Taxi Teheran (2015)

A taxi driver who does not know the city (Teheran) very well talks to a bunch of people who, for different reasons, ride with him in his car. The idea of Taxi is a very simple one, but for all that, an entire world seems to seep into this apparent simplicity. Jafar Panahi often toys with the distinction between reality and fiction, and here he does that as well, in a tender and extremely unpretentious way. Or at least that was how it seemed to me. Some of the customers recognize Panahi as the prominent director. Movie-making is also the topic of some of the conversation between "Jafar" and his precocious niece, who is engaged in a film project at school. The charm of the film lies in the vivid portrait of various people it manages to paint. It has the gentle flow of life itself, with a variety of people from different walks of life. The camera is always placed on the front panel of the car, but even so, the perspective we are given never feels static. Plenty of things are going on, despite the very limited framework. Taxi Teheran is a light-hearted film that takes on its sometimes controversial (in Iran) subjects - among them censorship and punishment) with gentle humor and warm humanity. It is impressive that a director who has been banned in his own country (a 20 year ban on making films!) is able to keep up this kind of complete lack of resentment or bitterness.

What perhaps makes this film so good is that its improvisational feel works very well here. The conversations drift here and there, and always succeeds in keeping me focused and interested. The references to Panahi's celebrity at no point feels like an act of self-glorification; the Panahi we see here as a fiction character is a humble guy who often embarrasses himself and whose celebrity always has a very ambiguous role. In one of the most funny sections, some kind of under-the-table-video-store guy rolls into the car and starts to chat with Panahi. He rents out banned movies - a perfect moment to make some good business! There is also the niece for whom Panahi is a bumbling old-timer who never does the right thing. She establishes her own perspective by directing her camera at Panahi. The two talk about what can and cannot be shown on film. The girl's teacher has instructed the pupils sternly, and now she is already trying to revolt a little - by filming a boy who is taking money which isn't his and then demanding the boy to give the money back because otherwise she would be breaking the rules of film-making! The film also has sad moments, as when Panahi meets an acquaintance he hasn't meet for a long time, and there is an uncanny awkwardness between them. For all this, Taxi Teheran is in a most curious way a hopeful and quietly defiant film about people who are living in difficult surroundings.

Le passé (2013)

Asghar Farhadi made the brilliant A Separation a few years ago and now he returns with Le passé which even though it has much in common with the breakthrough film, is inferior to it because of what I consider to be an over-dramatized story. Farhadi is a capable director and there are a couple of stunning compositions where Farhadi strays from his usual social realism and hints at something more poetic. Farhadi is interested in human psychology and relational twists but in this movie this interest turns into soap opera, unnecessary plot embellishments and well, in general, too much stuff. A man goes to see his ex-wife in France. She lives with three tense kids and a new boyfriend. From the get-go, there are numerous tensions and we instantaneously realize that theirs must have been a bumpy relationship. The beginning of film is rather captivating because one knows so little and Farhadi skillfully makes us guess, wonder and re-think: what's going on with these people? Why are they so angry? What has happened to them? Here, the small details of people who don't get along are focused on, and many times it works. The second part of the movie is a mess of new threads, Big Feelings, Big Secrets & Revelations (Farhadi shows how social technology can be easily integrated into melodramas), and none of this feels very real. My attention went all over the place and maybe my erratic psychological set-up is not to blame exclusively.

Circumstance (2011)

Maryam Keshawarz is a new name in Iranian cinema and I hope she will make more movies after Circumstance, a quite good, but far from perfect movie about young people in love and the society that makes their love invisible. Keshawarz is eager to show us images of Teheran we might not be used to: underground clubs, young people who are more interested in dubbing Milk to persian than leading the traditional life. The kids in the film have lots of secrets and the adult world is shown to tolerate their rebellion to some extent, but there are limits. And some things can't even be mentioned or spoken about. This is the case with the love affair of Atafeh and Shireen. Close friends - ok, but that's all others see. Keshawarz explores the class differences that have an impact on their lives. One of them is a pampered kid with a brother who goes from being an addict to a faux-religious moralist with his own dark secrets. It is mostly this middle class life we see, people who mix the underground clubs with a polished appearance. Keshawarz has many things on her mind here, and sometimes she is too intent on showing us HOW IT IS, so some things here end up as caricatures, too hastily or drastically portrayed to be believable, or engaging. Simply: melodrama abounds. This is a shame, because the film clearly has potentialities.

Close-up (1990)

Close-Up, directed by Abbas Kiarostami is a goofy film that plays with the medium of film on about a thousand different levels. In some cases, I have problems with that kind of approach (it can get self-indulgent) but this film was enjoyable to an extent I couldn't predict. So here we go: the film is based on real events but it's is a fiction film, a mocumentary, but oh wait, the actors play themselves. The story is about a man who impersonates the famous film director Mohsen Makhmalbaf. In this way, he gets in touch with a family, who all think that the guy is making some movie, in which they will act. But soon enough they start suspecting that he is not who he appears to be, and they call the police. He is detained, and tried. The film follows the trial and in the end of the film we see fake-Makhmalbaf together with the real deal Makhmalbaf. No, it doesn't get self-important.

It's a funny film with lots of stuff to admire: the whole thing works splendidly - most of all Kiarostami's direction. I'm not sure how he persuaded the deceived people to participate in the film, but their acting (or whatever we call it) is great.

The film poses questions about the nature of acting (how can it NOT?), questions that have philosophical depth: what does it mean to act? How is acting different from impersonating, and is impersonating and acting the same as pretending? And how is it different from fraud? What does it mean to appear as a specific person and that people believe that you are that person, what kind of responsibility is involved here? These questions arise in connection with the entire idea of the film, to let people play themselves doing stuff they really did do (to some extent), at the same time as the film also was created through improvisation. But these questions is also tackled in the story itself, where we are led into a number of conversations about identity and, you guessed it, identity theft. And then you will also be encouraged to muse about the concept of identification.

But then again this is also a story about why the guy impersonated Makhmalbaf, what kind of problems he was haunted by and what kind of attitude he takes to himself and the people he encounters. It's a sad story about escaping oneself to pretend to be somebody else.

If you intend to watch one hyper-reflective film-about-film-about-film, watch Close-up. And don't miss the last couple of scenes, where you find yet another goofy use of the technique of film that makes you attend to the art of film-making itself. But I hope my review did not give the impression that the film is engrossed in technical jokes. This is not at all the case. Kiarostami is rather preoccupied with moral questions about responsibility.

Bashu, the little stranger (1990)

Bashu, the Little Stranger (Bahram Beizai) turned out to be a pleasant surprise. The story follows a young boy from the south of Iran. He is orphaned in the Iran-Iraq war and flees to the north. He ends up in a small village. Perching in a wide field, he first encounters Nai and her two kids. They are first suspicous (among other things, they have no common language), and he is afraid. Gradually, however, he becomes a part of their family. The villige treats the boy with hostility - the film depicts a cruel form of racism. I liked several things about this film. Stylistically, it was a wonderful film comprising long, languid takes of nature and ordinary chores (the scene on the bazaar was extremely well crafted, very simple but very striking). The film's treatment of the relation between the boy and Nai appealed to me in particular. The boy becomes a part of her life, and she cannot help taking care of him, of taking responsibility, of seeing him as somebody to help and shelter. Trust is often seen as a process where people prove themselves dependable (trust as reliance). In this film, it is perhaps tempting to say that trust is earned, but that would be misleading. Nai grows to trust the boy, and the boy grows to trust Nai, and this is an interdependent form of trust which is not at all about proving oneself worthy. Here, we rather see how the villagers or Nai's absent husband presents a temptation: the boy is a burden, is there any reason that he should be there at all? Does Nai really have any obligation to look after him? We see how this temptation is dangerous, but also how it loses its power and how that perspective slips away.

Facing mirrors (2011)

Eddie is on the run from his family. He jumps into Rana's taxi. Rana supports her family by driving the taxi, but not all family members know that this is what she does. She only takes female passengers and in Eddie she sees a girl. Eddie is on his way to go to Germany to have a sex-change operation. He persuades Rana to take him out of Teheran. In Iran, his family has marriage plans for him. At first, I was afraid that Facing Mirrors (dir. Negar Azarbayjani) would become too much of a 'social issues' film. Afterwards, I realized I appreciated the film on other levels as well. The surroundings - wintry Teheran and desolated roads - were haunting and the minimalistic style of the film worked well. I also liked how the characters were treated. The juxtapositions never became too boxy - the director dodges stereotypes about the traditional and the modern, male and female, hetero and gay. All in all, I thought the film conjured up a moving image of the sudden and drastic thing that friendship is.

A separation (2011)

A Separation is a popular contemporary film - and yet it actually manages to feel like a film for adults. That, in itself, is impressive. The film does not brag with stylistic extravaganza. The center of the film is a couple planning a separation due to one of them moving abroad. Actually, the very both to move, together with their small daughter, but the husband decides to stay to take care of his elderly father. During the rest of the film, we see two people who seem to have loved each other grow more bitter, proud and conscious of keeping up their own sense of self-respect. They both want to do whatever is right "for the child", but it is the child who suffers and who has to make the hardest decisions. As the wife, Simin, moves away, the husband, Nader, hires a care worker to look after the father while he works. Something goes wrong, and a series of personal and juridical strifes ensue. Everybody want to do good but things just get worse. Decency and good manners easily turn into contempt and condescension. A separation is a bleak movie, and it doesn't attempt to make the viewer feel comfortable: everything will be ok in the end. But it doesn't appear to be a cynical film either. It is a film that observes, rather than preaches. Asghar Farhadi directed the film and I am curious about the rest of his production. The tempo of the film is slow and hectic at the same time. We view people in distress, and it is as if the film watches them from one corner of a room that is always crowded, always ablaze with seething or repressed emotions. There is no hint of sentimentality in Farhadi's plot or in the actors' delivery. A separation is raw, willing to tell a story about the knots of human relations, class differences and gender roles. I am glad I watched it.

It's Winter (2006)

Rafi Pitts' It's Winter, a visually stunning film about the impossibility of returning home, puts you in its landscape so firmly that you practically can breathe the air of the chilly winter on the screen, feeling your lungs hurt and your throat stiffen. Cam you imagine Reed desert in Iran? Well, then you can pretty much envisage what this film is like. Yes, there is alienation and yes there is a correspondence between the internal and the external. Mostly, these metaphorical landscapes do not become too blunt and for that we can give our thanks to the cinematographer, who has a marvellous grasp of colors and texture. A grim-looking landscape of industry and infrastructure turns into a journey of the soul. In this film, we have to guess at much of what is going on. The story and the characters remain quite mysterious. A man leaves his daughter and wife to go abroad. Another man heads out into the big city, looking for a job. He meets a friend and lands a job, but a miserable job without pay doesn't make anyone thrive. He meets a woman and they get married. It turns out that ----. Well, I won't spoil it. The film problematizes what it is to find a home within an impossible, barren world. Even though I was moved by many things in this film, I kept worrying about the gender perspective, especially since the female main character remains a mystery - or let's be fair; a bigger mystery than the male characters. This is the kind of film in which women are passive victims, and the men's activity are ruined by bad fate. But this of course also means that the film takes a critical perspective on power and powerlessness. The dream of a man 'looking for something better', is brutally crushed. Independence and manly freedom - these are dangerous ideals that make people miserable. Here, everyone is powerless, mute, almost lifeless. The little life we see is the friendship/love between two men. But also here, the wintry landscape seems to eat up the space for human relations. It's winter is a miserable, yet extremely beautiful, film.

Taste of cherry (1997)

A middle-aged man, Mr. Madii, has decided to commit suicide. However, he needs some help. Madii drives around in his car in the wastelands outside Tehran to find somebody who can help him. He talks to laborers, a young man drafted in the army, a seminary student and a man employed in a museum. He tells them about what he is about to do. He offers them money. But the first people he asks refuse his offer. He is getting increasingly desperate. Taste of cherry is very much a Abbas Kiarostami-film. The quasi-documentary feel is there, the naturalistic dialogue works all right – and the landscape of the film is simply stunning. Still, I feel this is a less successful movie than, for example, The Wind Will Carry Us. Regardless of its slow pacing and naturalism, Taste of cherry has some weak moments, where the dialogue and film language verge on the pathetically pompous. The themes of the film, suicide and the meaning of life are sometimes dealt with in a heavy-handed way. As much as these moments bother me, this is a good film, a moving film. The main character is surrounded by an air of mystery. We know he wants to die. We know he interrupts his interlocutors in a way that signals that he doesn’t really care. He wants to settle the deal. Other than this, we don’t know much. Why this man wants to die, we do not know (there are some very small hints, but in no way are they conclusive). For the first twenty minutes we just see the man slowly driving around in his car, gazing at men. Yes, in fact, it seemed as if this was a cruising hunt, as Madii asked men if they were lonely, if they wanted to take a ride with him, etc.

Nature plays a major part in this film. One might even say that it is a specific perception of nature that the ending scenes revolve around. Nature is not romanticized. Even though one of the characters, who also wanted to commit suicide, talk about the life-inducing experience of eating mulberries, there are other, less traditional, images of nature: a burly machine is shoveling stone, swirling dust, winding roads in a rocky landscape, a town scene in the twilight of the early morning hours. Every frame is filled with a melancholy sense of life, of being alive. Kiarostami underscores this feeling with a masterful combination of sound and images of nature. 

As for the very last images of the film: well, I really don’t know. To me, it didn’t work. I didn’t get the point. I felt it was an unnecessary distancing gesture – what for?

The Wind Will Carry Us (1999)

A man drives a big car through a herd of sheep. The man is hollering, "hello, hello" into his ancient mobile phone. The car trudges up a hill. The man steps out of the car and starts talking in the phone with his employer. Everything is wrong. His project is stuck. Gently, he kicks a turtle that happens to walk by. The camera focuses on the turtle. The car drives away. The camera zooms in the turtle again. The turtle starts to abscond from the camera.

This is one of the brilliant scenes from Abbas Kiarostami's The Wind Will Carry Us, a slightly absurd study of frustration and human encounters. A group of men, we are not sure of their profession, arrive in a village. Something is to be done. The only man we see in-camera, a slightly dour middleaged man, mostly trods along aimlessly in the village, talking to people, asking for milk, asking about the old lady who is rumoured to be dying. Why is he inquiring about the lady all the time? Eventually, it is clear that they are to document a mourning ceremony, if only the woman were to die...

Nothing much happens in the film. We see almost the same scene repeating over and over again, ritualistically. The man drives up the hill, and down the hill again. Make no mistake: Kiarostami does not bore us. His film, one might call it a comedy, is full of life. Of course, I am not a speak of the languages spoken of the film, so should not really say this, but from the contexts, it seems as if language is used very fluidly here, not as a conveyor of information, but as a part of the life people are living, the way the understand one another, or don't.

Ten (2002)

Ten is not Abbas Kiarostami's best film. But it sure is a good film that plays with the form of documentary to create a sudued piece of fiction. The film is divided into - surprise! - ten sequences. In each one of them, we follow the same female driver along with the passenger she happens to have in her car; sometimes it's a woman she has given a lift, and sometimes it's her little Emperor-ish son. If you have any preconceptions about Iranian life, some of them will be shattered by this movie. The women portrayed in the movie do not comprise one homogenous group. Rather, they embody different attitudes towards society, men, what it is like to be a woman. The opening scene is perfectly chosen. The driver has a verbal fight with her son. He accuses her of everything, and she defends herself by critiquing her former husband, and society. The camera rarely (never?) moves from the boy's agitated body language. It's an emotionally poignant seene that creates a kind of suffocating effect, in a good way.
As a viewer, I feel trapped in the car along with these people. The minimalist idea of the film is well executed. I barely think about not seeing anything in the entire movie except the front seat of a car. The makes us strangely aware of the connection between what we hear and what we see. In many scenes, we only see one of the interlocutors, and we can only imagine what the other looks like when she talks. Of course, you might give this a political interpretation.

Blackboards (2000)

Samira Makhmalbaf is the director of Blackboards /Takhté siah (2000). It's a simple, yet politically conscious, film much in the same style as the two other films I have seen by her, The Apple and At five in the afternoon. All three films showcase great acting and many poignant scenes, driven by very simple, close-to-life dialogue. In Blackboards, the main characters are two teachers, Said and Reeboir, who trudge the craggy border area of Iran and Iraq. The story takes place during the Iran-Iraq war. They look for students whom they can teach how to write. They are Kurds and what we get a glimpse into in this film is Kurdish people who have fled their homes, and who intends to return. The teachers hooks up with a group of elderly people, and another group of children carrying goods on their backs. They persist in offering them their services, as teachers and in Said's case, guiding the group of elderly people to the border. The film mostly depicts their perilous journey among the hills. They are in constant fear of border military who aims gunfire at them. Makhmalbaf really has an eye for people and social interaction. She creates amazingly intimate scenes by elucidating the specific occasion. An ailing old man needs to pee but is unable to do that, other men carrying him by each arm and encouraging him to pee. Said approaches every kid he sees with the question, "can you read"? The kids are smart and do not trust this stranger. Suddenly, Said is married to a woman in the group. The woman is not interested. What is atypical and great about Blackboards is how quickly and successfully it manages to introduce its characters. But not by painting with broad streaks, by means of dramatic entrances or eccentric behavior. Characters are established in sensitively written dialogue, in which everything is of importance, even annoying repetitive questions and even things like peeing and eating nuts.