One late review for Sam. Watched this last night but was too tired to write it up.
Shirin (2008)
I knew going in this was some kind of meta film about actresses and spectatorship, but I didn't realize it was literally 90 minutes of closeup shots of Iranian actresses watching a (fake) movie. It's a really cool concept, but after about half an hour I couldn't find anything more to take out of the experience. There are several reasons for this, some fair, some not. The biggest issue is the language barrier. There are two aspects to the film, the story of Shirin which we hear but never see, and the story of these women reacting to it. Having to rely on subtitles will always make it a bit harder to fully engage in a film's visuals, but when the visuals are incongruent to the soundtrack that difficulty is exacerbated, especially since what I found most interesting visually were the little details (the way eyes scan, lips quiver, heads re-position, etc) which really only get perceived over time. That made the film a bit more challenging than I'd hoped, but what made me start losing interest was how the reactions often were either empty or forced. At no point was I ever actually seeing a film through someone's reactions, I was watching people watching, but they could have been watching anything turns out they were. At the beginning they were focused, and that worked well enough, interest and curiosity is rather universal so seeing the differences between the different expressions of direct focus, and comparing them also to my own not quite complete focus on them, was interesting, allowing a focus on little probably meaningless details to bounce around my thoughts. As the film they're viewing continues reactions diversify, interest meanders and, most notably, reactions don't quite seem to match what I imagine to be on screen. I no longer felt an insight or connection to what these women were going through and there was little to extract for that last hour.
Then I read up on the film and my disappointment deepened I suppose it's my fault for expecting Kiarostami to play fair, but all the other times he's mixed truth with fiction like this it was a) clear and b) an intrinsic part of the film's themes. In this case it is never revealed that the "film" being watched is fake, and that the women aren't even watching anything but directed to express reactions which Kiarostami would later edit. Most damning, though, is that this deception actually undermines the film's exploration of spectatorship, femininity and the contrast between their roles on screen vs their roles as spectators, rather than augmenting it. When reality is mixed with fiction in Close-Up, it serves to enhance the exploration within the film on truth and humanity. The multiple layers of truth in the Koker trilogy explore the unreality of cinema, the effect of observation and the interplay between reality and roleplay. If Shirin showed us the film these women were supposedly watching this might work, as an exploration of our reactions vs what's on screen and the interplay between real and imagined reactions. As is, it is a film purportedly about women's reactions which is made up and created whole cloth by a man. What could be a film about insight into the self of these many actresses, and the way they react to the unreality that is inherent to their profession when shown as a finished work, is instead a film about these actresses acting out reactions. There's no actual contrast because they're just doing their job as usual, acting. There's no deeper layer or interplay because the thing they're reacting to doesn't even exist.