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Daily Star - Lebanon
Feb 9 2009
Kiarostami's high-brow gaze at high melodrama
There is a bit more to 'Shirin' than 113 pretty faces would seem to suggest
By Jim Quilty
Daily Star staff
Monday, February 09, 2009
Review
ROTTERDAM: Since the release of his 2002 film "10," the output of
Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami has veered away from narrative
film, towards documentaries about his himself and his work, on one
hand, and, on the other, work verging on conceptual art.
That vector continued in 2008 with the release of his film "Shirin."
This multiply self-reflexive study of popular culture and audience,
image and representation screened at the 2009 International Film
Festival of Rotterdam. This film is indeed conceptual art, one that
affords a surprisingly arresting cinema experience.
The story at the core of the film is "Khosrow and Shirin," a
12th-century Persian poem by Farrideh Golbou. It is a tale of
star-crossed love between an Armenian princess, Shirin, and a Persian
prince, Khosrow, here told from the perspective of Shirin. The two
nascent lovers live in their respective kingdoms and are completely
unaware of one another's existence until, in one of those plot
complications common to folk tales, Shirin glimpses a representation
of Khosrow's face and falls hopelessly in love with him, or it.
Driven to distraction, she consults a magus, who tells her to ride
immediately to Persia. Khosrow, he says, has caught a glimpse of her
and is equally smitten.
She arrives in the Persian capital to find Khosrow gone to Armenia to
find her. She stays in the palace the prince has built for her for
some time, then returns to Armenia, where she finally meets Khosrow in
the flesh.
She's skeptical of his declarations of love, though, saying he seems
more driven by lust than love. A Persian Army general has taken
Khosrow's kingdom for himself and she disapproves of his remaining in
Armenia with her while his kingdom is in the hands of a usurper.
Khosrow leaves Armenia, forms an alliance with the Roman emperor and
with his military assistance takes back his kingdom, in return for
which the new king marries the emperor's daughter. This sidetracks him
from the conventional happy union you might expect.
The story continues along these lines, with circumstances (fate, if
you like) pulling Shirin and Khosrow further apart the closer they
become. At one point, the story becomes a love triangle when a Persian
sculptor falls in love with Shirin. He is so gifted, that he's created
the perfect likeness of Shirin after having met her only once.
When Shirin and Khosrow are finally able to consummate their love,
disaster strikes.
Anyone knowing Kiarostami's output may be baffled by this plot
summary, enacted in high melodramatic tradition.
This audience, however, only has the film's soundtrack to go by. What
you actually see throughout the 92 minutes of "Shirin" are the faces
of its audience, who are (based on the variations on a theme of the
hijab worn by the women there) watching "Khosrow and Shirin" in an
Iranian cinema.
There are men here, but - appropriate to the film's title - the center
of the frame is always occupied by a woman. There are 113 in all, most
played by Iranian actresses, one of them the French film star Juliette
Binoche (also in hijab).
This sounds like a recipe for suicide-inducing boredom but, for an
interested audience at any rate, Kiarostami's high-brow treatment of
high melodrama is oddly absorbing.
As so little happens on screen, you are at first tempted to see
sameness - women of various ages, many of them breathtakingly
beautiful, hair covered, large eyes reflecting the rectangular screen
that holds them transfixed.
Perhaps in anticipation of his real audience noticing the similarities
among these women's noses, the director has carefully placed in the
audience a young woman with black eyes and a vast bandage on her nose
- the global trademark of cosmetic surgery. It's a wink that suggests
Kiarostami isn't as bereft of a sense of humor as some of his critics
would assert.
As the camera makes its way through the rotation of actresses, you are
struck by the tremendous variety in these faces - in the style of
visible clothing, manicure, manner of wearing the hijab, and so forth.
Simultaneously, you are drawn into the minimalist performances, as the
figures' apparent responses to the story of "Khosrow and Shirin"
transform these 113 actors into characters. Though many of the women
are held, rapt, by the story, others are obviously bored by it, and
one young woman struggles to stay awake. Some of the women remain
aloof, others at times observe the proceedings with a coquettish
delight. Several respond to the plot's self-consciously tragic twists
and turns with tears.
The concept for "Shirin" was Kiarostami's "Where Is My Romeo," his
three-minute-long contribution to 2007's group project "To Each His
Cinema," here expanded to feature length. The obvious question is
whether the experiment is worthwhile or simply self-indulgence.
Many movie-goers, who already ignore anything with Kiarostami's name
on it, will not regard "Shirin" as "cinema" at all, and it is surely
more likely to be screened as an installation in galleries than in
than in any multiplex.
There is a sense, though, in which "Shirin" is quintessential
cinema. As an art house treatment of pop culture, it echoes the
cinematic concerns of other more conventional films, not least the
auteur film generated in Turkey over the last decade or so.
In their efforts to use the moving image to make art out of lived
experience, auteur filmmakers have eschewed the staples of popular
cinema - most notably sentimentality, action and comedy - leaving some
detractors to find their representation of the human condition to be
on the arid side.
"Khosrow and Shirin" is, among others things, a story about the
deceptive, even perilous, emptiness of the image, and the human need
to ascribe meaning to it. "Shirin" doesn't represent this tale via a
"real" audience. Rather Kiarostami calls upon an array of physically
beautiful actors - professional deceivers, if you like - to do so.
The film is a cinematic version of a box lined with mirrors, a study
of appearances whose substance, like much conceptual art, is the
thought it provokes.
Feb 9 2009
Kiarostami's high-brow gaze at high melodrama
There is a bit more to 'Shirin' than 113 pretty faces would seem to suggest
By Jim Quilty
Daily Star staff
Monday, February 09, 2009
Review
ROTTERDAM: Since the release of his 2002 film "10," the output of
Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami has veered away from narrative
film, towards documentaries about his himself and his work, on one
hand, and, on the other, work verging on conceptual art.
That vector continued in 2008 with the release of his film "Shirin."
This multiply self-reflexive study of popular culture and audience,
image and representation screened at the 2009 International Film
Festival of Rotterdam. This film is indeed conceptual art, one that
affords a surprisingly arresting cinema experience.
The story at the core of the film is "Khosrow and Shirin," a
12th-century Persian poem by Farrideh Golbou. It is a tale of
star-crossed love between an Armenian princess, Shirin, and a Persian
prince, Khosrow, here told from the perspective of Shirin. The two
nascent lovers live in their respective kingdoms and are completely
unaware of one another's existence until, in one of those plot
complications common to folk tales, Shirin glimpses a representation
of Khosrow's face and falls hopelessly in love with him, or it.
Driven to distraction, she consults a magus, who tells her to ride
immediately to Persia. Khosrow, he says, has caught a glimpse of her
and is equally smitten.
She arrives in the Persian capital to find Khosrow gone to Armenia to
find her. She stays in the palace the prince has built for her for
some time, then returns to Armenia, where she finally meets Khosrow in
the flesh.
She's skeptical of his declarations of love, though, saying he seems
more driven by lust than love. A Persian Army general has taken
Khosrow's kingdom for himself and she disapproves of his remaining in
Armenia with her while his kingdom is in the hands of a usurper.
Khosrow leaves Armenia, forms an alliance with the Roman emperor and
with his military assistance takes back his kingdom, in return for
which the new king marries the emperor's daughter. This sidetracks him
from the conventional happy union you might expect.
The story continues along these lines, with circumstances (fate, if
you like) pulling Shirin and Khosrow further apart the closer they
become. At one point, the story becomes a love triangle when a Persian
sculptor falls in love with Shirin. He is so gifted, that he's created
the perfect likeness of Shirin after having met her only once.
When Shirin and Khosrow are finally able to consummate their love,
disaster strikes.
Anyone knowing Kiarostami's output may be baffled by this plot
summary, enacted in high melodramatic tradition.
This audience, however, only has the film's soundtrack to go by. What
you actually see throughout the 92 minutes of "Shirin" are the faces
of its audience, who are (based on the variations on a theme of the
hijab worn by the women there) watching "Khosrow and Shirin" in an
Iranian cinema.
There are men here, but - appropriate to the film's title - the center
of the frame is always occupied by a woman. There are 113 in all, most
played by Iranian actresses, one of them the French film star Juliette
Binoche (also in hijab).
This sounds like a recipe for suicide-inducing boredom but, for an
interested audience at any rate, Kiarostami's high-brow treatment of
high melodrama is oddly absorbing.
As so little happens on screen, you are at first tempted to see
sameness - women of various ages, many of them breathtakingly
beautiful, hair covered, large eyes reflecting the rectangular screen
that holds them transfixed.
Perhaps in anticipation of his real audience noticing the similarities
among these women's noses, the director has carefully placed in the
audience a young woman with black eyes and a vast bandage on her nose
- the global trademark of cosmetic surgery. It's a wink that suggests
Kiarostami isn't as bereft of a sense of humor as some of his critics
would assert.
As the camera makes its way through the rotation of actresses, you are
struck by the tremendous variety in these faces - in the style of
visible clothing, manicure, manner of wearing the hijab, and so forth.
Simultaneously, you are drawn into the minimalist performances, as the
figures' apparent responses to the story of "Khosrow and Shirin"
transform these 113 actors into characters. Though many of the women
are held, rapt, by the story, others are obviously bored by it, and
one young woman struggles to stay awake. Some of the women remain
aloof, others at times observe the proceedings with a coquettish
delight. Several respond to the plot's self-consciously tragic twists
and turns with tears.
The concept for "Shirin" was Kiarostami's "Where Is My Romeo," his
three-minute-long contribution to 2007's group project "To Each His
Cinema," here expanded to feature length. The obvious question is
whether the experiment is worthwhile or simply self-indulgence.
Many movie-goers, who already ignore anything with Kiarostami's name
on it, will not regard "Shirin" as "cinema" at all, and it is surely
more likely to be screened as an installation in galleries than in
than in any multiplex.
There is a sense, though, in which "Shirin" is quintessential
cinema. As an art house treatment of pop culture, it echoes the
cinematic concerns of other more conventional films, not least the
auteur film generated in Turkey over the last decade or so.
In their efforts to use the moving image to make art out of lived
experience, auteur filmmakers have eschewed the staples of popular
cinema - most notably sentimentality, action and comedy - leaving some
detractors to find their representation of the human condition to be
on the arid side.
"Khosrow and Shirin" is, among others things, a story about the
deceptive, even perilous, emptiness of the image, and the human need
to ascribe meaning to it. "Shirin" doesn't represent this tale via a
"real" audience. Rather Kiarostami calls upon an array of physically
beautiful actors - professional deceivers, if you like - to do so.
The film is a cinematic version of a box lined with mirrors, a study
of appearances whose substance, like much conceptual art, is the
thought it provokes.