Through the Olive Trees (Abbas Kiarostami, 1994)

Life, and Nothing More... undercut Where Is the Friend's Home? by acknowledging the falseness of its diegetic reality as it added another layer of verisimilitudinous falsity to the narrative. Through the Olive Trees takes this simple elevation from one dimension of diegesis to another and fractures it into a thousand pieces; the film's opening image is of a man who introduces himself, "I'm Mohamed Ali Keshavarz, the actor who plays the director." With these 10 words, Kiarostami sets off the largest meditation on the thin line between reality and fiction of his self-reflexive career. That sentence serves as a warning shot for the rest of the movie, making it practically impossible to distinguish between what particular plane of "reality" the film is on at any one time. So perplexing is its Gordian knot that even cutting the thing by acknowledging the fictionality of the whole piece cannot successfully unravel its complexity.

But as with Close-Up, Certified Copy or any of the director's examinations of confused diegetic reality, Through the Olive Trees never loses its emotional resonance amidst its metatextual fun. The primary focus of the film is a pair of people who existed in the background of the previous movie. Late in Life, and Nothing More..., the lead actor (who is playing the director, but not the director who introduced himself at the start of this movie, because he is the "director" of Life) meets a young couple who elected to marry despite losing nearly all their family the earthquake that ravaged the region. Kiarostami aligns the focus of this film onto that couple. Well, the actors who played that couple, at least.

As Kirostami moves laterally as well as vertically, he lets his characters take over the film somewhat and to diverge from the roles they play down the line of the Koker trilogy. Tahereh, who plays the young woman in Life, is anything but the lovestruck wife of that film. When paired with Hossein, the "groom," she comes off as cold and uninterested even when the boy begins to feel some of the attraction of his character. Hossein even flubs his lines repeatedly in a hilarious scene where the filming of one of Life's shots constantly goes wrong because Tahereh refuses to respond to anything Hossein says to her, even in character. (It should be noted that her silence does not mean what Western audiences might think it means, but more on that later.) For his part, Hossein actively seeks that his part in the film not simply mirror his real life. A stonemason by trade, Hossein demands that his character not be a stonemason so that he need not even have to fake the work he does not like.

Yet even these conflicted, delineated marks between reality and fiction are soon absorbed into the denser web of the larger film, which even uses shot and sound design to blur lines. The drifting, focus-bending style that dotted the previous two Koker films rears its head again from time to time, and once again, the biggest yet most welcome distraction comes from an old man who seizes control of the film for a few minutes to ramble amiably. Then the film suddenly snaps back to attention by floating back to Hossein, and the sense of the movie making room for the real world dissolves when the old man's laughter blends with the honking of nearby geese in a deliberately false effect. An early camera shot that looks out from the car Tahereh takes to set seems to be a POV shot until one realizes the impossibility of it being the perspective of anyone inside the car, contradicting its naturalist feel with clear artifice. Poor Hossein later gets so mixed up by the film that when his character should say he lost 65 relatives in the quake, he instead says that he lost 25 because that is how many of his own relatives died in the disaster. In perhaps the film's most surreal moment, the actor playing the director of Life, and Nothing More... instructs the actor playing the director of Where Is the Friend's Home?, and at one point the camera reverses 180 degrees as if the director roles reverse, just to add to the confusion.

All of these bits are amusing—even Hossein's mix-up over the death count, though it comes from a horribly honest place—but they also speak to the Koker trilogy's larger breakdown of the very notion of capturing reality with film. By moving outward, cinema only adds more layers of falsity, and even reality (or at least what passes for reality within the false framework of film) cannot be trusted. Case in point, the way that Tahereh's tacit interaction with Hossein is obscured by both Kiarostami's camera and differences in cultural behavior. Her silence actually communicates cautious interest, not disdain, but even when one knows that, her actions feel rude and cold. The final scene, of a playful back-and-forth between the two as Hossein attempts to woo Tahereh, serves as the cap to this trilogy's ambiguity and its sense of ambiguity as the inevitable result of any attempt to capture a full portrait of something. As the camera pulls back ever further, its vast canvas does not reveal the truth of the couple's outcome but instead obscures it. Something will always be omitted in a movie, whether through too narrow a focus or too broad. Godard continues to look for a way to "get it all" in a film, but Kiarostami gracefully admits defeat in such a way that he makes an equally grand artistic statement out of his failure. Godard famously once said, "Film begins with D.W. Griffith and ends with Kiarostami." Through the Olive Trees almost seems the literal embodiment of this thought.

Life, and Nothing More... (Abbas Kiarostami, 1992)

Abbas Kiarostami's Where Is the Friend's Home? was a watershed release, exposing the director to the world and establishing him as a critical and festival favorite to this day. That film's simplicity and profundity, rooted in objective realism but also deepened by subjective camerawork, exists as if outside time. Not until I watched Life, and Nothing More... did I even realize that there are no cars in the 1987 film, no indication that the world in which the film unfolds has any trapping of modernity. This 1992 "sequel," on the other hand, opens with the grind of urban bustle. Kiarostami places his camera inside a toll booth in front of the operator so that the audience only sees the man's hand taking money and handing back tickets. The drivers all ask if the highway is open, and the loud din of emergency vehicles belies his calming assurances that it is. Compared to the muted bustle of children's voices that ushered in the tranquil fable of Where Is the Friend's Home?, Life, and Nothing More... feels harsh and grating.

When Kiarostami's camera jumps from the toll booth into the car of one of the drivers who passes through, the director soon clarifies this new sense of tension. The man driving the car (Farhad Kheradmand) is, effectively, Kiarostami himself, and he is returning to Koker in the wake of a devastating earthquake to try to find the local children who appeared in Where Is the Friend's Home? Accompanied by his young son, the director travels heavily damaged roads to reach the location of his breakthrough film, the beautiful, rustic buildings that made that movie such a gently labyrinthine journey now reduced to rubble. If Where is the Friend's Home? subsumed its conflicts of generations and duty into a benign, lilting trek, the cacophony of sirens, heavy-lifting equipment, and crying babies that drowns Life, and Nothing More...'s soundtrack reminds the viewer how real and mortal the setting for that film was.

Much of this film mirrors the structure of Where Is the Friend's Home? The first stretch of the movie shows the director simply trying to find his way to Koker and Poshteh, the two regions where he shot the predecessor, constantly redirected by road closures in the same way that Ahmad's simple attempt to return his friend's notebook became hopelessly entangled. The director even uses a poster of Where Is the Friend's Home? with the young actor's face on it to try to track him down. Nevertheless, Kiarostami does not simply repeat the other film for self-reflexive giggles but to complicate and even critique the previous film's themes and attitudes. In Where Is the Friend's Home?, the boy's journey is constantly inhibited by the indifference of adults to his conviction. People prove similarly unhelpful in this film, but their silence and distraction now stems from their fresh agony over the loss of possessions and loved ones. One old woman even responds to the director's question with the death count of her family, so absorbed in her grief that anything can bring it spilling out of her. One comes away from the first Koker film under the impression that elders have grown so jaded they cannot even recognize when a child lives up to the standards and values they themselves preach. This film, however, takes the time to show how much can weigh on an adult's mind, tacitly cautioning against quick judgments. (It also deflates the critical view those of us who do not in Iran might take of the elders' behavior in Where Is the Friend's Home? being an indictment of Iranian society and conditioning. This expansion of personal scope reveals a universality to the grown-ups' actions, not only in this film but its predecessor.)

But if the film deepens Where Is the Friend's Home? through tragedy, it also compounds the sense of human warmth and resilience that characterized Ahmad's driven quest. As Kiarostami surveys the heartbreaking damage done by the Manjil-Rudbar quake, he also finds people persevering in the face of utter catastrophe. An old man, Mr. Ruhi, helps the director and Puya reach their destination in exchange for a ride, and his meditative but good-natured thoughts recall the similar helpfulness and joviality of the carpenter who aids Ahmad. Discussing film with the director, Mr. Ruhi gracefully says, "Well, to continue being alive is also an art. I suppose it's the most sublime art of all." Embodying that sensibility is a young couple the filmmaker meets who lost dozens of relatives between them but elected to get married as they planned. The groom-to-be tells the director of all the ways they cobbled together a ceremony out of what little they could scrap and paste together, to the filmmaker's gentle humor and unmistakable admiration. "We thought that we should hurry to set up a home," the young man explains. "The ones who died hadn't expected that. We should go on living and raise a family. Perhaps we will die in the next earthquake."

Such observations are no less didactic than the bedtime story morals of the film's predecessor, but the broader focus and the newfound metatextuality manage to not lose the impact of reality (or verisimilitude) in its self-reflexive touches. The director's boy, in contrast to the child protagonist of the previous Koker film, is a tag-along, but he brings the same sense of real empathy and perseverance that Ahmad did. His ostensibly insensitive conversations, carried on with the bluntness befitting a child, also unlock believable, crucial connections with those still stunned by the devastation. One of the most believable, realistic aspects of this or any Kiarostami film is the notion that something as innocuous as kids' undaunted enthusiasm for soccer is not only a welcome relief to the pain around them but a vital means of slowly overcoming it. Sometimes, even Kiarostami's distancing analysis can fold back into the intimacy of the film's more neorealist stretches. The finale, in which the director is helped by a previously ignored hitchhiker and then returns the favor, could almost be a critique of his own role as the director and a reminder not to lose sight of the real world around him even as so much of the film serves to undermine his connection with that world by proving its falsity. From a delicate fable, Kiarostami expands into a serious (but never self-serious) meditation on the power and limits of art, and he still had one more extrapolation to go.

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

Where Is the Friend's Home? announces the intimacy of its focus from its opening shot, held on a door in close-up as the credits roll. The sound of children chattering and the unlatched door being blown ajar and closed again by the wind comprises all the action of the shot, until a shadow appears upon the door and footsteps near. The approaching person is the schoolteacher, reentering the classroom to scold his unruly wards. By focusing so intently on, effectively, nothing, Abbas Kiarostami makes the teacher's emergence that much more frightening, subtly aligning the audience's feelings toward the man with those of the children he harangues. One poor boy in particular, Mohammed Reza Nematzadeh, receives such a tongue-lashing for doing his homework on loose-leaf rather than in his assigned notebook that his thunderstruck terror filters through the camera and nearly turns the calmly filmed scene into a horror film.

Kiarostami stays in a childlike perspective for the remainder of the movie. Adults never appear in full close-up, the way a kid processes a grown-up, and the even larger world around them can be as scary as it is wondrous and inviting. The world takes on these contradictory properties to an even greater extent for Ahmad, a classmate of Nematzadeh's who discovers he accidentally took his friend's notebook home with him. Aware that his hapless buddy faces expulsion if he enters class the next day without that book, Ahmad decides to return it. But with Nematzadeh in the town of Poshteh and Ahmad stuck in Koker, he needs some help getting there, help almost always denied him.

The chief conflict in the warm, gentle flow of Where Is the Friend's Home? concerns the friction between Ahmad's earnestness and sense of personal duty and his elders' indifference. Relatives and strangers all talk about the values children need to be taught, but they get so lost in their narcissistic interpretation of what true responsibility and duty are that they utterly fail to notice how much Ahmad exhibits the values nominally taught to kids. The boy's grandfather opines that kids should be beaten regularly to instill discipline, even if they have done nothing wrong. The mother offers an even blunter response to her son's act of kindness, assuming he merely wants to get out of doing his own homework and finally shouting, "Obey!" This outburst, yelled early into the film, crystallizes Kiarostami's commentary on the disconnect between morality and what is taught as such in school (which is, after all, a socializing institution as much as an educational one).

Yet even as Kiarostami portrays the world as a harsh place, he infuses Ahmad's journey with a lyrical quality that constantly finds the warmth and humanity in people. Whenever Ahmad finds himself stymied by an indifferent adult, he runs into a child who proves far more understanding and helpful, creating a network of social interdependence that offsets the self-centered narcissism of the grown-ups. And not even all the elders are bad; as night falls on the increasingly desperate child, Ahmad finally receives assistance from an old man. Ironically, the gentleman's age makes him as much a hindrance as help, yet his willingness to engage with the kid makes their wandering through labyrinthine streets at night even more dreamlike and fantastical. Rather than appear as a token of enduring empathy, the old man acts as a playful guide, drawing out the already laborious walk around Iran's countryside even as he brings it to an amusing anticlimax.

No one could deny that Where Is the Friend's Home? is a message movie. Its clearly drawn lines between callous, conditioned adults and their innocent, moral progeny show the director at his most didactic. Yet even this fable has its nuance and grace, from the grandfather's friend who gently asks Socratic questions that undermine his old pal's irascible pro-beating stance to the way the camera sometimes drifts off to follow the adults exclusively, momentarily forgetting the aesthetic and narrative arc simply to dwell with these other people. Most unorthodox of all is the ambiguity that hangs over this otherwise simple tale of generational conflict, the question of whether the elders who react with such apathy, even hostility, to Ahmad's quest were once as pure as he, and whether Ahmad and his friends will grow into jaded, "socially acceptable" adults too. Nothing underscores the complexity Kiarostami brings to the project like its ending, which amusing suggests that the final action Ahmad takes is at once a transgression and the most moral, even the most reasonable choice he could have made.

Crimson Gold

[This post was written for Sheila O'Malley's Iranian film blogathon running Feb. 21-27. I encourage all to participate. More details here.]

Crimson Gold opens on a static shot in darkness as a scuffle is heard over the soundtrack. The black of the title card gives way to an undulating, impenetrable molasses eventually revealed to be a man pressed up against the camera. His attacker pulls him back, revealing a giant, shadowed man holding an old jeweler as he demands the key to the safe. The thief drags the man out of frame, but the camera does not follow, now looking outside the door as an accomplice stares uncertainly and a potential customer obliviously pulls up and walks in, even making conversation before she spots the gun and screams. The distraction allows the jeweler to set off the alarm, trapping the robber inside. In a huff, the man shoots the jeweler and looks outside as a crowd gathers to gawk at the caged animal. At last, the camera begins to zoom in on the man, who turns around to face the camera, backlit by the bright sky outside. Realizing his fate, the man at last turns the gun on himself, the camera at last cutting as the shot rings out.

Only the greatest of artists could dare to place an ending such as this at the beginning, but Crimson Gold bears the input of two of the greatest today: Jafar Panahi and Abbas Kiarostami. Panahi, who got some of his first post-collegiate work as an assistant director under Kiarostami on the latter's Through the Olive Trees, has collaborated with the Iranian master through his career but has his own artistic identity. Where Kiarostami reaches for the bigger target, bypassing national boundaries to make observations on all humanity, Panahi cannot overlook the tangible ills plaguing the society in which he lives. Together, the two bring out the best in each other: Kiarostami's writing channels his understated but razor-sharp wit toward more pointed political satire, while Panahi's direction absorbs some of the poetry inherent even in Kiarostami's scripts.

Like his mentor, Panahi loves shots of vehicles traveling, but where Kiarostami changes up his long-extreme long shots for shot/reverse shot close-ups inside a car, Panahi maintains the same distance throughout (typically a medium long to mild long shot) and moves outside the vehicles. Here, Hussein, the man who robbed the store and shot himself at the start before the film flashed back two days, drives a motorcycle, typically carrying his friend and, later, accomplice Ali. Their conversations are terse, and where Kiarostami normally uses trips to subtly bring out the philosophies and traits of his characters, here he deliberately walls Hussein off, preventing any deeper reading of that blank face or those dead eyes.

The nonprofessional actor playing Hussein, Hossain Emadeddin, is purportedly a paranoid schizophrenic, and while clues are dropped regarding a past in the Iranian military and a need to take pain medication, neither Panahi nor Kiarostami does anything to suggest that the character has the same condition. But the hint of boiling emotion and internal war raging behind the expressionless face complicate the otherwise banal Hussein, which in turn gives his flat line readings an untraceable menace. Of course, the fact that we saw the end of his life first, a darkly comic but ultimately despairing murder-suicide also contributes to the attempt to figure out what made the gentle man snap.

As with so many Kiarostami-penned films, however, Crimson Gold does not settle for easy linearity, even the tangled linearity of a psychological breakdown. Throughout the film, I thought of Kiarostami's The Wind Will Carry Us, in which a director travels to a remote village to film an old woman's death, only for new ideas to arise when she stubbornly continues to live. The piercing wit of that film gives way to a more pointed political examination of modern Iran, albeit one filtered through a humanism that blunts polemics.

Hussein, working as a pizza delivery man, rides his bike around the disjointed metropolis of Tehran, routinely wanders into the wealthy districts to make deliveries, and the juxtaposition of his simple clothing and stark living conditions and the almost Western level of comfort enjoyed by the rich is eye-opening, unmissable yet understated. On the first delivery we see, Hussein buzzes in at an apartment complex, and the man who answers tells Hussein that the elevator is broken and makes him abandon his bike and climb four flights of stairs. Hussein heads up there, and when the customer opens the door we see red-painted walls and candles.

The pizzas cost 18,500 tomans, roughly $18. This well-off man gives him 19,000 and tells him to keep the change. Hussein does not budge. Just as I thought he would strike the man for this infuriating offense, Hussein introduces himself and reveals that he and the man served in the military together. Struck by the realization, the customer gives him a larger tip out of sympathy but clearly wants to avoid anything but the barest discussion with this lumbering man, bloated by cortisone and spare pizza. Even among war buddies, some just get forgotten.

That brief moment conjures a plethora of feelings, from social outrage to frigid comedy to heartbreak, all of which inform the film's most memorable (and long) sequences. The first is a masterpiece of anti-comedy, as Hussein travels to an apartment complex to deliver a stack of pizzas to a party. Just as he reaches the intercom, a policeman walks up and pulls him aside. As it turns out, the police and military are staking out the party and waiting for people to come down. Why they are doing so is never said; the camera stays with Hussein, who is made to go stand aside, unable even to leave because he is now a "witness." For what feels like forever, he stands next to a teenage soldier as people arrive at the apartment and are detained as the police wait for the partygoers to leave so they can be arrested.


Proving the combative, non-submissive nature of the Iranians, everyone protests being pushed around by the police, not a one of them simply following orders. But Panahi does not come down too hard on the cops: Hussein, aware that he will not get to make his delivery, offers the pizza to the police chief, who accepts a slice, then to the rest of the cops. Hussein spends most of his time standing next to a teenage soldier holding a rifle about as tall as he is, nervous with anticipation and fear. He tells Hussein he'll shoot anyone who makes trouble, but he has no clue why he's waiting for rich people to stop carousing and disperse. Panahi pulls back the camera just enough to capture an eerie, pale green glow mingling with soft moonlight. He moves around the alley slowly, taking in the absurdity of the situation and how everyone there is trapped by forces they cannot explain.

Near the end of the film, Hussein makes another delivery, this time to an absurdly lavish apartment. The man who answers the door is huffy, the two women he invited over having left abruptly. They wanted the pizzas, he rants, so why should he pay for them? Hussein barely listens; the camera cuts suddenly to a POV shot of his head whirling around the sights behind the customer's head, the fast tilts and pans relaying the stupefying impact of the marble staircase, Greek statues and other adornments on a man who, only minutes earlier, we'd seen return to an apartment with naught but a minuscule poster dotting a cracked concrete wall.


Guilty for subjecting Hussein to his invective (yet also wanting to keep him around to vent more), the man invites him in to share the pizza and talk. The mult-tiered apartment is an astonishing setpiece, displaying the dominant Western influence among the rich. Hussein stumbles around in a stupor even before he later gets drunk and jumps into the indoor pool, but Panahi does not attack the rich for the extreme disparity between the haves and have-nots: the man, who lived in the West but returned to his parents' pad out of homesickness, is nouveau riche but not condescending toward Hussein. As can be seen with the women, who darted out of the complex in Western clothes, even the rich are restricted by social repression. The man calls the women sluts in his anger, but the clear implication is that they left because he was trying to coax them into a threesome. As is always the case, a sexually repressed society obsesses over sex and its implications far more than a liberal one.

This is but one commentary Panahi makes on the plight of women here. The two films that surround Crimson Gold, The Circle and Offside, directly concern women. Here, Panahi's holistic approach to the clashing forces pulling at Iranians incorporates his gender observations into other facets of shifting yet frustratingly static Iranian lifestyles. During the protracted police stakeout, a married couple returns to the apartment and tries to go back to their place. The police grill them as to what they were doing, and they protest that they were just going out. "What kind of a man goes out with his wife?" asks one cop without a hint of irony, seriously unable to imagine such a scenario.

Even the main characters exhibit sexist views. Ali is a pickpocket who steals women's purses, yet no one seems to care. He even empties one out on a table in a restaurant without anyone raising an eyebrow. Hussein is set to marry Ali's sister, and Ali admits he worried no one would have her. As he rides on Hussein's bike, he tells his friend as they pass ladies, "I look more at the purses than the women" even as he gently tests Hussein's restraint by tempting him to look at other women.

Hussein too seems to bear some of the socially ingrained sexism: he brings his fiancée with him to the jewelry store he will later rob, and when she lifts up her shawl for only a moment to try on a necklace, Hussein's icy demeanor cools even more. He heads to the jewelry shop several times looking to buy her something, yet when she appears with him he scarcely says three words to her. He just wants the condescending old man who runs the place to acknowledge him and uses his fiancée as an excuse to return there.


Panahi's cultural criticism is unique: it is plain and unhidden, be it the difference between the respectful oppression the rich suffer compared to the battered-down doors and shouts the poor endure, the subjugation of women or the influence of the West that appears to have seeped in only in materialistic ways. Yet he also crafts subtle, even poetic ruminations from the obviousness of his targets, and if the setup is always predictable, the payoff never is. Crimson Gold takes such turns and moves with such dreamlike imprecision that I forgot Hussein would kill someone else and then himself by the film's end. First, I expected an anti-heist movie in the vein of Sidney Lumet's Before the Devil Knows You're Dead, then something akin to Taxi Driver and it Dostoevsky-inspired breakdown. But I was foiled at every turn: the stakeout, with its soft neon glow, long-shot comedy and exquisite framing, looked like something out of a Tati film, while the other major sequence brings forth a despair in Hussein amidst the modernity of the rich man's accoutrements that, though the feeling was not as strong as the Tati connection earlier, made me think of Ozu.

When Ali sifts through the woman's purse near the start of the film, an old con artists walks over and marvels at the openness of their theft. He instructs them not to steal simply for the pocket change of a poor woman's purse or for the thrill of the chase but to understand one's motives and one's existential need to steal. He leaves them his card, leaving open the possibility of him becoming a mentor to Hussein and Ali, but they never contact him. Hussein simply resents being dismissed so casually by the man and continues on without ever figuring himself out. We can guess at why Hussein eventually murders the jeweler -- in keeping with the slight connections to Taxi Driver, I kept thinking about the protagonist's encounters with the uncaring officer in Notes from Underground and how badly Hussein simply wanted to be acknowledged by his "foe" -- but answers remain insidiously out of reach.

“If you want to arrest a thief, you’ll have to arrest the world," recites the old con artist to the men, and as Hussein emptily wanders around Tehran without expression, one cannot help but feel that someone or something has stolen a piece of him as well. Without that missing piece, Hussein is incomplete and less than human. So invisible is he that, in the end, Hussein must hold a gun to a man's head just to see a necklace. The dark comedy of the beginning now morphs into engulfing despair: I laughed fatalistically at the doomed fool, and now I wanted more than anything to find some way to get him out of that shop before he did what he was fated to do. Kiarostami and Panahi do not yank the carpet out from underneath you, they gently slide you off a plank.

Certified Copy

[Warning -- contains spoilers]

If there is a better film this year than Certified Copy, then I must rescind the statements I have made throughout 2010 of the abysmal quality of its cinematic offering. Thus far, the films that I have loved most I have embraced despite their flaws, falling in love with ambition (Inception), thematic richness (The Social Network) and plain ol' emotional attachment (Toy Story 3). Some of these works have at least flirted with the adjective "masterful," if for no other reason than some are the works of masters (The Ghost Writer, Shutter Island), but I had not yet seen a true masterpiece. Leave it to Abbas Kiarostami, the greatest living filmmaker in the world, to fill the gap.

While I rarely discuss any movie these days without going into spoilers (though I do try to save more elaborate talk for secondary reviews when it comes to new films), I must impress just how much of this film I will and must discuss in order to pen anything approaching a meaningful essay. I'm not talking about the questions over the film's real-or-fake narrative, which is as playful and exciting as it is wholly unimportant to gauging the film. I want everyone to go into this film with as little knowledge as possible, all the better to let its perfect blend of metafictional levity and insightful human drama hit with maximum impact.

At the halfway point of Certified Copy, the two main characters, an English art critic and writer (opera singer William Shimell, in his first movie role) and an unnamed French art dealer (I'll call her "Elle" like everyone else) enter an Italian café after debating the thesis of James' book. James steps outside for a moment, and the café owner remarks that they make a good couple; though the two just met, the woman does not correct the owner and launches into a discussion about the problems of keeping a marriage up after 15 years.

What sort of nonsense is this? Why would she do such a thing, and why would the man seemingly play along when he returns? In true Kiarostami fashion, these questions are indispensable to unlocking the central thrust of Certified Copy's intent yet pointless. There is a tendency for people to question which parts of a Kiarostami film are real and which are fake, which is a waste of time because it's all fiction. Granted, he blends documentary into the proceedings, but in doing so he makes reality fake. Of course, the flip side of that is that he makes falsity more real, and that dichotomy goes a long way toward building his status as the preeminent cinematic poet of his time.

Slyly, Kiarostami plants the idea that these two are a couple from the start. Binoche takes her teenage son to listen to James' lecture, but the spoiled brat complains of hunger and makes his mom leave almost immediately. She leaves her number with a friend to give to James, and when they meet, each comes off as slightly confrontational from the start. She attacks the premise of James' book, which stipulates copies of original artistic works have their own value based on the perspective of the copier. The discussion, framed, naturally, within a car traveling through the pastoral Italian countryside morphs from Elle asking for clarification on James' ideas to a debate about them to a more personal spat that frames the two as a stereotypical "old married couple."

Just as that thought enters your head, Kiarostami literalizes it by having Elle start the lie, which James bizarrely maintains. Suddenly, the aggressively flirtatious attitude between the two characters jumps into the advanced stages of a relationship, with Elle berating James for neglecting her and her son and him defending his absences as work-related. As they continue to walk around a quaint Tuscan village, the pair only get more savage, and both look increasingly immature. At an early dinner, Elle excuses herself and goes into the bathroom to plaster on lipstick and gaudy earrings, smoothing her face yet ironically robbing the 46-year-old of her ageless grace and beauty. She emerges as a child who got into mommy's accessories, and she might as well be going to a tea party with stuffed animals for the regression she displays. For his part, James turns into a petulant cad, flying off the handle for as innocuous a comment as Elle quietly saying she likes the wine he disparages.

Their bewildering behavior represents a stylistic departure for Kiarostami, as it enters into a melodrama far removed from the naturalism of his previous films. Rarely has Binoche been so animated, and she's one of the most effortlessly extroverted actresses on the planet. She's pushy, manipulative, happy, sad, quiet, loud, aggressive, defensive and various other adjectives to boot. She and Kiarostami have been friends since the '90s, and the director has been looking for the chance to put her in one of his movies for years. The wait was worth it: the idea that Kiarostami complicates the narrative just to make a cryptic puzzle have not addressed how openly and completely Binoche fits her performance to every twist and turn, clearly aware of what the director was trying to do.

For all her theatrics, however, Binoche continues a thread Kiarostami has been developing for years, that of the challenges facing women. Working in his native, restrictive Iran, Kiarostami bumped up against the lines of censorship with his depictions of women, but he never defined his female characters through anything as simplifying as region-specific oppression. When he examines the plight of women, he does not stop with the hijab and honor killings, he looks at broader emotional oppression by men. For James to so quickly defend leaving home for extended periods of time to leave Elle to raise their son by herself demonstrates how even the supposedly enlightened intellectual class can give career preference to men. After Shirin equalized Binoche with the cast of Iranian women and presented a universal male patriarchy as an enduring problem, Certified Copy digs deeper into the emotional tumult of not being openly oppressed or discriminated against but subtly manipulated for years, and the range of Binoche's expression reflects how complex the reactions to such confusing reduction can be.

At the same time, Kiarostami scores a coup with the film by setting it from the woman's perspective. The nosy, aggressive questions Elle's son prods his mother with at the start can obviously be explained by Elle's own confrontational nature. But Kiarostami is not blaming the mother for corrupting the son so much as illustrating the issues that can arise from a single parent situation, a subject that courts its own controversy until Elle tearfully speaks of how hard it is to play both roles to raise a child. Besides, for all the kid's distracted noodling with a cell phone, he's quite perceptive, and he realizes as he looks at his mom during the opening lecture that she is planning to seduce James. Her actions are manipulative, to be sure, but never cruel, and the director finds a way to deliberately pace what we know about the character without making her a bitch until the last 10 minutes. I've seen so many examples of this in contemporary cinema that I'm at a loss to explain just how Kiarostami brushes against the traps of Western filmmaking and casually inverts and subverts them. Here is a movie that answers the male gaze with the female gaze, replacing sexual lust with conflicting romantic emotions that seem to confuse more male critics than female ones because we're not used to this level of sophistication when thinking about an object of desire.

Binoche's performance is insightful and believable, but it also plays on the artifice of cinema. Shimell, on the other hand, is so stiff and unaccustomed to dramatic acting that he also points out the falsity of it all. Kiarostami slyly doesn't use Shimell's singing talents, nor even the melodramatic chops he no doubt he picked up performing opera. That would be too obvious. Instead, Kiarostami uses Shimell the way he does any nonprofessional actor, to get a more natural performance. Shimell plays the straight man off Binoche's complex emotional range, and even his broader moments of anger look simplistic compared to Binoche. This can partly be explained as the natural result of a person out of his element working alongside one of the world's greatest actresses giving one of her best performances, but it's also all part of the plan. If Binoche examines Kiarostami's divide between reality and fiction by keenly understanding what the director intended in nearly every shot, Shimell does so by being as lost as we are. If Binoche doesn't look like she's acting even while doing Sirkian cartwheels, Shimell makes it blindingly obvious, and that, ultimately, is the clue that decides whether the two are a real couple.

Yes, it's all a fake, as is revealed vaguely but unmistakably at the end. The ending snaps all the pieces into place, not of the film itself but of the clues that allow one to unlock its meaning. The question people should ask of the film is not whether Elle and James are for real, it's who was right about the artistic merits of James' thesis. The ending lets us understand that Elle planned her game to test James' contention that copies have their own worth, but also to get out her frustrations over being abandoned. When the game first begins in earnest, Elle jokes with the café owner that James does not speak another language. Yet when Elle gets so emotional later that she slips into French, and James responds in kind. By altering his language, James fits better as the copy of Elle's ex-husband, and his stiff movements are the sight of an unprofessional actor acting as a character who in turn acts for an audience of one.

By the end, the positions of the characters have reversed. In projecting all her hangups onto the copy, Elle falls in love again and desperately wants to rekindle her old relationship with this new copy. She has made James into a clone of her husband, but she and James have also made this replication different enough that she can fall in love with the man she hates. But James can see the emotional distress in her, and while he clearly feels tempted by Elle's seduction -- we are talking about Juliette Binoche here -- he cannot bring himself to torment her with a specter of past love. Where she at last believes in copies carrying their own emotional weight, James, who says at the beginning that he wrote his book to convince himself of his own idea, realizes that he cannot be someone else's copy without being their projection, not his own. Ironically, by rejecting his premise at last, he commits the final act necessary to make him a perfect copy of the ex-husband: he leaves Elle.

This driving conflict fits squarely within Kiarostami's canon, built upon the dividing line between reality and fiction. What is most amusing about Certified Copy is the way that he uses his first European film and the freedom it entails to make a movie that only looks different from his previous, restricted movies in the clothes that Binoche can wear. Marilyn Ferdinand, one of the best movie bloggers around, noted something I had to go back and check: when the two characters visit a church in Lucignano where loving young couples pledge eternal love on a gilded tree branch -- one of Kiarostami's more devilish touches, given the embittered duo he focuses upon -- a bride in the background squirts eye drops in her eyes. When James goes inside and the camera cuts back to the bench he was sitting on, that bride sits there now with tears rolling down her cheeks, but we know they're fake. It's a light touch, as nearly all touches in a Kiarostami film are, but it broadens the scope of his inquiry on fakes, not letting the entire story rest on the fractured perspective of a troubled woman. Even the content rearrange themselves to make copies of what they think they should be, the bride genuinely happy but wanting to seem happier to fit to the image of the wife who cannot contain her joy.

Actors will pick apart Certified Copy for years, because it says more about the profession than any film made in at least a decade. The caliber of Binoche's performance will certainly be studied, but more importantly, the film has a great deal to say about the profession. Actors play copies of people, either of real figures or fictional characters who are composites of real people (or of previous fictional characters themselves based on real people). But they are also human themselves. They process and perceive the fiction, thus aligning them with the audience, who become background characters, trying to figure out this couple along with everyone else. The most amazing aspect of Binoche's performance is not how well she follows Kiarostami's emotional and artistic themes but the manner in which she allows herself to lose the thread at the end as Elle's grand scheme falls apart when she gets lost in her own labyrinth. The bravest and most compelling thing she can do is lose track of where she's supposed to be at the exact right time.

"Art is not an easy subject to write about," James says in his opening lecture. "There are no fixed points of reference, no immutable truths to fall back on." Certified Copy is itself a sterling replication of the European, romantic art film, drawing on Roberto Rossellini's Voyage to Italy and Richard Linklater's Euro-centric Before Sunrise. He even throws in a bit of Bergman's Persona into the mixture. In the process, however, he proves James' thesis by adding his own indelible spin on it. Using his usual shot/reverse shot structure, Kiarostami gently reconfigures the perspective of the film, starting with James speaking before cutting to Binoche arriving, then to the son's view as he watches his mom whispering conspiratorially to her friend. Yet when James arrives, the POV clearly shifts to Elle as she begins molding her image of James. Even European films, generally the ones with the best roles for women, are masculine, and Kiarostami makes a film some have misread as a sellout, festival-friendly movie into a more feminist movie than nearly all European romances of similar stripes. It's a bold response to those who say there are no more ideas for movies, that all movies are just rip-offs of something else: as long as someone brings something new to the table, it's valid and unique, regardless of whether it's "original."

And just as it is a copy of European films that differs slightly until everything adds up to a unique vision, so too is Certified Copy a typical Kiarostami film that is in no way typical. Shot on digital but printed on 35mm, the film blends the methods of capturing film, literalizing the artistic dichotomies the director's work embodies. Once again, the director uses a return to cinema to poke fun at those who wanted him to go back to making features instead of experimental ventures. But the biggest breakthrough, even for a director as emotionally attuned as Kiarostami, is the heightened humanity. After making so many films about people in cars, the world visible only as it rolls over a windshield vertically as if we're seeing film run through a projector, Kiarostami inserts a little joke to his knowing fans when the two get out of the car and join the world, making their story so much harder to untangle. But that's because he's finally inserting his characters into a larger story, a clear reflection of his own steps into a larger world by making films outside of Iran (he's already scheduled to make another film with Binoche). His films have never been insular, but that have been personal. Here, he realizes how much he can expand while still retaining the individuality of his emotional explorations. He already condensed the world's complexity into the sandy Iranian countryside; now, he throws away the microcosm and works within the real thing. And only Kiarostami could make such a transition and still give off the impression that the world cannot contain all that he has to say about it. Shirin dealt with the contrast of collective and individual reaction to film in minimalist terms, and here he explodes them in a narrative as complex, dubious, rewarding and frustrating as life itself.

Certified Copy probes at the emotions of a relationship, the pain of loss and the idea that there might only be one person out there for us. The idea of a soulmate is so romantic, but if you ultimately separate, doesn't the possibility exist not that the right person is out there, but that you couldn't even make things work with your fated partner? That is an excruciating thought, and one Kiarostami dispels only after he drains Binoche; only when we've all cried it out can we move on and realize that the most useless and unhelpful of breakup maxims is actually true: plenty of other fish in the sea. Church bells ring at the end, possibly funereal as James leaves. But the peals also emit a hopeful tone; it's the start of a new day, and perhaps another couple is getting married. I've heard some compare Certified Copy to the screwball comedies of old, The Philadelphia Story and so on. If there are any screwball antics here, they exist solely on the meta level as Kiarostami messes with narrative coherence and fulfills the wishes of his critics as he subverts them. But the comedy of the film is quiet, as is the melancholy, and when it all comes together in the final moments, Certified Copy stands as the latest proof that Abbas Kiarostami has no equal, and whatever else may be said about these sad times, we are lucky to be alive in an age where a master continues to work.

Shirin

It has been said many times over that the best seat in the house in a theater is at the very front, looking back at all the upturned faces. Truffaut best epitomized this in The 400 Blows with his evocative shot of kids watching a show. Shirin, at once Kiarostami's return to cinema after spending the first decade of the new millennium with increasingly minimalistic films shot on digital cameras and a continuation of those movies, takes this notion to an almost experimental endpoint.

Ostensibly a film about the classical Persian, romantic myth of Shirin and Khosrow, Shirin is instead a film about an audience watching a film about the romantic myth of Shirin and Khosrow. This setup naturally fits within Kiarostami's oeuvre of dividing the line between truth and cinema, yet Shirin does not employ the alternating documentary and fiction that complicates and deepens the narratives of his best work. Shirin is purely fictional, yet its falsity is more real than some of the genuine images Kiarostami has captured over the years.


Armed with 113 Iranian actresses (and Juliette Binoche, appearing in a cameo while she was in Iran to discuss working with the director on his subsequent feature), Kiarostami creates a film so simple that it borders on the avant-garde: we pick up the details of the movie from the soundtrack and, when that fails, from the reactions of the women watching the film.

In the process, he constructs a movie without really making one. Kiarostami shot the actresses without them knowing what they were meant to be watching; he even shot some of them in his house. He used similar techniques to get the reactions of characters in previous films, particularly in his many scenes in cars. And just as all of those sequences managed to convey a deep humanity and convincing emotional response out of a fabricated context, so too do the looks on the women's faces communicate a clear progression of shared yet isolated emotional reaction.

Understanding the strange dichotomy of viewing art, Kiarostami emphasizes the discrepancy of seeing a movie within an audience yet ultimately processing it alone. Filmmakers face that challenge all the time, either making their film broad to have the maximum impact or more personal to appeal to the individual internalization of a film's emotional projection. In the world that Kiarostami creates out of the darkness of his false theater, the unseen film manages to unite the two, with tears beginning to roll down the cheeks of the audience past the 30-minute mark, slight smiles tugging at the lips at the moments of quiet humor and the soft creak of shifting weight as the moviegoers lean forward in suspense. Each of the actresses gives a terrific performance of silent cinema, and David Bordwell is right (as ever) to note that their reactions to Shirin's martyrdom on the screen are so pure and empathetic that the best comparison is not with Godard's Vivre sa vie but the film that Anna Karina's prostitute watched in the theater, Carl Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc.

The ties that bind all of these films are, of course, the female characters, and Shirin embodies the same martyrdom as the other two in much subtler ways. Through dialogue and narration, we pick up that Shirin, an Armenian princess, falls in love with the Persian king Khosrow, only for his bloodlust in battle to repulse Shirin and political opportunity to give his hand to a Roman princess in marriage. Dejected, Shirin manages to find love in the poet and carver Farhad, who displays more devotion and innocence toward the princess than the entitled Khosrow ever could.

As tears stream down faces, we realize that where the inference between Falconetti's Joan and Karina's Nana is open, the connection that links Joan of Arc and the women watching here is more obvious even as it is more nuanced. These women aren't doomed like Joan or Nana, but they are trapped in a patriarchal system that in the best of cases restricts freedom and, in the worst, harms and even kills women. As Khosrow interferes in Shirin's happiness to his own ends, the reactions of the women convey an emotion that runs deeper than mere involvement with the film. They see their own plight in Shirin's pain. Dreyer almost never showed Joan in a shot with a man, using shot/reverse shot structures to maximize the impact by isolating Joan in the frame and magnifying the effect of men looking down upon her. Kiarostami never even shows us the tormentor, as if the actions of Khosrow and, by extension, the patriarchy are so immense that they cannot be adequately squeezed into the frame. Here, Binoche's cameo fulfills a broader purpose: without makeup and scarved in a hijab, it's almost impossible to discern her from the Iranian women, and Kiarostami deftly uses her to globalize the issue into something that affects women the world over and not merely in openly oppressive regimes.

Never before has Kiarostami's feminism been more plain. He has had difficulty displaying it in the past, what with the Iranian theocracy's restrictive policies concerning women -- so many Iranian films are made out in the open and never in a house, in fact, because it's illegal to show a woman without her hijab -- but here he communicates volumes with only the slightest voiceover narration. The women reflect Shirin's disgust as they turn away from the sound of battles, a sharp contrast to the men in the audience, who look bored every time except when an action sequence is clearly playing on the screen. "Damn this man's game that we call love," comes an exasperated voice from the screen, and considering how Shirin finds herself in the middle of a struggle despite her clear preference for one man, it's not hard to see romance as a leftover of primitive territoriality among unevolved males while women are forced to wait for men to reach their level of sophistication and emotional maturity.

In broader terms, Shirin simply marks a master's return to true cinema, even if he takes the long way 'round. If it really does have a connection to The Passion of Joan of Arc, a silent film, Shirin inverts the structure of that film by presenting blind cinema. We pick up the story from the soundtrack which is more nuanced and evocative than any of the boisterous blockbusters that take home sound editing Oscars year after year. Sounds you don't expect from a romantic melodrama appear in the mix, such as crows cawing, owls hooting, horses galloping, the battle sounds of clanging steel and the wet thump of blades carving into flesh. The orchestration can be teasing, bombastic, but also minimalistic, with a barely perceptible hum undercutting the sound at times. Most bizarre is the ambient noise of water dripping at several intervals, a noise that must be coming from the theater speakers but doesn't seem to have any reason to exist in the screened film. Maybe that dripping is simply the sound of tears pooling under the eyes before the audience finally sheds them.

As I watched, I couldn't help but wonder if, on some level, Shirin wasn't Kiarostami's sarcastic reply to colleagues and supportive critics who wanted him to return to narrative filmmaking after his experiments. Oh, the director returned to the cinema, alright, but he does so in a way that makes his digital movies look straightforward. There's no way to know where the film is at any moment, nothing to signify which face is the most important and thus the last to be shown. One can imagine him sitting his excited friends in a screening room, declaring "I have returned" and taken his spot at the front of theater to watch Shirin have its effect on them. By the same token, the movie is so emotionally resonant that, even if it is a joke, it is built on a foundation of sincerity that turns a movie with only the sparest parts into riveting cinema. Furthermore, the nature of its construction speaks to the power of film to generate meaning from nothing, and how editing is what ultimately tugs the heart.

What would such a film be like if it showed an American film to an American audience? This is cynicism speaking, but I imagine we'd see an audience of people focused on everything but the film, with people whispering, texting, checking watches. Then when the movie ended, a few would lazily turn to friends and mutter, "That was awesome" or "That sucked" with all the conviction of a porn star delivering a line of dialogue. Here, Kiarostami creates a shared experience, not simply among the fictive audience but those watching Shirin. But he especially speaks to the women, and if there's a driving force behind the film, it's the hope that women will realize how the issues that affect each of them affect all of them and have done for centuries. Is it any wonder, then, that Kiarostami had to head to Europe to make his next film? If he'd continued on this path in native Iran, he'd be imprisoned by now.