

Note that the pivotal court case scene was shot with two cameras:

1. one that panned around the court, opportunistically viewing the magistrate and the Ahankhah family as appropriate, and
2. a second camera with a telephoto lens always maintaining Sabzian in close-up during his testimony.

This is the critical dialectic of the film and underlies the significance of the film’s title. The first camera is showing the court case in documentary “objective reality” fashion. But the second camera has a different aesthetic. With Sabzian in close-up and “playing” to the camera, there is a different, more personal and self-conscious level of reality on display. Whether the second camera is more “real” or not is open to question, but at least the two cameras evoke contrasting emotional effects on the viewer.

Altogether it is the provocative use of mise-en-scène to provide alternate forms of reality that has attracted attention to Kiarostami. In particular in Close-Up, the blending of documentary “reality” and dramatic reenactments is what attracts the attention of cinema academics. Of course we know (and Kiarostami seems to be suggesting this) that the camera in the documentary film sequences will invariably have some behavour-altering impact on the subjects filmed, and therefore these sequences will not come out to be absolutely true representations of objective reality. So that means that neither the dramatic reconstructions nor the documentary sections are representations of objective reality. In fact, one might speculate that the dramatic reconstructions could have the edge over the documentary-style sections, because they have a certain heightened sense of reality (compared to the documentary sequences) due to the fact that the original participants can more effectively highlight and project their original intentional states (as they remember them) when they re-perform those roles in the staged events. Could Kiarostami’s hybrid form of documentation, then, somehow get at the truth more effectively than conventional approaches? Upon reflection, I don’t think so. I am inclined to think that true “objective reality” is never a realistic option for film, which inevitably must present the world from a contextual perspective of the storyteller. Nevertheless, the metaphorical illusion of objective reality by means of the “silent witness” of the camera is indeed commonly assumed by filmmakers and filmgoers alike, and Kiarostami is, consciously or not, exploring the boundaries of this illusion.

On the whole Close-Up is not a cohesive and aesthetically pleasing narrative experience. I don’t believe that a deep social message is present in the film or that the “truth” of Sabzian has been revealed therein. But the film is interesting, nonetheless. Whatever pleasures it does offer are not aesthetic, but lie primarily on the intellectual plane in connection with our speculations concerning how we construct visual narratives in our imaginations.
★★★