Palme d’Or winner A Taste of Cherry is now showing on the Cannes mini-festival. Dinah Arnott introduces its brilliant director.
The award of a Cannes Palme d’Or to A Taste of Cherry, a film by Abbas Kiarostami, will hopefully bring the work of this astounding Iranian director greater prominence.
From a background in painting and advertising, Kiarostami began in 1970 directing films for the Institute for the Intellectual Development of Children and Adolescents, or Kanun, an organisation initiated by Farah Dibah, the wife of Shah of Iran. The organisation provided a starting point for many Iranian directors, a reliable source of funding for films which were often a disguised critique of Iranian society.
The first film by Kiarostami to become known in Europe, Where Is My Friend’s House? (1987), is the beginning of a trilogy, followed by And Life Goes on (1992) and Through the Olive Trees (1994), his first box-office success. Through this trilogy unfolds an increasingly complex relationship between fiction and documentary.
Where Is My Friend’s House? is emblematic of Kiarostami’s early cinema: simple settings and non-professional actors create the illusion of documentary, though rhythmic editing generated suspense. This film recounts a boy’s frustrating quest to return his friend’s schoolbook.
And Life Goes On was made in the aftermath of the devastating 1992 earthquake in Iran. A man and his son search for the two boys from the first film. Meandering through the wrecked villages they encounter people reconstructing their lives amid the ruins. It feels like a documentary, and the characters of the first film are placed in the context of a real catastrophe.
The third of the trilogy, Through the Olive Trees, returns to the same area two years later. The quest is now that of a film director looking for his story and the actors to embody the characters. A brief scene in the second film becomes central scene to the new film-within-the-film. The director casts a young man in desperate and unrequited pursuit of the young woman cast as his wife (she refuses even to look at him).
But the illusion of film has a transforming power, as the director offers his actors/characters a chance to act out their drama and potentially overcome the stranglehold of religion and tradition. But, just out of frame, in yet another tier of representation, hovers the spectre of another director and crew, another village.
Kiarostami takes this construct to an extreme in Close Up (1990), the story of an unemployed man who is mistaken for a famous Iranian film director, Makhmalbaf, and insinuates himself into a bourgeois Teheran household. The film moves between a re- enactment of the story with the actual family involved, Kiarostami’s visits to the man in prison, and the subsequent court case. In a final meta-fictional ploy, Kiarostami arranges for Makhmalbaf to meet the impostor.
In his latest film, A Taste of Cherry, Kiarostami tackles new taboos as he follows the journey through Teheran of a middle- aged man preparing to commit suicide. Kiarostami claims that the work of the artist consists of posing questions but not necessarily providing the answers. He believes that the point of view of the film-maker should be childlike — questioning, yet fresh and open.
Kiarostami must be considered an inspiring model for film-makers looking for simplicity of means with complexity of content, film-makers who want to tell universal, human dramas grounded in a specific context — film-makers who want, in Kiarostami’s words, to “search for the simple realities hidden behind the apparent realities”.
A Taste of Cherry will be screened as part of the Jameson’s Cannes Film Festival at Cavendish Square in Cape Town; Durban’s Musgrave Centre; and Pretoria’s Brooklyn