Audience Member
To commemorate the great Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami's death this week, I watched this very conceptual art film that ironically features 112 of Iran's top actresses along with Juliette Binoche. What we see is only their faces, apparently watching a film version of the classic tale of Shirin and Khosrow. The film is about 90 minutes long, so we are compelled to listen carefully to the film's soundtrack and to see how this registers on the actresses' faces. Do they know they are being filmed? Are they over-doing it? As is always the case with Kiarostami, there are some questions about fiction and reality here. However, things are not really what they appear (which is also typical of Kiarostami's work). Rather than film all of these actresses in a real cinema watching a real film, Kiarostami filmed each of them separately (or in small groups of two or three) in his own living room. It may have been a bit like Warhol's Screen Tests. But what's more, they weren't reacting to a film at all but instead to Kiarostami's spoken direction. Even more bizarrely, Kiarostami selected the "film" to be watched after the actresses had already been recorded and created the version of Shirin and Khosrow himself with another set of actors and actresses. The foley artists are really working overtime! He then edited together the soundtrack and the clips of the actresses to create a seamless whole that relies on a sort of audio version of the Kuleshov effect to trick the viewer into believing in cause and effect. A bloody battle in the story (replete with the usual sound effect of smashed watermelons) results in an almost comic moment when the stars shrink away from the screen (what did Kiarostami really tell them?). Of course, the film is something of an endurance test and not for the casual viewer but it is impossible not to begin to have thoughts and to engage interactively with the film and this is clearly one of Kiarostami's goals - he wants us to wonder what the hell is going on! In addition, there is an additional subtext about the faces of women in an Islamic society when strict religious tenets might require them to be covered - here they are unveiled. Is this empowering? Is it taboo-breaking? Do these women feel even more self-conscious? But then again they are already actresses. With Kiarostami, the questions never cease.
Rated 3.5/5 Stars •
Rated 3.5 out of 5 stars
02/04/23
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Audience Member
While entertaining, beware that you are not really watching a film. You are watching an audience of Iranian women who are viewing a film you can only hear (sound effects and all). I did get sucked into the story of Shirin, Queen of Armenia (which was like listening to a good audio book), but I didn't find that viewing the faces of the audience actually added anything profound to my experience as a viewer/listener. I agree that 30 minutes of this experience would have been enough.
Rated 3.5/5 Stars •
Rated 3.5 out of 5 stars
01/14/23
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Audience Member
A remarkable idea for a film--but it's surprising that it works as well as it does.
Rated 3.5/5 Stars •
Rated 3.5 out of 5 stars
01/24/23
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Audience Member
Shirin (Abbas Kiarostami, 2008)
I am normally a fan of both capital-A-art-film (Begotten is in my top ten films of all time) and Abbas Kiarostami (I was pretty rapturous about A Taste of Cherry, and only slightly less so about Ceritifed Copy), so Shirin, about which I knew not a bloody thing other than that it seems to be Kiarostami's least accessible film (The Guardian called the film âa strain on the viewerâ?). It turned out that the capsule description on Netflixâ"which is so often incomplete, or entirely wrongâ"was perfectly accurate in this case; the film is an hour and a half of close-ups of women watching a movie (anecdotally, not even the movie portrayed here). There are men in the audience; they can be seen in the background occasionally. But all of the close-ups are of women, mostly Iranian, one French.
Normally, I get it. I understand what Radha Bharadwaj was on about in the vastly underrated Closetland, I saw without any problems what Stan Brakhage was doing in pretty much every one of his movies I've seen, Derek Jarman's Blue made perfect sense to me, even if I didn't think it actually worked all that well. But here, I didn't have clue one what Kiarostami wanted to tell me. I am more than willing to entertain the possibility that it's not the movie, it's me, and this one simply went right over my head. But if Kiarostami had a point to make here, in my estimation, he missed it. We have a series of close-ups and nothing more. *
Rated 1/5 Stars •
Rated 1 out of 5 stars
02/11/23
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Audience Member
Incredible idea for a movie. Watched the first 10 minutes, which probably sufficed - this is one of those brilliant projects that I think might function as well as a review by Borges of a nonexistent movie as as a movie. Of course, understanding Persian instead of having to read subtitles would undoubtedly change the experience, and I suppose if the story is one every one in the intended audience already knows, that changes things entirely. Wish I could be Persian, to appreciate it the way it was intended; next-best option would be a "cultural translation," but I don't even want to think about what that would be for American culture.
Rated 3/5 Stars •
Rated 3 out of 5 stars
02/13/23
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Audience Member
Interesting and brave.
Rated 4/5 Stars •
Rated 4 out of 5 stars
01/30/23
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