Dir. Abbas Kiarostami, 2004, Japan/Iran, 74mins
In a little-known short story by Abbas Kiarostami entitled After The Rain, the narrator, a filmmaker, is taken by his friend to a screening of the 1994 Luc Besson film, Léon. (That’s the one in which Jean Reno’s reclusive hit man takes in a 12-year old orphan, Natalie Portman, and unwillingly teaches her the assassin’s trade while she teaches him something about human companionship.) The narrator, who bears more than a passing resemblance to Kiarostami, hates the movie. “By the third scene I have figured it out. It’s another of those popular stories with a second-rate hero and a dash of compassion thrown in for good measure. The homicidal protagonist always has a houseplant that he cares for conscientiously. Right before taking aim and shooting someone in the chest, he waters his plant and places it outside a window.” After enduring as much orgiastic bloodshed as he can, the narrator leaves the movie theatre in protest. He regrets not finding out what happens to the pot plant and how the filmmaker might “convey a loving message to his naïve spectators”. Well, I stayed to the conclusion and can inform Mr. Kiarostami that the pot plant didn’t really have much to do but did have a happier ending than its owner.
I wonder how many people walk out of Kiarostami movies? There are surely plenty of cinema-goers who haven’t the patience for the Iranian filmmaker’s gently-paced meditations, just as he hasn’t for Besson’s quickfire gorefest. His latest film, Five, may prove too much – or, rather, too little – for some. It consists of five mainly static tableaux shot on a digital camera, apparently in one take. All the scenes take place on or about an unremarkable beach. The first scene depicts a small piece of driftwood rolling around on the incoming tide. After about ten minutes, the log breaks into two, the camera staying with the smaller one. That’s it.
There are a further four scenes, which, although increasing in complexity and directorial intervention as the film progresses, are similarly minimalist. One involves people walking on the promenade, one features dogs lying around in the sun, one stars a cast of ducks and, in the last episode, the moon is reflected on the dark water as a chorus of frogs croak their colourful nocturne. It all looks and sounds convincingly natural, but one suspects that there is a good deal of art in creating the apparently artless. His ensemble of dogs and ducks perform brilliantly, with, in the case of the latter, impeccable comic timing. It must have taken great ingenuity to capture this, the same ingenuity with which Kiarostami has always coaxed incredibly natural performances out of children and non-actors.
Whether you find this contemplative collage beautiful and inspiring or, as the Evening Standard’s Derek Malcolm did, ‘tediously self-reflective’ depends on what you expect from cinema. In Kiarostami’s short story, the filmmaker’s friend (who loves Léon, by the way) complains that he finds the filmmaker’s own movies very tiresome and always falls asleep in the middle. Kiarostami’s films certainly don’t feel like films: the viewer is never manipulated by conventional means. Instead one is simply shown, in the words of another Kiarostami film, ‘life and nothing more’. And, if you are patient, you begin to notice life as you never have: in the case of Five, you become so accustomed to the minimalism that any small change, like the log breaking in two, becomes a dramatic event.
Kiarostami has said that we no longer have the ability to observe nature. Through his films we have learnt to see again, to appreciate the beauty of overlooked details. Lingering shots of nature permeate his work – a dung beetle, an overturned tortoise, an ant colony. Kiarostami’s camera has a childlike ability to pick out the random peculiarities of life which the adult eye misses: in Close-up, a tin can rolls down the hill; in The Taste of Cherry, a distant plane streaks across the sky. And like a child, Kiarostami stares at life at great length, uninhibited and entranced by its wonder. Five is perhaps the purest manifestation of this childish joy: in a sense, seeing Five is like seeing for the first time.
Simon Gray
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