Certified Copy (Abbas Kiarostami, 2010)

In Certified Copy, Kiarostami harks back to his favorite question of the supposed divide between art and originality (divide between cinema and life, as we know them) and skillfully weaves his tale around two characters while examining his central theme that nothing is really original and that we all assume roles in our lives. This is a recall of the themes he masterfully examined in Close Up. James Miller is a British author on a tour of Tuscany where his work on originality in art has been better received than in his homeland. Binoche is the woman who comes to hear his talk, and the two are then drawn together in a discussion of his work. Once the two meet again, the course of the movie charts their discussions over the course of an afternoon, taking in the Italian countryside and engaging with a number of characters along the way who cause them to reflect on their differing viewpoints on author's work. There's a turning point as we approach the halfway mark where one of those characters seemingly mistakes the pair for a married couple. What starts as a role play, set off by the misunderstanding, takes on more and more aspects, and eventually both the pair and the audience are lost in the drama. The whole movie reveals itself to be an intricate construct on this concept, almost every aspect of the theme, the performances or the setting playing with the motif of originality versus imitation. Reflections in car windows sometimes obscure the actors themselves, point-of-view shots ask us to engage directly in the drama almost as a participant and this even extends to the leading pair themselves – The male lead is a renowned baritone, not an actor, and there is a slight but noticeable difference between his performance and that of Binoche, which almost feels like a copy of acting rather than being fully immersed in the role. While this reinforces the concept, it does prevent the audience from fully engaging, being kept slightly at arm's length by the constant artifice. That's not to say that there's not a lot to enjoy here, with the confusions and the tensions making this verge on a romantic comedy at times. Despite the differences in acting ability, Miller and Binoche make an engaging couple at times and as time wears on, you find yourself more keen to believe that the beginning was the illusion and that their relationship is real and not the copy. Much of the credit for this must be placed at Binoche's door, using the language differences to vary mood effectively, but also adding colour and emotion in all of the languages she uses. The only one here who's on familiar ground is director Kiarostami, who's explored these themes before but never to such mainstream effect – worth checking out if you'd like to engage your mind and your heart. Why see it at the cinema: There is a very literal aspect of the visuals which runs throughout the course of the film, which the cinema screen will allow you to fully appreciate. Ultimately, Certified Copy - with its unresolved loose ends - is a mystery box without a key. Kiarostami's best films are profoundly empathetic. By comparison, Certified Copy is a slighter but more ingratiating film and a chance to see a master filmmaker in uncharacteristic playful mode.

Through the Olive Trees (Abbas Kiarostami, 1994)

Welcome to the cinematic universe of Abbas Kiarostami—low scale on effects and plot, but very high on character, Iranian culture, and creative point-of-view camera work. His simple films appear sparse, but the images often profoundly stay with the viewer for a lifetime. Through the Olive Trees is a quintessential Kiarostami film—it exists between film fiction and reality. The purpose of this film within a film is to illustrate the tedious process of filming the a film while focussing in on replacement actor Hossein's romantic pursuit of the stubbornly unresponsive Tahereh, who has been cast as his new bride. The director parallels Hossein's challenges with unreciprocated love with various filming frustrations. Things just don't go according to plan for the director. Some are expected when using amateurish non-actors, while others are caused by cultural hang-ups or relationship problems. For instance, Hossein, the first lead actor stutters when talking to a girl and must be dismissed. Tahereh shows up on the set in a new party skirt instead of the required peasant dress and won't talk to the replacement. Hossein keeps forgetting his lines when he confuses his real life with the scripted one. To call the pacing of Through the Olive Trees slow would be a gross understatement. It is glacial in pace especially when Kiarostami demonstrates take after take after take of the same scene, to the point that we gain the director's point of view and feel like throwing up our hands when an actor screws up. But this hammering approach of the director ultimately achieves something unusual for such a film. We feel like we have been through the directing experience, and by the end of it many of the lines are indelibly engraved into our minds. Despite the sameness of many scenes, small detailed differences surface with each new take—pointing out skill that comes with making a piece of art that is bent on achieving perfection. The final scenes of the film are classic "Kiarostamic", profoundly philosophical and evokes intense curiosity. His camera sits perched on top of a hill, overlooking a breezy valley of olive trees, as Hossein pursues Tahereh. The long shots extend to even longer shots to the point that the two people are tiny white flecks moving across the unspeaking greens of the valley. And yet Kiarostami's camera continues to roll on its tripod for another five minutes. I am yet to come across a film that specializes on long takes and glacial pace, and yet in its culmination point invokes so much calmness accompanied by a sense of uncertainty. I guess that many arthouse lovers will find this film rewarding and memorable. On a deeper level, the film seems to be asking unanswerable questions about the differences between a movie and reality (life as art) and questions the problems faced by filmmakers as they try to tap into cinema's unexplored potential. On that level, the film was stimulating as an intellectual experience. 

Where is the Friend's Home? (Abbas Kiarostami, 1987)

Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami established his reputation outside of Iran with Where Is The Friend’s Home. Like many modestly budgeted Iranian films of those days, including Kiarostami’s earlier works, this film is a child’s story. 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 (1990), Through the Olive Trees (1994), Taste of Cherry (1997), The Wind Will Carry Us (1999), and The Certified Copy (2011). All these films have been characterized by his signature contemplative and long-take cinematography, along with overt mixing of Iranian poetry and mystical philosophy – all of which render his films a distinctly intellectual air and which has drawn the admiration of intellectual critics the world over. Indeed, Kiarostami has multiple cultural inclinations that include poetry, painting, and graphical design, and these interests are reflected in those later works. Where Is My Friend’s Home? is a modest and straightforward movie, unilke his other pieces. Nevertheless, I think it is Kiarostami’s most accessible piece of work. In Where Is My 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.  In the small northern village of Koker, Ahmed Ahmadpoor and Mohamad Reza Nematzadeh are two boys sitting in the local schoolroom 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. First trip to 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. 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 talk 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. Back in Poshteh, Ahmed finally finds the tradesman’s son, but it is not Mohamad Reza. By this time is 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. 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. 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 and tyrannous rules that one follows or obeys. So although he is instinctively honest, Ahmed, in pursuit of the higher good, does hesitantly make compromises with literal truth at several turns. Initially he is supposed to get bread and pretends to do so, but instead rushes off to Poshteh with his friend’s schoolbook. Later, 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. In Where is the Friend's Home?, on one level Kiarostami paints a society rooted in authoritarian demands, but on another he reminds how us kids get lost in the grown-up world of business and responsibility.

Taste of Cherry (Abbas Kiarostami, 1997)

Taste of Cherry comes close to being a great film. Its much discussed ending that breaks the fourth wall to reveal what has just been witnessed is all a film, is one of the worst conclusions for a film of this high caliber. The basic problem with the ending of Taste of Cherry is that the big revelation that intentionally alienates the viewer from the medium comes after we have been emotionally prepared for more than ninety minutes to probe a question of deep philosophical nature. The unfortunate ending emotionally deflates the whole story. Many claim that in Taste of Cherry, Kiarostami consciously renounces the role of a preacher, rejects formulaic tearjerking plots, or he wants to embrace indeterminacy as the film’s major motif. Yet, before the ending of the film, it is not preachy, jerks no tears, is clearly fictive, and the penultimate scene spells out indeterminacy far more powerfully and cogently than the ending does. The fact of the matter is that Kiarostami did not believe enough in his film to let it end at its best point. The narrative is rather simple. A stony Mr. Badii drives about the outskirts of a small Iranian desert town in a Range Rover. Mr. Badii is looking for a help, of course, in exchange of a princely sum of money. The job is to check up on him the next morning, in a grave that he has dug. They are to see if he is dead or alive, after he has taken a bottle of sleeping pills. If alive, they will assist him out of his grave. If dead, they will heap dirt on his corpse. Kiarostami makes is to never reveal the source behind Badii’s suicidal anguish. Manifestly, Badii does not really want to die. If he wanted to die he would kill himself and not care what happened to his corpse. As Badii drives, he picks up is a young Kurdish soldier, barely out of his teens. When he is driven to the freshly dug grave he runs away as fast as he can. He is similarly rejected by a young seminarist from Afghanistan, whom he meets when he arrives at an abandoned factory. Finally, Badii finds the man and Kiarostami consumes several minutes before we see the man’s face, which shows Kiarostami building tension. We want to see what sort of man or monster would assist Badii. He is just an old Turk taxidermist, Mr. Bagheri, who needs the money for his own child’s medical bills, and regales Badii with a joke and a tale of how he was prevented from suicide, himself, in 1960, by the taste of cherries from a tree. It is worth noting that the three would be executioners Badii picks up are all not ethic Iranians or Persians, but minority groups from other countries, a point that no published critic I’ve read seems to have noted. As the film ends, Badii seems to have second thoughts, for after dropping off the old Turk at his job, he pursues him and asks him to make extra sure he is dead before heaping the dirt on him. He then walks off, satisfied, and watches the sun set. He then makes his way to the grave, gets in, then the screen goes black for a while, and we seem to hear rain, the sign of life’s renewal. Then, the fourth wall is unfortunately, and superfluously, broken. While most critics have picked up on the rightness or wrongness of suicide as being a theme of the film, the deeper question is really whether or not a person will violate their own ethical and moral codes to help another person in immense pain? The latter question seems to have itself answered in the affirmative, even if it takes some effort to find a human being. Some critics claim that the film’s ending is anti-escapist, when in fact, the ending is the ultimate escapism, for all that the viewer has been asked to emotionally invest in beforehand is revealed as nothing of deeper consequence than a philosophical posit. Some may claim, though, that Kiarostami wanted to dispassionately analyze the broader question at hand, much like a philosophical question dipped in logic. Taste Of Cherry has moments of pure cinema where images speak for themselves, and indeed do last longer than the lesser parts of the film. The ending does not completely ruin the film, but it makes it fall short of achieving greatness. Taste Of Cherry’s resolution is a startling one; Kiarostami has had to defend its seeming illogic and eeriness in several interviews. He usually does so with another shrug: "I did think this was a really big risk, but it was a risk worth taking. Even when I hear people arguing about the ending of the film, I like it because it means the movie hasn’t ended. . . that the film has a life in their minds." Many of Kiarostami’s films, such as 1987’s Where is The Friend's Home, feature children on  metaphorical journey whose real ends are not made clear. It has been a struggle, but Abbas Kiarostami has found a way, even under the eyes of the Iranian regime, to say exactly what he wants to say. That many of his films seem like elaborate, essentially wordless, parables is not coincidental. For all their seeming Otherness, believes Kiarostami, post-Revolutionary Iranians are walking a universal path. Theirs is the same slow, painful trudge across the forbidding mountains and into an ever-receding middle distance that all modern souls have to make. Thus, the journey of Taste Of Cherry is less an Iranian one than a human one. And by taking it, we may find commonality with a culture whose ways Westerners have yet to come to grips with.

This is Not A Film (Mojtaba Mirtahmasb, Jafar Panahi, 2010)

Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi, known for his cinematic contributions like The Mirror (1997), The Circle (2000), and Crimson Gold (2003), is under house arrest in Tehran. By making recalcitrant comments in his films about the suppressive Iranian regime and draconian laws imposed upon the society by the government, Panahi has long irked the government. Ultimately in 2010 the government handed him a sentence of six years in jail and banned from directing movies, writing screenplays, giving interviews to the media, and leaving the country for 20 years. He has appealed against this sentence ever since, and This is Not a Film, shot in his Tehran apartment, is an act of defiance by Panahi amid all this. The film can be categorized as a documentary in which Panahi self-documents a day of his captive life, assisted by Mojtaba Mirtahmasb in camera. The film in general shows a parade of some routine activities (having breakfast, talking to his lawyer, standing and smoking in the balcony, drinking tea, etc.) and some not-so-routine activities for an acclaimed director (taking care of his daughter's pet, an Iguana, getting the door for home-delivery food, and most ridiculously taking care of a neighbor's wayward dog, etc.) performed by Panahi. Some of these activities underscore, in a jocular fashion, what life has come to be for a world-renowned artist under house arrest. Panahi also regularly converses with Mirtahmasb about the sentence, and a few times jokes about his inability to control his innate habits like pronouncing "cut" after an imagined scene despite the government imposed restrictions on him. This is not the first attempt in history to stifle creative expressions of an artist. But artists are the most indefatigable types and creativity is unmindful of external limitations. What is clever about This is Not a Film is that Panahi abides by (almost) all the government bans imposed on him and at the same time successfully communicates his inner feelings by drawing upon images from his previous films. Specifically, Panahi dilutes the line between the cinema and the reality (which is the soul of This is Not a Film) and expresses his rebellious attitude toward the oppressors by playing a scene from The Mirror (1997) in which a child actor rebels against the director and removes a cast she's wearing on her arm; Panahi reveals his anguish by playing a scene from Crimson Gold (2003) in which a troubled war veteran working as a pizza delivery man who is driven into a suicidal crime by social tyranny. In another instance, Panahi uses a scene from The Circle (2000) to corroborate his assertion that sometimes in a film "location" (read house arrest) is more successful at establishing the inner states of mind of an oppressed character than the character merely "acting it out". In The Circle (2000), in one of the most memorable scenes one of the oppressed women released from jail into a Kafkaesque city races to avoid an arrest by the state police against a backdrop of steely vertical frames that befittingly seize the mood of the scene, that is, impending imprisonment of individual freedom. Panahi is also seen to be enveloped by a feeling of despair when Panahi discusses the film that he wanted to make but the censors rejected and thus Panahi never made that film. It is about the life of a teenage girl confined to her home in Isfahan by a dominating parent. She's a prisoner as Panahi is now, and he creates her apartment with pieces of tape on the living-room carpet. But after few unprofitable attempts, Panahi looks at the camera and tells that films are not meant to be "told", rather meant to be "made", essentially establishing a strict boundary between cinema and what is not cinema. In another brilliant use of his fertile imagination, Panahi continually uses the over-curios pet Iguana and its creepy and silent movements around the apartment to draw a striking analogy between the overtly encroaching nature of Iranian state laws into the private lives of Iranian people. The film ends with scenes where Panahi assumes the dual role of a cameraman and a character and engages in amusing conversations with a university student of art whose part-time job is to collect trash in the apartment building. The final scene ends with an apocalyptic vision of the outside world. At the end of the day This is Not a Film may not score high in terms of its pure cinematic contributions. Its success, however, lies in its remarkable ability to depict the life of an imprisoned artist by weaving together scenes from the reality and scenes from the cinema and thereby providing an all-inclusive view of the private moments of a captive but unflagging artist. In the long run This is Not a Film will rise as a testament to an artist's self-documentation of life under lock and key.