Abbas Kiarostami: The world is his workshop

Unable to film in his native Iran, Abbas Kiarostami now has to shoot his enigmatic films abroad. Does it matter that Cannes audiences found his new work exasperating? Not at all, he says. It’s hard to spot Abbas Kiarostami amid the gloom of the Cannes beachfront pavilion. There he is, behind the curtain, his clothes dark and his glasses darker. “I am not a creature of the red carpet,” he explains, lest there be any doubt of that. Today he could pass for a fugitive from justice or a supergrass on witness protection, set to dish the dirt from his base in the shadows. Once, not so long ago, Kiarostami was the de facto leader of the Iranian new wave, the creator of soulful, enigmatic human stories rooted in his home soil. Now the movement is defunct and the 71-year-old director in effect stateless, flushed from his habitat by the Ahmadinejad regime and forced to film in foreign climes. The shoot for 2010’s Certified Copy, about a British writer and a French antiques dealer whose relationship is transformed in the course of a day, tootled back and forth across the hill towns of Tuscany, with Juliette Binoche riding shotgun. His latest, Like Someone in Love, takes a cab ride through Tokyo. Kiarostami opted for Japan because it felt far away, neither Muslim nor western; a fresh adventure with no baggage attached. “Maybe sushi has something to do with it, as well.” A Cheshire cat smile beams out from the murk. “I do like eating sushi.” Kiarostami comes to Cannes as a cherished old master, a former Palme d’Or winner for Taste of Cherry, his 1997 film about a man looking for someone to bury him after his suicide. But when Like Someone in Love has its premiere, it seems to misfire. Kiarostami’s film is about the games we play and the roles we adopt. Akiko (Rin Takanashi) is a sociology student who funds her studies by working as an escort. Tadashi Okuno is the elderly professor who books her for the night, Ryo Kase the boyfriend who mistakes Akiko’s client for her grandfather. Here is a tale that’s as much about withholding information as providing it. Kiarostami teases his public with a perfect charade of eavesdropped conversations and unseen protagonists before bowing out with a crash-cut ending that leaves us dangling. The audience is dismayed and early reviews veer between the irked and the exasperated. It was only days after, once the dust had settled, that people start coming around to Like Someone in Love. Kiarostami shrugs. “Happily, I can choose my viewers,” he says. “And I’d rather not have the exasperated among them. Cinema seats make people lazy. They expect to be given all the information. But for me, question marks are the punctuation of life. When it comes to showing human beings, complexity and concealment are a crucial part of the character. If I show more than my character shows, it doesn’t make sense. And if the spectator doesn’t accept that, there’s not much I can do.” And why all the surprise? Kiarostami’s early films hardly ran scared of elusive meanings and hanging endings. The Wind Will Carry Us, from 1999, contained a milking scene that the Iranian censors agonised over for weeks, wondering whether it was a sexual metaphor. Through the Olive Trees, five years previously, had wrapped up with a proposal of marriage and a subsequent conversation conducted in the distance, out of earshot. Taste of Cherry even ended by breaking the fourth wall, showing Kiarostami shooting the film we’d just been watching. If anything has changed, it’s the setting and emphasis. Kiarostami’s non-Iranian pictures seem overtly concerned with notions of fakery, with lies that become true. I’m guessing this must reflect the director’s own experience as a stranger in strange lands. Is he making a bonus of his life in exile? “Well maybe,” he says. “On an unconscious level. But the stories in my mind are still in Farsi. And the characters, as I see them, have no nationality, no specific language; they are just my alter-egos.” He chuckles. “But the unconscious level is called that for a reason. So you may well be correct.” When most of his colleagues fled Iran in the wake of the 1979 revolution, Kiarostami stayed put, shooting his acclaimed neo-realist fables about rural life and human mysteries, and picking up prizes from the world at large. Now conditions have grown too tough, so he keeps a house in Tehran and shoots abroad. “The world is my workshop,” he says. “It is not my home.” When I ask if he feared it would be a struggle adapting to other territories, he responds with an analogy: “I have a friend who’s a doctor. He worked in Iran and now he’s in Paris. He does X-rays. Once I told him, ‘We do the same thing. You take X-rays and I take inner photographs.’ In X-rays there is no nationality.” Fair enough. But let’s counter with another analogy. Kiarostami once claimed that you should never uproot a fruit tree. Transfer it to foreign soil and it probably won’t bear fruit. Or, if it does, “the fruit will not be as good as in the original place”. The director smiles. “Yes, but now something’s different. I’m like the tree that’s in my garden back home in Tehran. When I leave my home, there is no one to water it for weeks on end. But the roots are so deep, they don’t need to be watered. I’m the same way. Leaving Iran would be very worrying for a younger artist. But I’m not making films about now. I’m making films about older times, bringing them up from deep in the ground.” Other filmmakers have not been so fortunate. Take Jafar Panahi, Kiarostami’s friend and one-time protege, now under house arrest in Tehran after being convicted of making “propaganda against the system”. Slapped with a 20-year ban on making movies, Panahi recently collaborated on a quasi-documentary about his life in captivity, entitled This Is Not a Film. It was smuggled out of Iran on a USB stick concealed in a cake. Kiarostami will not be drawn on the matter, perhaps wary that any ardent expressions of support risk landing Panahi in further hot water. “People find their own ways. I have no advice for anyone on how to live. He chooses his own path.” The director adds that he has yet to see This Is Not a Film, for the simple reason that it is not a film. “[Panahi] invited me to see it. And I said, ‘If this is not a film, then I don’t have to go. I will come with pleasure the day you make a film’.” What of Kiarostami himself? Ideally, he concedes, he would return to making pictures in Iran. “I do hope I can go back, because I have plenty of stories particular to Tehran that really cannot be made anywhere else. Of course, it is natural for me to work directly in Farsi, with an Iranian crew. And it is natural for me to tell stories in my country.” He gives a shrug from his place in the shadows. “For the moment, that’s not possible. But the only moment when my heart beats faster is when the plane is landing back home in Tehran.” From: Gulfnews