The Mystery of Truth in the films of Abbas Kiarostami

Renowned Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami’s filmography is a mysterious paradox. His films are incredibly simple and complex at the same time in a way that is not easy to describe. His minimalism may have a reserved aesthetic on the surface, but in employing realism and a subtle use of the camera, he makes films that are deep and complicated both in style and content. His works may initially seem similar to Italian Neorealism due to the use of long takes, nonactors, and plots that focus on ordinary small towns and their inhabitants, but more than anything, Kiarostami’s films are a self aware analysis about the elusive nature of truth, and cinema’s inability to capture it despite being able to record and reproduce sound, light, and movement. They also give international audiences a glimpse into Iranian life, a portrait that is so much more human than what we see from the media.

While the Neorealist movement stripped down Hollywood aesthetics to give us more ‘real,’ looking films, Kiarostami goes one step further. Showing his own creative role in the making of his stripped down pictures is one of his main obsessions. His career started with what has become deemed The Koker trilogy, Where is my Friend’s House, And Life Goes On, and Through the Olive Trees. They are all set in or around Koker, a humble picturesque small town in the countryside surrounded by olive trees.They would also give Kiarostami international recognition and feature all of the principal themes that would appear in his subsequent films.

The first film, Where is My Friend’s House most closely resembles the Neorealist films. It is about a little boy, Ahmed, who finds he has accidentally taken his friend’s school notebook home with him and sets out to return it so his friend does not get in trouble with the teacher. It is a beautifully simple film with naturalistic performances from nonactors that lived in the town. The boys are especially exceptional, their innocent faces beaming with emotion and personality. They are the first child actors to work with the director, who would become known for using them. Kiarostami shoots these seemingly isolated, hidden villages, giving international audiences a first hand look at the magnificent labyrinths of streets and clay houses that make up small town Iranian life. The camera follows Ahmed as he weaves and turns, climbs and ducks through the streets between one town and the other. His environment, surely mundane and unextraordinary to him, to a Western viewer is a joy to behold, a journey to a before unseen land. The Iranian life Kiarostami shows us is much deeper and more interesting than the stereotypical images we see on the news.

One recurring image in the film is a path that zigzags up a steep hill, leading from one village to the other. One the top of the hill is a single tree. We see Ahmed go back and forth, up and down this path again and again. His adventure is not Around the World in 80 Days. It is much more ordinary, but as exemplified by this path, everyday life can be just as interesting as the impossible if we pay close enough attention. Long shots of windy paths would also become a staple in Kiarostami’s films. There is a moving poetic beauty to his long shots of cars or people moving their way through twisty paths that cut across the landscape.

This same path would be seen again in And Life Goes On, Kiarostami’s second cinematic trip to the region. Here Kiarostami directly acknowledges his own role and the role of cinema in the storytelling process. Shortly after filming Where is My Friend's House, an earthquake hit the region and killed 40,000 people. Kiarostami decided to make a film about the fictional version of himself, the director of Where is My Friend’s House, and his son returning to Koker to see the damages of the tragedy. It is a brilliant work of metacinema, where we return with Kiarostami’s stand in on a mission to see if the protagonists of the first film survived. We get to see both the young actors from the first film in moving moments not only because they survived, but also because they have grown up and changed. They are now adolescents, and they are not fictional characters, but they are themselves! Or are they? It is needless to say the moments of reencounter are simple conversations shot through the car window or in the car itself. No Hollywood emotional soundtrack tugging at your heartstrings, or tear inducing thrilling climax. The film is a brilliant half documentary that is fictional, and we know it, but almost despite ourselves.

Almost all of the film takes place in a car as the director tries to get to the towns, getting lost, backtracking because of destroyed roads, and picking up locals to ask directions and information along the way. The car would become a zone of comfort for Kiarostami, a literal vehicle of course, but also a metaphorical space of human interaction and conversation in motion.

The title clearly states the film's main message. Despite the tragedy, the locals talk about the deceased matter of factly and are busy rebuilding their homes. They suffer for their lost loved ones, but they must continue forward. You only live once. At the end of the film we see the locals setting up a screen to watch a football game on television collectively. Even after disasters we cannot stop living. We can mourn and cry, but we must move one before we too pass away.

The final film in the trilogy becomes so meta that it loses the documentary quality the second film had. Through the Olive Trees is about the director who directed And Life Goes On and the troubles and experiences he had on set. We have now gone so far down the wormhole of self referencing oneself and one's process that it is almost like standing directly between two mirrors, with a seemingly unending possibility of films about the making of the previous film.

Between filming the first and second film in The Koker trilogy Kiarostami shot Close Up, a film many scholars and critics believe to be his masterpiece. Is the film that plays most with the idea of truth, documentary, and fiction, juggling truth, lies, and cinema to the point that it becomes impossible to tell what is what. The film’s plot is the bizarre true story of a man, Hossain Sabzian who impersonates successful Iranian filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf to integrate himself into the lives of a middle class family. The family take him in, ecstatic with their new artist friend who decides to cast them in his new film. However, the family begins to sense something is wrong and calls the police to investigate the matter.

Here is where Kiarostami comes in. The story became famous in Iran and Kiarostami decided to make a film about it, using all of the people to play themselves as he films the court process and sentencing. It is an absolutely remarkable semi documentary film. As I watched it I was completely moved by Sabzian’s defence of himself. His lies were really harmless, and he defends them as a way of paying homage to the art of cinema, of showing what it meant to him and how deeply it touched him. Playing the role of a director made him feel like he was part of the process, even if he was taking an innocent family for a ride at the same time, but there was no malice in his actions.

Though the opening scene where a taxi driver takes police officers and a journalist to arrest Sabzian in the action must have been staged, they have a documentary feeling to them, and the court scenes seemed completely real. However, after further research, the entire film is a fabrication in one way or another. Though there was no script, Kiarostami would tell his ‘actors’ what to say before shooting. Though he was given permission to shoot the real court process, in a remarkable turn of events, Kiarostami became a sort of overseeing figure in the whole process, telling both the defendants and prosecutors what to say, and influencing the judge’s final decision. This is an unprecedented example of a director who is not filming a work of fiction or a documentary. It is a much more intense relationship. It is an instance where the film itself directly affects real life in real time as it depicts it. It is an incredible type of almost performance cinema. In the end the filmmaker has gotten so involved in the life of his subject, that his presence has changed any real, raw depiction of events irrecoverably. It is a fabrication turned true, and a dizzily incomprehensible experiment in cinema history.

In 2002 Kiarostami made another experimental film involving only two digital cameras, actors, and a car. In Ten, he films a woman driver, Mania, and ten different conversations she has with different people. Unlike Close Up, it could not be simpler to describe, but it is similarly revolutionary in its content and aesthetic. It is the most obviously political of all Kiarostami’s films, featuring a female protagonist who speaks bluntly about the roles of a woman with her female passengers and her son. Her most shocking conversation is with a prostitute who lectures her on her monogamous sex life, condemnimg the Iranian society and the behavior of men including a fiance she once had and her married clients. As she lives she is free, and also free of children as she unabashedly admits that she aborts when she gets pregnant. The film was unsurprisingly blacklisted in Iran.

While the prostitute conversation is shocking, the most distressing scenes come between the mother and her son (mother and son in real life), with another brilliantly honest performance from a child actor. The film begins with more than ten minutes of conversation between the two, and the camera does not move from Amin, the son, meaning we only hear his mother’s voice. The two argue, shriek, and scream at each other over the diverce between Mania and Amin’s father. Amin accuses her of lying that his father was a drug addict to get a divorce as she admits in replying that in Iran it is the only way for an unhappy woman to get a divorce, is to be beaten or lie. This, like all Mania’s excuses falls on deaf ears. Amin may understand her point, but that does not stop her from being a disappointing mother and wife. Amin says if his father remarries his new wife will be better than her because she will be at home and will cook new meals every day and will not have a job. Mania shrugging tries to defend herself saying she wants her freedom. She wants to be able to have hobbies and have money to hire a maid to take care of the house. But Amin’s idea of a mother is Iran’s idea of a mother, and nothing Mania says will make her sound anything but selfish.

While it’s content is powerful and frustrating, the film is Kiarostami’s most minimalist. He connected two cameras to the interior of the car and gave the actors simple instructions of what to talk about before putting them on the road. He was not even present for the shooting of the scenes thanks to new digital cameras. This again, gives the film a documentary style, as does his use of nonactors, a real life mother and son, and the inclusion of scenes of people waiting in the car for Mania to return. As her sister waits she stares out the window, picks at her face, and shuffles in her seat. These small moments make the film all the more invigorating and believable.

Kiarostami won the Palme d’Or in Cannes 1997 for his brilliant film The Taste of Cherry. Like Ten and Life Goes On, almost the entire film takes place in a car. One remarkable aspect of Iranian life that these films show us is the essentially social nature of Iranian people. They are constantly talking with people they pass, picking them up, offering them rides, gossiping, asking for information. It Is a very friendly society where everyone talks with everyone if they suddenly need help, can offer help, or simply think of something to say.

In a Taste of Cherry the conversations are not so innocent. A man, Mr Baadi, goes around trying to pick up strangers and talking with them before asking a simple, yet impossible favor. He wants to commit suicide and has already dug his grave. He just needs someone to come by and put dirt over him if he is successful. We are told nothing about the man or why he wants to commit suicide, and are put in the passengers seat with him in a constant shot reverse shot between him and his copilots. There are also long shots of the beautiful dusty landscapes and winding roads that typically make up Kiarostami’s films. It is insinuated that perhaps Mr. Baadi is gay as he picks up random men and engages them in conversation before asking them to do him a favor, and his three passengers, a soldier, a seminarian, and an old taxidermist take their aims at philosophizing and convincing him against it. Perhaps this is really what Mr. Baadi is looking for a good excuse not to pull the trigger.

The film ends with him in his grave as a thunderstorm approaches and cuts to black. It is a great open ending as the audience must put themselves in his mind and decide if his days conversations had shown him life was worth living Then something strange happens, Kiarostami then puts footage of the shoot including himself and the main actor to break the fourth wall. Even in a perfectly wonderful narrative film, Kiarostami just had to remind us we are watching a film. This scene is not nearly as interesting as his other experiments with truth, documentary, lies, and reality, and actually feels completely surplus, but obviously Kiarostami couldn't resist.

In 2010 Kiarostami left Iran to make his first non Iranian film, Certified Copy, instead making a very European film in Italy with a very European actress, Juliette Binoche. Though the setting and actors may have changed, and even the style has echoes of Resnais and Antonioni, it is very much a Kistromi film and his last masterpiece. It is about an author who has written a book that argues that copies of great works of art have the same value as the originals. An art gallery owner played by Binoche invites the man to her shop and we spend the day with them. At the beginning of the film they seem like strangers. There is some sexual tension, yet the man is arrogant and the woman restless, and they easily break into arguments. Then, half way through the film, something incredible happens. As the man takes a phone call outside, an old Italian waitress talks with Binoche and mistakes them for a couple. Binoche goes along with her and tells her partner about the game as he re-enters, but it quickly and indescribably becomes much more than a game. For the rest of the film they transform into a real couple who were married years ago and whose love has disintegrated.

The film deals with truth and reality much like Kiarostami’s past filmography, but in a more metaphorical way. What is truth, who are we? Are we what others see us as, or do we know the real truth behind our identity? What is original and what is a copy when everything is influenced by what came before it and real originality ceases to exist, if it ever did in the first place?

The film is beautifully shot in long takes as the couple stroll, converse, and argue through the quaint Italian village. The audience is left utterly perplexed and enchanted by the film and left baffled asking what is real, what isn’t? Is the first half of the film real and the second a fantasy, or vice versa? What is the secret behind the film's mystery? Well nothing we witnessed is real of course. It is just a film, a total fabrication, and, in a way, we ourselves and our identities are fabrications as well. Truth is elusive and impossible to capture or describe. Nothing we can do or say can really encompass the totality of the word. It is too big to be described by images, language, literature or cinema. And Kiarostami has a ball masterfully taking us for another ride into the realm of dissecting untruths.