A taste of Kiarostami

NEW YORK -- Earlier this year, Iranian President Khatami called for greater cultural exchange between his country and the United States. Soon thereafter, Abbas Kiarostami, Iran's most celebrated filmmaker, found himself in a Manhattan hotel suite, promoting the American release of his latest film, Taste of Cherry.

"The timing was coincidental," says Kiarostami, who had come to America primarily to attend a retrospective of his work in Minneapolis. "The invitation from Minneapolis was initiated two years ago," the director explains, through his interpreter. "But people from different countries are like children. When their parents may be fighting over the condo fee, kids from different households still establish relationships, and they still meet in the hallways and under the stairs. It's through the mass media that governments sustain and create the appearance of a bad relationship. But people don't have any problems together."

The 57-year-old director is enjoying a career high, having become the first Iranian filmmaker to win the Palme d'Or at Cannes, last year for Cherry. Also, along with Khatami's accession has come a modest liberalization of censorship. "The restrictions have been curtailed and diminished right now, and it's a better environment for filmmaking," Kiarostami says.

Does his international success have anything to do with that? "No, it's not related. It's just that the pressure was about to boil over, and they had to do something."

Kiarostami is known for his documentary-like approach. His dialogue is largely improvised, and his actors are often non-professionals. In Cherry, the only professional actor is the lead, Homayoun Ershadi, who spends the film driving around Teheran looking for someone to aid him in his suicide plot. During the shoot, Ershadi never actually met the other actors; it was the director who was in the driver's seat, conversing with the players as he filmed their reactions with a camera mounted on the side of the car. Explains Kiarostami, "Within the style that I use, there's really no other way to do it, because you can't pair two non-actors together. If you do that, they can't act, they can't do the scene. So that's why I was using myself as the actor."

For instance, of Ali Moradi, a non-actor playing a young soldier, Kiarostami says, "What we were doing wasn't impressing him as being the shooting of a real movie. Because what he was witnessing was me sitting across from him and talking to him. He kept waiting for us to give him a gun and ask him to kill someone or be killed by someone. He kept asking, `Why don't you tell me what my part is?' All the time, we were shooting the actual scenes with him. I gave him no information about what we were doing, so whatever reaction you see from him in the film is his real reaction. One time, I asked him, `Could you get me a box of chocolates from the dashboard?' And when he opened the dashboard, there was a knife in there. And I had used the knife already to cut a pomegranate, so there was some red on the blade. So that's how I got the horrified reactions you see in the film."

Kiarostami's inventiveness extended to the movie's deliberately ambiguous, jarringly formalist ending, which frustrates many viewers. "I did think it was a huge twist at the end. But it was a risk worth taking. Even when I have people arguing about the ending of the film, pro or con, I like that because it means that the movie hasn't really ended, that people keep thinking about it. That kind of energy is a little more important than people agreeing on what they see or liking what they see."

The ending certainly mystified the censors, who had threatened to ban Cherry because suicide is an Islamic taboo. Kiarostami points out that "the government people aren't sophisticated film viewers. Their senses haven't developed beyond is it a melodrama where everything is explained to them and there can be a nice, neat moral at the end. Something that might mess them up mentally, they don't like that at all. They don't realize that the director himself might not understand the ending of the film.

"But to me, to feel the film is much more important than understanding it. Even the question mark you see at the end of the film is much better than leaving the film thinking, `Okay, the story is over. Let's go home.' "

-- Gary Susman

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