Diary Judgements

Kiarostami’s early feature “The Report” lacks the ironic detachment that is so inventively deployed in his later works, but it is more immediate and relatable. Kiarostami's better-known works from the 1990s tend to be movies, in some way, about movies. “The Report” is less self-conscious; its attention is fully on the story of a young tax inspector falling out with his wife.

Firouzkui at first seems like a fashionable modern Iranian. He has a handsome young family and jovial, like-minded coworkers. At the office his job is to sail over petty disputes about taxes and rents. But he is also in the middle of a moral collapse that echoes and re-echoes, claustrophobically. There is no one cause. Money, office politics, tensions with his wife, and the pressures of parenthood all feed back on one another. They form somehow a connected circle of anxiety. In one scene, his boss’s new child occasions a fight with his wife, who is annoyed that he cannot remember the sex of the child. In another, his toddler finds a notice of overdue rent.

The movie works somewhat in the pensive, poetic vein of Rossellini’s “Journey to Italy” or Ermanno Olmi’s “I Fidanzati,” which are also about fighting couples. They are not so much about the kicking and screaming as about the aftermath, about having to live with yourself afterward. In a state of such private unease, everything seems to convey a message, melancholy and elusive. Firouzkui broods over spilled pomegranates and an old man walking off into the sunset and the stories he hears in an all-night deli. By the end of the movie, he has retreated so far into himself that he can barely even speak.

“Like Someone in Love,” like Kiarostami’s previous film “Certified Copy,” is about an attractive woman fawning over a gray-haired man, with unexpected consequences. The inherent falseness in the relationship gives way to something real but also dangerous.

Akiko fawns because it’s her job. She is a college student in Tokyo, alone and adrift, like everyone, in that city’s neon glare. She's also a call girl. We meet her one night when things are quietly coming to a head: she has test to study for, a grandmother coming in from out of town, and a boyfriend getting suspicious of where she really goes at night. On top of it all, her pimp has scheduled her for a mysterious VIP.

At least the man turns out to be a kindly old translator, with whom she spends the evening conversing like a long-lost granddaughter. But underneath these gentle rhythms the movie never loses its sense of dread. Their encounter appears innocent and asexual, but is it? If Akiko shows girlish interest in Watanabe’s books and paintings, or tries to tell a joke and flubs it cutely, is it because she is being herself or are these all just tricks of the trade? And then to initiate sex or forestall it? For his part, Watanabe’s gentlemanly forbearance is no proof at all of pure intent; he would hardly be the first timid man cowed by a prostitute.

What we have here is another of Kiarostami’s black holes, a relationship that may be either authentic or inauthentic, real friendship or a cynical transaction, but is really both and neither. The next morning Watanabe drives Akiko to her exam, but the moment of serenity is upset when Akiko’s  boyfriend Noriaki shows up. An overwrought stereotype of the disaffected youth, he seems ready at every moment to either punch someone or burst into tears. But Watanabe’s grandfatherly demeanor calms him, and after he  fixes a drive belt on Watanabe's car, all seems to be right with this impromptu little family, in which in fact no one really knows anyone.

“Like Someone in Love” is the finest example since “The Wind Will Carry Us” of Kiarostami’s undulating cinematic style. Instead of using cuts to indicate transitions, there will be little organic interruptions within the frame, like a car pulling up or a voice calling out or a phone ringing. But with just such inevitability, the harmony between Watanabe, Akiko, and Noriaki sours. The dread that has been present throughout grows into a roar. The ending is sudden and traumatic but also something of a release: in one stroke, we no longer have to worry about who Watanabe really is.

Ever since the sublime humanity of “The Wind Will Carry Us,” Abbas Kiarostami’s work has shown a coldness and a bitterness that speaks almost to mid-life despair and self-doubt, ironically at the very moment when his reputation outside Iran was being consolidated. Prestige pouring in, he seems not quite to have known what to do with himself. He made a documentary about AIDS (“ABC Africa”), then a couple of dry photography experiments (“Ten” and “Five”), then a pair of manifestos reaffirming his working principles (“Ten on 10” and “The Roads of Kiarostami”). However valuable and intelligent, this work has been not so much cinema as skeptical commentary on cinema. It seems to brood over whether emotional truth is even possible on film. As a result, it has ideas but little intimacy. “Shirin,” another experimental film, seemed possibly to signal a new direction, but even there the conceit of inflicting an unseen movie on a legion of professional actresses was also a clear act of aggression against the idea of cinema.

This, then, is the context for “Certified Copy,” Kiarostami’s first film resembling a traditional narrative since “The Wind Will Carry Us” and his first feature made outside Iran ever. It is Kiarostami’s most watchable film in years, but it too is a statement in bitterness, this time about the awkward horrors of the over-45 dating scene. Two successful, well-preserved people, of the kind who probably advertise in the back pages of The New York Review of Books, go on a late-afternoon ramble through Tuscany. Art and romance are all around them; each wants it, and knows the other does too. Yet they are impossibly hung up. First they spar meaninglessly about the ideas in his book, about whether a copy can be as good as an original. This is meant as intellectual foreplay, but is merely tedious. Then right when they seem about to make a real connection they embark on a bizarre role-playing game. She berates and implores him as if he were her actual husband, from whom she is evidently all but separated, and he plays along, flashing back no doubt to memories of an unhappy marriage of his own. This, it seems, is what it’s like to be back on the market at a certain age, needy but also disillusioned, condemned to treat everyone as a stand-in for an ex.

These are bitter, used-up people. Outwardly, they seem to have a lot going for them. An author on a publicity tour and a gallery-owner, respectively, he is tall and suave, she vivacious and creamy. They are practically a pair of middle-aged sex symbols, cougar and silver fox. Perhaps that is their problem. At an unseemly age, they are so focused on sex and flirtation that they have lost all sensitivity to anything else, to humor, beauty, nature, time. Instead, he plays the haughty know-it-all, she the flighty dame. But the more time we spend with them the more they are exposed as merely silly, self-deceived people incapable of stepping outside of themselves. He is cold; she is shrill. They deserve each other.

It is hard to escape the feeling that this is all partly autobiographical. The movie opens with the man making an insufferably pompous appearance to promote his book. Kiarostami has contempt for everyone in the room: the fawning audience as well as the author himself, who seems on some level to realize that it is all a waste of time but soaks up the attention nonetheless. Veteran of the highbrow publicity circuit, Kiarostami no doubt knows these situations well. No doubt he too has fielded advances from art groupies. Perhaps he too has indulged in the narcissism on offer, and regretted it. Perhaps this is in fact the root cause of his mid-career depression.

“Shirin” is the first of Kiarostami’s experimental features to really break new ground. Instead of the usual wide-open spaces and non-professional actors, he uses over a hundred professional actresses and keeps them indoors. They sit in the dark watching a movie that is heard but never seen. The entirety of “Shirin” is a montage of spectating female faces. What they are watching is evidently a treatment of the Persian tale of Shirin, a beautiful princess cursed to suffer heroically for her passions. In response, the viewers flinch and fidget and sigh; there are a few discreet tears. The most obvious reading of Kiarostami’s “Shirin” is as a sort of tribute to Iranian womanhood. It says, “You are all, in your wonderful diversity, treasures like Shirin.”

But this being Kiarostami, there are layers and twists. For one, not all the women are Iranian. Juliette Binoche has part, only no larger or smaller than any other woman. Other nuances come out only in the making-of documentary “Taste of Shirin.” In fact, the actresses were not in a real theater. They were in Kiarostami’s modest living room, and in fact they were not watching a movie at all. They were simply acting as if they were. In the documentary, Kiarostami can be seen superintending all of their little reactions from eye-movements to scarf-adjustments. Finally, and most peculiarly, they were given no context, only general instructions. They were not told to imagine Shirin or any other plot. Kiarostami’s plan was evidently to capture an abstract, all-purpose catalogue of reactions that could be edited to match any story at all.

This makes for an obscure hybrid of acting and non-acting. In the behind-the-scenes footage, the actresses are clearly working hard. The process seems quite laborious, hardly improvisatory at all. But at the same time there is no character or role or persona that any of them are striving to inhabit. They are not even playing the role of spectators at a movie, because there is literally no such movie for the characters to watch, hence for the actresses to imagine watching. They are, in a sense, playing themselves but at two levels of abstraction. First, they are pretending to have the vicarious reactions that moviegoers have, not happiness or sadness but a kind of second-hand happiness or sadness. And second, there is no movie, not even a hypothetical one!

Kiarostami’s point here seems to be that acting, even of the most professional kind, is still a part of reality. It is still a job performed by a real person in real time, and, no less than with any other job, how she does it must reveal in some small way something of her true character. Of course, we are usually too interested in the pretense that the actress is trying to get across. Hence the necessity for the abstraction that Kiarostami introduces: the actresses play spectators, and they don’t even know what they are supposed to be watching. The idea is that by highly artificial means suitably arranged, we may begin to see women as they really are.

“I Am Love” is a quietly enveloping ode to the sensory delights of Italy. The Recchi are a family of Milan industrialists who live surrounded by everything sumptuous and tasteful, from clothes to food to furnishings. Their lifestyle is an easy balance of traditional and modern, organic and synthetic, elegant and down-to-earth. In the family palazzo, for example, the dark wood paneling of the entryway is set off by modernist glass doors and a towering cactus garden. As for avocation, they are artists, athletes, and amateur chefs in addition to men and women of affairs. They exude wealth but treat their servants (almost) as members of the family. They seem to have mastered not only business but the entire art of bourgeois civilization.

The patriarch of the Recchi may be dying, but there is a crop of bright and handsome grandchildren to carry on his success. Edo and Betta of course have ideas of their own. Edo dreams of opening a restaurant with his friend Antonio, a poor but talented chef. Betta has her art and her newly discovered lesbianism. But this is all just context. The real story is Edo and Betta’s mother Emma, who married into the family and now finds herself awakened by an affair with the chef Antonio, her son’s best friend. As if in response to a spiritual calling, she divests herself of family and luxury to lead a life of simplicity and sensuality.

The director Luca Guadagnino is a wonderful aestheticizer. He could seemingly photograph anything at all and make the resulting frames throb with visual beauty. His approach is enthusiastically Epicurean but artisanal, discreet, almost shy. He revels in simple textures enjoyed in moments of solitude. This is a movie to be consumed and savored.

The flip-side is a certain simple-mindedness. Essentially all the movie does is weigh-up two categories of pleasure. A woman gives up the pleasures of wealth for the pleasures of the body: if only life were so simple! What love and duty and happiness might consist in beyond pleasure the movie is completely silent about. That life might consist moreover in irresolvable conflict between these things is not even surmised. This is because, like its good bourgeois characters, the movie has a utilitarian worldview, on which life is simply about mechanically bending toward the greater pleasure. Once the pleasures have been experienced, the decision is made; the will never enters into it. Mind and soul, on this view, are simply appendages of the stomach, the genitals, and the pocketbook. This obsession with pleasure is not so much a rebellion against capitalism as a consequence of it.

“I Am Love” is so thoroughly an artifact of consumerism that practically every interaction between characters is mediated by some kind of object. Characters never speak revealingly; only things do. Emma learns of Betta’s lesbianism from a CD she finds in some dry cleaning. The mother communes with her children’s effects more than with the children themselves. Antonio wins people over through food, and his affair with Emma is revealed—reified—through food. It is as if the Recchi are cursed as mass producers of things to be forever suffocated by things. But then again it is also the audience who is alienated. The things in a shot always say more to us than the characters do. Even during a close-up of an embrace after a wrenching family tragedy, a stylish diamond ring has to creep into the frame, declaring itself as the real star.

In “Dogtooth,” three adult children live with their parents in a walled compound, a single-family utopia. They know nothing of the outside world. Only the father goes in and out to work as an executive, but at home he and wife use tricks and intimidation to keep the children in a state of fearful innocence. When words from the outside seep in, they are said to refer to familiar things, like chairs and flowers. A Frank Sinatra record is said to be a recording of Grandfather. The only movies are home movies. The children are like zoo animals, totally dependent on their keepers, totally alienated from reality and their own instincts, depressed and insane. They are told they will be able to leave when one of their canine teeth grows out, which of course it never will.

On one hand, “Dogtooth” is an allegory of the limits of paternalistic control. The father underestimates the disruptive effects of letting an outsider in. The children, especially the older daughter, are pliant but only within limits. And this tendency for reality to assert itself seems true. On the other hand, the world the children inhabit is so artificial that it makes it hard to gauge the authenticity of their reactions. They behave variously like five year-olds and like blasé adults, like primitive savages and like simpletons. But is this how humans would actually behave, even in the stipulated conditions? For example, none of the groups listed above are so asexual as the characters in “Dogtooth.” And would even the most cloistered minds really take it on faith that cats are deadly man-eaters? Yes, they have been conditioned, but the larger point of the movie is precisely that conditioning has limits.

“Fish Tank” is a portrait of a fifteen year-old tomboy in a London housing project. But this is not another bleak pseudo-documentary. Instead of solemn, it is tart and screwy. Instead of drab, the landscape is sunny, with wind turbines and greenbelts. The characters are poor but also awash in crass consumerism. But, again, this is not an excursion to see how the other half lives, even in the postmodern welfare state. Above all, it is a story. The characters are characters, not class-representatives. They are singular, too acerbically themselves to speak for anyone else. Nor are the events the stuff of everyday life. They are certainly not to be found in the dossiers of every social worker in the country. Without being fantastic, they have an almost mythical quality. There are, for example, undertones of the Oedipus drama, right down to the bloody foot.

The hero Mia is, from the very first, an individual. While her peers loiter like sheep, she invents dance moves for exhausting, lonely hours in an abandoned housing unit. The first time she speaks, she is leaving an anxious voicemail for a friend: “Keely, it’s me. What’s goin’ on?—I’ve left like fhree messages. I said sorry, didda I? You know what I’m like—I was pissed off. Ring me back, ya bitch.” We never find out what it was all about, but this is her character in full: vulgar, nervy, volatile but candid, self-aware, pleading, and even playful.

She lives with her thirtyish mother and pre-pubescent sister, all three caught in the same void between childhood and adulthood. At once precocious and arrested, they all drink and swear and scream. They listen to the same music, delight in the same girly tchotchkes, and exhibit the same sullen irresponsiblity. When the mother brings home a charming, laid-back boyfriend, he seems to fill all of their ambiguous needs. Is he a father-figure or a lover or both? Or neither? In any case, he is the perfect yang to their surplus of yin. Mia is especially taken with him, at first in spite of herself, when he nurtures her artistic ambitions, then hopelessly, when their relationship becomes sexual. This may be statutory rape, but Mia responds with a transgression of her own that is altogether more twisted and surprising.

The writer-director Andrea Arnold is a major artist. In her hands the camera is not a documentary bludgeon but a kit of brushes. She is interested in the beautiful as well as the ugly, one coexisting on top of the other. Her landscapes and close shots often show inspiration from the patience and serenity of the Dutch masters, of Vermeer or Van Eyck. She sometimes use a shaky frame but the shakiness is always matched precisely to a character’s level of internal disarray; it is never simply a presupposition of the genre.

The skin of the title is the female skin, donned by a mysterious alien and used to lure unsuspecting men. For what purpose is never completely clear. What is clear is that the men are prey—stalked, liquidated, skinned. Some of the attempts succeed, some don’t. With one exception, force is never used; the men are entirely the victims of their own appetites.

After an encounter with a shy, disfigured outcast, the alien begins to develop empathy with her victims. She flees the dingy city for the countryside. There she seems to find a kinder, gentler breed of man to justify her change of heart. But not entirely, for misogyny finds her there as well, and far more violently, all on account of her female skin.

Much of the allure of “Under the Skin” comes from the way we are made to see men in the way men usually see women, as sexual prey. The fact that Scarlett Johansson plays an alien and not a woman is absolutely key. If we were merely seeing through the eyes of a female character, we would still, in effect, be seeing her. It would be her appetites that were on display, and therefore in question: to be female is often to be stubbornly visible. But instead actual women never enter into it. We are seeing from the perspective of a being dressed and treated as female, but pointedly not female. The politics of female desire are never an issue. This rather limits the reach of “Under the Skin” as an exploration of women and their status. But it may be that it captures quite well indeed the experience, and perhaps even the tragedy, of the gay transvestite, who assumes all the risks of being a woman, with the added danger of being discovered in moments of intimacy as something not-woman.

Overall, the movie is a glossy, mostly silent collage without much substantive content, the transvestite angle notwithstanding. The use of unscripted interactions between a disguised Scarlett Johansson and unwitting men on the street is audacious and ingenious, but those scenes never go very far. They feel a bit like “Jackass”-style segments in which civilians are not so much unintentional collaborators as marks who can be gotten every time. Johansson has the natural opacity to play an alien but this makes the character’s emotional awakening in the second half less affecting. The director has to force it with a rather twee excursion to a ruined castle.

“Blue is the Warmest Color” is a three-hour movie about a rather ordinary love affair between two young people in France. Love begins one day with an illicit glance on the way to school; the lovers graduate and move in together; it peters out several years later. One of the pair is an aspiring teacher with a certain slovenly, lower middle-class charisma. The other is a painter with blue hair and a pretentious, upper middle-class self-confidence. They are supposed to be enthusiasts of literature and art, respectively, but it would appear that they are at best modestly above-average. Neither is particularly talented, neither attempts anything significant, and neither says anything interesting or witty. They are ordinary, rather directionless, rather dumb. We may like them but we do not respect them. Is the mere fact that they are two women—lesbians—enough to make this exercise in lifelike boredom worthwhile?

A movie about banal, inarticulate people should, if nothing else, say something about why they are the way they are. Unfortunately, “Blue is the Warmest Color” is no more intelligent than its characters. It says nothing at all about lesbianism. One comes away with the impression that lesbians are people who go around gobbling oysters and ogling female nudes at the art museum. It says next to nothing about high school politics or class differences, other than that they exist. What difficulties they might pose in a mature romantic relationship is unexplored. Formally, every scene is shot in the exact same way: in close-up, always of people either shrugging, dancing, eating, groping each other, or crying, all of it sloppily. If the aim was to rub our faces in the fluids of everyday life, then the movie succeeds admirably.

What is going on here? Why was this movie acclaimed as one of the very best of its year? For one, it is less about lesbianism than about youth. Under the guise of “realism,” it panders to a certain stereotype of youths as witless, hedonistic pagans, natives of the wasteland defined by rap music, junk food, public buses, and multicultural schools. We are thus offered a window on their customs: how they chew with their mouths open, wear their hair in strange ways, and generally care about very little. We see that they have feelings but that they cannot express them except by tears, blank stares, and fucking. Above all, they cannot think. Even the bookish ones in “Blue is the Warmest Color” have only a cringe-inducing imitation of culture.

Though made in America, “Man Hunt” is Fritz Lang’s return to Europe, as a setting and perhaps as a state of mind. Once more we see the enchanted forests and stage-like interiors organized and photographed with thrilling intellectual clarity. The wonderful first act, in a mountaintop Nazi retreat, has the incisiveness of firsthand experience. Though Lang fled Germany in the early days of Nazi rule, he seems to know these character-types well. He has a feel for the ceremonious sadism of the Gestapo chief and the puerile glee of his lapdog, a diminutive doctor. The bizarre little details of decor and bearing are credible and chilling without being over-the-top.

The problem is that the central premise is scarcely credible. All plots depend on coincidences, but “Man Hunt” is built on a completely unlikely motive. We are supposed to believe that a gentleman English big-game hunter might carefully sneak within range then, with loaded gun, bring himself to the nearest verge of killing Adolf Hitler, and refrain, all in the name of sport. The Nazis naturally don’t believe this, and neither do we. They hound him back to London; we can see that his far-fetched character is a symbol for Anglo-American isolationists who preach sporting open-mindedness about Nazism when the fate of the world, their own included, is under threat.

Fritz Lang, with his penchant for looking down on both sides, probably enjoyed the irony that while “The Return of Frank James” was in some way an apology for pro-Confederate guerrillas, his next picture shows them as mendacious thugs. “Western Union” sets eye-catching action against the building of the first transcontinental telegraph line. Like John Ford’s “The Iron Horse,” about the completion of the Transcontinental Railroad in the same era, it celebrates Union, even if it is closer in style to paperback entertainment than to Ford’s epic poetry.

“Western Union” is an engaging bundle of elements, none of which have much to do with the others, but the film moves smartly among them. The characters are bland but tailored for vicarious identification, all equally good in their own way. There is the rugged man with a past, the devilishly charismatic dude from back East, the noble engineer, and his sister, the girl they all adore. Despite the potential for conflict, the real point is how well all these fantastic people get along. Problems are shrugged off with a grin. Even the dark secret of the man with a past turns out to be nothing that could really be held against him. Children could play these roles in their playground games: you be Shaw, I’ll be Blake.

“The Return of Frank James” is one of Fritz Lang’s lighter movies, a tale, like “Fury” and “You Only Live Once,” of an outlaw on trial, but with none of the inner tension. Despite his bad name, Frank James never needs to be redeemed. He is honest and mild-mannered. The girl Eleanor is sweet and spunky, the sidekick lovably immature, and the black farmhand loyal to the point of death. These are characters without flaws. It’s the rest of the world that is temperamental and dangerous.

This may be one of Lang’s sunnier movies, but it is no warmer than usual. The authorities, even those who take Frank’s side, are uniformly buffoons and demagogues endlessly re-litigating the Civil War. At one point, Lang even plays a trick on the audience, making the hero re-enact John Wilkes Booth’s leap onto the stage. Nor is the ultimate authority—the people—left unindicted. They save Frank, but from themselves. They are shown as easily manipulated by theatrics and bold-face headlines. Frank just happens to have fame and a propagandist on his side. If the mob does the right thing this time, it might just as easily be stirred to opposite results next time.

“10 on Ten” seems at first like bonus material, a kind of director’s commentary on “Ten” filmed in the digital bare-bones style of the movie itself. Much of what Kiarostami says as he drives around the same hills where “Taste of Cherry” was shot is an interesting but unsurprising defense of his neo-neo-realist aesthetic: unprofessional actors, simple equipment, open-ended scripts—reality directly seen. It seems, in other words, as sincere and straightforward as a manifesto. But this is not the first time Kiarostami has made a show of explaining himself. Anyone who remembers the ambiguously fictive self-portrayals in “Life, and Nothing More…” and “Through the Olive Trees” should be wary of understanding “10 on Ten” literally.

Kiarostami’s experimental work seems not so much to break new ground as to exhibit ideas that have already seen honorable service in earlier films. The artier presentation might prompt one to go back and appreciate just how much was going on before, but only if one missed it the first time around. Just as it is hard to see what the driving and talking of “Ten” adds to Kiarostami’s many other moments of front-seat intimacy, it is hard to see what “Five” adds, for example, to the magnificent long takes at the end of “Life, and Nothing More…” and “Through the Olive Trees” or to the patient observation in “The Wind Will Carry Us” and “ABC Africa.”

“Ten” is Abbas Kiarostami’s rather tepid return to experimental filmmaking. It is seemingly designed to test the intuition that digital cameras left unattended can capture such intimate, unscripted moments that the director need only curate them. Ten one-on-one conversations, all directly or indirectly shedding light on the vulnerable position of women, in Iran and in life generally, are recorded in the front seat of a car. The choice of women as a topic may be guided by the notion that the digital camera, in making the director’s authority less central, is a feminist technology. In any case, the driver is an elegant, professional woman. Her passenger in four of the episodes is her young son Amin, upset about his parents’ divorce and his mother’s remarriage. Her sister and friend, both enduring break-ups, get two episodes each. A devout, penniless old woman and a cynical prostitute provide contrast.