Tag: Abbas Kiarostami

Rapid Response: Taste of Cherry

Just about every Abbas Kiarostami movie is to an extent about people driving around. The people in the cars drive and they talk, and sooner or later they get somewhere, maybe not geographically, but existentially at least, or so you would think. His movie “Ten” was all about conversations people had in cars. In “Certified Copy,” the images reflected on the windshield were more interesting than the discussion. I know Kiarostami is a gifted filmmaker, because I can see the absolute fire in some of his scenes. When he wants to, he’s capable of arresting filmmaking. But there is a very fine line between extremely careful and slow plotting and just filling time.

“Taste of Cherry” walks this line ever so studiously. It waits a full 25 minutes before revealing its main character’s intentions, and even then it doesn’t seem to amp up the suspense. I admit I looked at the plot description ahead of time, so I knew Mr. Badii’s (Homayoun Ershadi) trepidation and dilemma from the start, which is maybe beside the point. He is contemplating suicide, so he drives around seeking a laborer, a loner or someone naive who will help him without question.

His request is simple. There is a hole in the ground on the side of a secluded hill. Come by at dawn, and Mr. Badii will be in it with a heavy dose of sleeping pills. If he is alive, wake him and help him out. If not, bury him. Either way, Badii will pay well.

My thought is that if this were an easy thing to ask, it wouldn’t take the movie so long to ask it. Kiarostami shows great trepidation for a reason. His purpose is not to approach a fate for this man. He asks, how do you get someone you’ve just met to have faith in you, to take your life in their hands?

Badii’s first potential servant is a teenager in the military. After some uncomfortable, one-sided small talk, this kid quickly regrets his decision to accept this ride. Badii invokes God, logic, pity, monetary incentives and even his country loyalty as a Kurd, to get him to agree to this impossible assignment. But it’s no use. All the small talk in the world could not change his mind.

Kiarostami elevates this material somewhat by denying us the typical melodrama reaction shots, often showing us long, unbroken stretches of the car traveling instead. It’s a symbolic representation of what Badii says early on in the film to explain why he’s committing suicide. We can comprehend his pain, but cannot feel it, so the specifics are unimportant.

“Taste of Cherry” ultimately asks us to change our perspective on life. When this film was made, it was daring for an Iranian to make a movie about suicide. It still is. Here is a film that is arguably boring, polarizing, and if not all together maddening in its perplexing ending, and yet it requires a new outlook to appreciate fully.

CIFF Review: Like Someone in Love

There seem to be a lot of times in Abbas Kiarostami’s “Like Someone in Love” that the characters ignore their phone. When they do answer, there’s something lost in translation.

I point out this minute detail because at times it seems to be the only thing to hold our attention in this film about communication between people. The film follows a narrative structure so stripped down that it is at once baffling, boring and beautiful.

It starts inside a bar of people talking and having fun, but the voice we hear is Akiko’s (Rin Takanashi) arguing with her boyfriend Noriaki (Ryo Kase). Akiko is a call girl in Tokyo about to be sent out of town to spend the night with Takashi, an elderly, lonely and retired college professor (Tadashi Okuno). Takashi’s interest in her isn’t sexual, instead looking only for an evening of romance. But he doesn’t make that completely clear, and she falls asleep in his bed.

The next day, Noriaki mistakes Takashi to be Akiko’s grandfather and asks for his blessing in marriage. Suddenly the focus seems to shift to Noriaki and how he struggles to keep his fractured relationship built on lies together. He doesn’t know Akiko is a call girl, and when someone suggests that a photo in an ad looks a lot like her, he lashes out. He’s a scrawny kid capable of intense violence and anger.

Like Ozu, Kiarostami’s films have always been a modern example of deeply personal, slow cinema. And now this Iranian auteur completes his transformation by taking this trip to Japan for “Like Someone in Love.” Unlike his most recent masterpiece “Certified Copy,” Kiarostami is exploring mismatched relationships, philosophy and human nature not through a jumbled, experimental narrative, but a movie that bucks narrative altogether.

It is at times a maddeningly empty film. We sit and watch characters sleep in cars or wait on doorsteps, but Kiarostami surprises us with the new interactions and the new hints at backstory that come from nowhere, something that becomes even more obvious in the film’s captivating and undeniably abrupt ending.

One of the film’s finest scenes shows Akiko listening to voicemails in the backseat of a cab. They’re messages from her grandmother, who has come into town to see her but has been neglected and waiting all day. Now as Akiko is forcefully sent out on a job without time for her to rectify her mistake, we get an understanding of just how lonely her day has been. In her last message, she says she’ll wait patiently in front of a statue before the last train home departs. The cab circles a roundabout at the station at that moment, and there waiting under a streetlamp just as she said is a little old lady holding a suitcase. The image is sad enough, but Akiko asks the driver to go around once more so she can get another look.

It’s a heartbreaking moment, and one that just hints at the many flaws and depths of these characters. And yet it is perhaps a film I’ll have to see twice, one that is regrettably unclear about its intentions and its structure, requiring picking up on nuance on a second pass.

Perhaps that’s why Akiko asked to drive around again; we just need a better look.

3 stars

Review: Certified Copy

“Certified Copy” is a film that can hardly be spoiled by discussion. It demands to be seen and further discussed as soon as it completes casting its spell on you.

The painting “Liberty Leading the People” by Eugene Delacroix rests on the wall in the Louvre. When I visited there, I saw it and immediately thought of Coldplay’s “Viva La Vida.”

The symbolic meaning of the song associated with the fake image on the Coldplay album cover meant more to me than the symbolism behind the real thing. In fact I admired both equally.

The academic argument that serves as the initial basis of “Certified Copy” is that we often admire the copy of a work of art because in truth, all art is really just a representation of something.

But the miracle of Abbas Kiarostami’s film is in the seamlessly cinematic way he exposes the differences between what we think is real and what we think must be fake by staging stark and intertwining romances.

“Certified Copy” is a film that can hardly be spoiled by discussion. It demands to be seen and further discussed as soon as it completes casting its spell on you. Continue reading “Review: Certified Copy”