Classic Movie Review: Where is the Friend's House? (1987)

Where Is the Friend's House? (1987) 

Directed by: Abbas Kiarostami.

Written by: Abbas Kiarostami.

Starring: Babek Ahmed Poor (Ahmed), Ahmed Ahmed Poor (Mohamed Reda Nematzadeh), Khodabakhsh Defaei (Teacher), Iran Outari (Mother), Ait Ansari (Father), Sadika Taohidi (Perzian Neighbour), Biman Mouafi   (Ali, a neighbor), Ali Djamali (Grandfather's Friend), Aziz Babai (Waiter), Nader Ghoulami (Property Owner), Akbar Mouradi (Old Man from Azerbaidjan).

 

There is a simplicity to Where is the Friend’s House which only adds to its emotional power. Directed by Iranian master Abbas Kiarostami – who would go on to make far more complex films, with different layers of reality layered throughout – from Close-Up to The Taste of Cherry to Certified Copy and many others – Where is the Friend’s House doesn’t get that complex. It is a simple, straight forward story – the type of thing that people who were fans of the Italian Neo-Realists would recognize. And it is a heartbreaking film in the way it builds its simple acts of kindness.

 

The narrative begins at school – where Ahmed (Babek Ahmed) is seated next to his friend Mohamed (Ahmed Ahmed) – when the teacher comes around to check their homework – berating poor Mohamed for once again not doing his homework in his workbook – and telling him if it happens again, he will be expelled from school. Keep in mind these kids are about 8 years old, but education isn’t quite a right here – and its notable, but never noted in the film, that only the boys are being educated at all. It isn’t until Ahmed gets home that night that he realizes that he has made a purely innocent mistake – taking not just his own workbook, but Mohamed’s as well. He knows the implications of this – but no one else seems to care that much. He tries to explain the situation to his mother – again and again – but she doesn’t want to hear it, just wants him to finish his homework, and then go buy bread – he can just give the book back tomorrow. Adding to the difficulty is that Ahmed lives in Koker, and Mohamed lives in the nearby, neighboring village of Potesh. Both villages are a maze of narrow streets, seemingly identical buildings, and confusing directions. When Ahmed does get to Potesh, he still isn’t able to find his friend’s house – and keeps being given bad directions. He finds families with similar names, or people who just saw him and his father – but they just left for Koker. He runs around – and is stymied at every stop. His grandfather berates him – and wants him to give up his quest and go get his cigarettes – we then stay with the grandfather, who details his own childhood for a few minutes, before Ahmed comes back – and is able to go on his quest again. This all culminates with a lengthy sequence where Ahmed meets an elderly man, who says he can walk with him to his friend’s house – although once again, the end result isn’t what he expected.

 

The film is deceptively simple. The narrative really is simple of course – it’s the story a boy trying to correct his innocent mistake, and going to great lengths to do just that. But the power of the story only slowly reveals itself – and the implications of it. Yes, the film takes on the appearance of a Neo-Realist film – but it isn’t quite that simple either. Kiarostami is painting a portrait of this community, about childhood innocence, but doing the right thing – and a portrait of rural Iranians. It is a quest narrative – and at that a very simple one. But its implications are profound. Kiarostami would return to this area – these characters – twice more (I will review those two films, Life and Nothing More and Through the Olive Trees as well) – and with each passing film, he complicates the relationship between actor and character, director and narrative, etc. But here, he has made a simple story – with the profundity of a parable – one you will not forget.

Movie Review: Like Someone in Love

Like Someone in Love
Directed by:  Abbas Kiarostami.
Written by: Abbas Kiarostami.
Starring: Rin Takanashi (Akiko), Tadashi Okuno (Takashi), Ryo Kase (Noriaki), Denden (Hiroshi), Mihoko Suzuki (the Neighbor), Kaneko Kubota (Akiko’s Grandmother), Hiroyuki Kishi (Old Student), Reiko Mori (Nagisa), Kouichi Ohori (the Taxi Driver), Tomoaki Tatsumi (the Auto Mechanic), Seina Kasugai (Nagisa’s Friend).

Abbas Kiarostami’s Like Someone in Love feels like the Iranian master playing around. Like his last film, Certified Copy (2010), this is a movie in which spend a lot of time pretending to be something they are not. In Certified Copy, we never find out if the couple at the center of the movie is what they seemed to be in the first half of the movie – people who have just met, who are playfully flirting and getting to know each other, or the second half of the movie, a long time married couple on the brink of divorce. The movie withholds that information from the audience, so only the characters – not even the actors, and perhaps not even Kiarostami – knows for sure. Like Someone in Love is different in that this time, the audience knows more than the characters do. We see the entire picture of what is unfolding, while the characters only see their part of the picture. So depending on who is interacting with who, they are essentially playing different characters.

The film opens with Akiko (Rin Takanashi), a beautiful young Tokyo University student who pays the bills by moonlighting as a prostitute. She has to hide this fact from her jealous, obsessive, possibly violent fiancée, with whom she’s on the phone when the film begins. He makes her tell him where she is (she lies) and then makes her go to the bathroom and count the tiles on the floor, so he can stop by later and see if she was lying or not. She has lies to her family – she has been dodging calls from her grandmother all day, who is Tokyo and waiting for her to arrive at the bus station so the two can talk. But Akiko blows off her grandma, when she is sent to see a “very special client” just outside of Tokyo. In an extended, and heartbreaking scene, Akiko sits in the cab taking her to her client as she listens to one message after another from her grandma, and then has the cab driver drive by the bus station, more than once, so she can see her grandma sitting alone waiting for her. She is too ashamed to get out and talk to her.

When she arrives at the client’s house, she finds it is Takashi (Tadashi Okuno), an old professor, and the two have a sweet conversation, before she disappears down the hall to the bedroom – slowly trying to seduce him (which is a good guess by her, since she is a prostitute, and assumes this is what he wants). But he isn’t really interested in sex – he just wants company for his meal. The next day, he’ll drive her to school, and see as she is confronted by her boyfriend Noriaki (Ryo Kase) – and her storming off. Noriaki then comes to talk to Takashi, because he saw her get out of his car, and mistakes him for Akiko’s grandfather – a mistake he doesn’t correct.

Like Someone in Love is an interesting film, because at times it seems to be a light comedy, but the film certainly takes some dark turns. The most amusing sequence is when Takashi and Akiko first meet, and talk, and learn something about each other. Her attempted seduction of him is brilliantly handled, as she slowly walks down the hall, and the camera watches her go. And while the conversation between Takashi and Noriaki starts off fairly light and amusing – it is after all a comedy of errors at this point, it starts to hint at the darkness that is coming. Noriaki and Akiko have gotten engaged, according to Noriaki because “once we’re married, she won’t be able to hide anything from me. She’ll have to answer me”.

Kiarostami plays with conventions a little bit here. Normally, when you have two young people in love, and an older character there to give advice, you would expect that older character to be wise – that his life experience would give him some insight. But Takashi is just as clueless as Akiko and Noriaki – continually insisting that “everything will work out”, even as it becomes increasingly clear that certainly is not the case. The wisest character may well be Takashi’s neighbor, who in an interesting scene, tells almost her complete life story to Akiko – who seemingly learns something.

Like Someone in Love is not a great film like Certified Copy was. That film remains endlessly fascinating, and haunts me even two years after I first saw it. By comparison, Like Someone in Love is fairly lightweight. It certainly feels like Kiarostami simply treading water, deciding what direction to go with his career now. But Kiarostami treading water is still immensely satisfying – a sometimes touching, sometimes funny, sometimes dark, sometimes heartbreaking little film.

The Best Movies I've Never Seen Before: Close-Up (1990)

Close-Up (1990) ****
Directed by: Abbas Kiarostami.
Written by: Abbas Kiarostami.
Starring: Hossain Sabzian (Himself), Mohsen Makhmalbaf (Himself), Abolfazl Ahankhah (Himself), Mehrdad Ahankhah (Himself), Monoochehr Ahankhah (Himself), Mahrokh Ahankhah (Herself), Nayer Mohseni Zonoozi (Herself), Ahmad Reza Moayed Mohseni (Family Friend), Hossain Farazmand (Reporter), Hooshang Shamaei (Taxi Driver), Mohammad Ali Barrati (Soldier), Davood Goodarzi (Sergeant), Haj Ali Reza Ahmadi (Judge), Abbas Kiarostami (Himself).

The line between cinema and reality is blurred beyond recognition in Abbas Kiarostami’s Close-Up. In a way, the film could be seen as a documentary, as much of the film is “real”, and yet there are also reenactments in the film – ones that may or may not play with what really is real. Everyone in the film plays themselves, and the result is a fascinating movie – one because of its story and two because of how it is filmed.

The film centers of Hossian Sabzian, a man who is getting divorced, losing contract with his kids and barely works part time. His one escape is movies – in particular the films of director Mohsen Makhmalbaf. One day while riding the bus and reading a copy of The Cyclist, Makhmalbaf’s novel that he turned into a film, he strikes up a conversation with Mahrokh Ahankhah, who is a fan of the movie. Sabzian tells her that he really is Moakhmalbaf himself, and although she is at first skeptical, he eventually convinces her. He starts coming around to the Ahankhah household, flattering them by telling them that he wants to shoot his next movie in their home – with them as the stars. But eventually Aholfazi Ahankhah, the father of the family, grows suspicious and calls on a reporter friend of his who has previously met the real Moakhmalbaf. Eventually Sabzian’s ruse is discovered, and he is carted off to jail.

Kiarostami read an article about the arrest, and was fascinated by the story. What kind of man would imitate a film director? Why was he doing it? What did he hope to gain from it? Did he really think he was going to get away with it? His resulting film does his best to answer these questions – but goes much deeper than that.

The film is not told in chronological order. It opens with a reporter on his way to the Ahankhah house with two cops and a cab driver, hoping to capture the arrest of Sabzian. This scene is an reenactment, and it’s a very strange one – because it doesn’t have much to do with the rest of the film. Kiarostami lets the cab driver tell a story about his life in the airforce, and eventually when the car is parked outside and the reporter is waiting to go in, his camera will follow a can as it rolls down the street, away from the house. In doing this, Kiarostami is showing us the multiple viewpoints any story can take – and how in fact, there are many stories to tell, and he is only telling one of them.

The rest of the movie is intercut between these reenactments, in which Sabzian and the Ahanhkhah family, as well as the reporter and the police, play themselves inside the real house where the events took place and Sabzian’s trial, which is almost surreal, but is in fact his actual trial. Why this is confusing is because often, Kiarostami, who is filming it all, will stop the trial to ask his own questions. The judge looks on with a bemused grin on his face, not quite believing all this is happening.

What emerges ultimately is a portrait of Sabzian as a sympathetic, yet also pathetic loser. I was reminded of Rupert Pupkin in Martin Scorsese’s The King of Comedy, as Sabzian cannot quite grasp why people do not like him. He bemoans his station in his life, and while his poverty is quite real, and that makes him somewhat sympathetic, it does not really excuse what he does in the film. He, like many, wants fame, but doesn’t want to do anything to get it. In this way, he is not all that unlike the Ahankhah family themselves, who are flattered when they think a filmmaker wants to make a film about them. At least Sabzian is poor, and really has nothing going on his life, so he grasps at straws, but what is their excuse? At the trial, they seem unimpressed by Sabzian and his reasons, so why then do they agree to take part in the reenactments?

The film plays with the boundaries between fiction and reality right up until its final scene. In that scene, Sabzian is let out of jail, and is met by the real Makhamlbaf, who drives him on his motorcycle to the Ahanhkhah house to apologize. Kiarostami and Makhamlbaf have had a well publicized feud for years, so how Kiarostami convinced the other director to be in his film is beyond me, but Kiarostami has the last laugh. Not liking what Makhamlbaf was saying, he plays with the sound – saying there are “technical” problems, so he can cut out Makhamlbaf’s words that do not fit into his narrative.

Close-Up is a fascinating film. Kiarostami has played with the lines between fiction and reality since then – in films like Taste of Cherry, Ten and Certified Copy (and I assume others, that I have not seen), but never as effectively as he does here. Apparently Sabzian does not like the film, or how he is portrayed in it. More likely, he isn’t happy that being the “star” of Kiarostami’s film didn’t led him to fame or fortune, or a career in the spotlight that he thinks he is entitled to. You have to wonder if he learned anything at all.

Movie Review: Certified Copy

Certified Copy ****
Directed by: Abbas Kiarostami.
Written by: Abbas Kiarostami.
Starring: Juliette Binoche (She), William Shimell (James Miller), Jean-Claude Carrière (The Man at the Square), Agathe Natanson (The Woman at the Square), Gianna Giachetti (The Café Owner), Adrian Moore (The Son).

Perhaps it is time for me to reevaluate my feelings of Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami. I had judged him on the basis of two films (admittedly, never a smart thing to do) Taste of Cherry, which won the Palme D’Or at Cannes in 1997, and which I found to be a thudding bore and 10, which was one of his "experimental films" which I found to be even more boring, and so I have avoided his films since. But his latest film, Certified Copy, is one of the most fascinating films of the year so far. It has been compared to everything for Hawks’ Bringing Up Baby to Rosselini’s Voyage in Italy to Resnais’ Last Year at Marienbad to Antonini’s L’Aventurra to Wong Kar Wai’s In the Mood for Love to Linklater’s twin films Before Sunrise and Before Sunset to the late work of Luis Bunuel. The strange thing about Certified Copy is that all of those comparisons are apt, and at the same time none of them are. This is a film unto itself – wholly original and unique.

The film stars Juliette Binoche and William Shimell as two people who may or may not be married. We first meet them as he is late to his own lecture about his new book, which argues that copies are just as good as originals in art. She arrives even later, and leaves before the lecture is over. We see her argue with her young son, who wonders why if she hated the man’s book so much, why does she want to meet him, and get him to sign copies of the book for everyone she knows? Then the two characters do meet, they argue, and eventually they get into a car to travel to another town close by in Tuscany where there is something she wants to show him. In these scenes, the two do genuinely seem to be going throw the typical getting to know each other romantic conversations we have seen before. But everything shifts during a scene in a café they stop at to have coffee. He leaves to take a cell phone call, and the owner of the café says she can tell the two of them are fighting, but they generally, he is a good husband. Binoche doesn’t correct her, but instead tells a long story about their marriage and their wedding day. When Shimell comes back to the table, she reveals that the café manager “mistook” them for a married couple, and she didn’t correct her. From then on, the two behave as a married couple – arguing about the past and the present in scenes that feel real as well. We are left with the interpretation that in one of the two halves of the movie, the characters are play acting. Either in the first half, they are a married couple pretending to have just met each other, or in the second half, they have just met each other but are pretending to be a married couple. Or are they? If they were genuinely married, why does the son question her about the man they just met? Is he playacting as well? But if they had just met, how does Shimell know the personal details of their marriage that she revealed only to the café owner when he was away taking the phone call?

There are a few way you can take Certified Copy. You can either drive yourself mad, trying to figure it all out, trying to put the pieces of the puzzle together as many have done. Or you can simply go with the film, and accept that you will never know. Many critics have taken the first approach, and the explanations have run from the simple (that in one part or the other they are playacting) to the complex – that the character have become lost in time, and that both are real, but don’t happen the way we as an audience experience them, but there are really years in between the two halves of the movie or that the young couple we see getting married in the background is really these same two characters years before, and the old couple at the fountain (including a cameo by Bunuel collaborator Jean-Claude Carriere) are them as an older couple. There are other interpretations, and no one can seem to agree on which one is real, and which one isn’t.

And I think, that’s precisely the point. That at the same time everything we see in Certified Copy is real, and everything we see is not real. The scenes as they play out in front of us are real at the time we are watching them – the characters are precisely who they seem to be at all times. And yet, because this is a movie and Binoche and Shimell are actors playing these characters, they are also always a fake – a copy of real people if you will. The line between cinematic reality and fantasy has been blurred to point where it is indistinguishable in this film. This was true of Taste of Cherry to a certain extent as well – where Kiarostami takes great pains to remind the audience again and again that we are watching a movie. This time, he doesn’t need to do that, because right from the beginning of the movie, he tells us what the film is going to be about. You just need to pay attention.

All of this will likely sound like a pretentious bore to many people – and to those who hate the film, I can’t really argue. You could easily hate the film because Shimell plays his characters as a somewhat arrogant twat and Binoche becomes an annoying nag as the film goes along. Both of their performances however, especially Binoche’s (who proves once again, she is one of the biggest risk takers out there right now) fit into the world that Kiarostami has established here, and they fit in perfectly (those who complain that Shimell is wooden miss the point that he is supposed to be wooden).

Some of Kiarostami’s more adamant admirers didn’t really like Certified Copy, which to them represented him selling out, or simply him goofing off. Perhaps they are right about either of those things. But to me, Certified Copy is a film that makes me want to go back and see more Kiarostami films, which I didn’t think possible after seeing Taste of Cherry. The fact that Kiarostami cast an Oscar winning French actress, and a well known British opera singer in his leads is not Kiarostami selling out – but rather, I believe was necessary for him to make Certified Copy the success it is. After all, with this film, isn’t Kiarostami making a certified copy of the European art films of the past? While Certified Copy may not be the masterpiece that some of the films I mentioned at the lead of this review are, it is as close as we are likely to get in this day of age. Certified Copy deserves to be seen, discussed and seen again.