IRANIAN FILM "SHIRIN" A REWARDING CHALLENGE
By Deborah Young
Reuters
Aug 29 2008
UK
VENICE (Hollywood Reporter) – A tough yet fascinating watch once you
get into it, "Shirin" marks another interesting twist in the eclectic
artistic career of Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami.
This feature-length film, screening out of competition at the Venice
International Film Festival, is simply a parade of close-ups of 113
Iranian actresses who are watching a film which we never see. Some
viewers will panic when they realize there’s never going to be a
reverse shot, while others will succumb to a hypnotic series of
beautiful faces and a charming fairy tale read on the soundtrack.
The deceptively simple film is much closer to Kiarostami’s experimental
theater play "Taize" than to such features as "A Taste of Cherry"
and "The Wind Will Carry Us." In "Taize," a traditional religious
play is performed in costume while screens show films of an Iranian
audience’s emotional involvement with the story. Here the narration
is taken from an 800-year-old Persian love story about Shirin, the
princess of Armenia, and Khosrow, the prince of Persia. On screen,
however, we see only the reactions of a female "audience" watching
a film that only exists in the mind of the viewer.
In fact, Kiarostami has stated that the actresses are staring at three
dots on a sheet of white cardboard off-screen, while imagining their
own love stories; he chose the Shirin narration only later, after he
finished filming. It is an effective trick, in any case, because the
illusion that the women are watching a film is quite strong.
The camera delves deeply into the expressive, sometimes teary eyes
of the silent actresses, who include major Iranian stars like Hedieh
Tehrani (also credited as casting director), Leila Hatami and Niki
Karimi, as well as French actress Juliette Binoche, recognizable even
in a headscarf and without makeup. Everyone is democratically given
equal screen time.
Delightfully full of passionate trysts in perfumed gardens, the story
of Shirin and Khosrow is probably unfilmable in today’s Iran. The
melodramatic tale of star-crossed love is still engrossing, even
though nonstop subtitles are required for foreign audiences. Still,
the narration is an essential part of the movie, creating a palpable
tension between the image and the soundtrack. One’s focus tends to
shift back and forth between word and image in a very noticeable way.
The story is skillfully read between the tragic and kitsch by a cast of
narrators lead by Manoucher Esmaieli and is accompanied by a historical
"film score" by Morteza Hananeh and Hossein Dehlavi.