CriticalIn Paris, an integral retrospective and an exhibition shed light on the work of the Iranian filmmaker who died in 2016.
He was the one who, at the end of the 1980s, put post-revolutionary Iran on the map of world cinema and opened up an invaluable lens over the country, far from media clichés and peddled fantasies. Author of forty magnificent films, recipient of a Palme d’Or for The Taste of Cherry (1997), he was considered a major figure in cinematographic modernity, capturing the realities of his time while confusing their perception. Five years after his death, in 2016, the cause of a real popular stir in Iran, Abbas Kiarostami is honored at the Center Pompidou, which devotes a full retrospective to the filmmaker and, to the versatile artist he was through. above all – which we still tend to underestimate – an exhibition (“Where is the friend Kiarostami?”). Delayed thirteen months by the health crisis, the event is surrounded by such a bundle of extensions – DVD boxes, books, released in theaters – that Kiarostami’s film work has never been so widely accessible.
With the undue reputation of austerity which surrounds it, we must start by making a spell: there is no cinema more playful, cunning and manipulative than that of Kiarostami. His filmography is made mostly of tales, certainly realistic, but which feature characters wandering in the mazes of the surrounding world. In the film that revealed him on the international stage, Where is my friend’s house ? (1987), a schoolboy named Ahmad trudges from one village to another to return a homework notebook inadvertently stolen from his classmate, without knowing where he lives precisely. On foot or on the wheel, the Kiarostamian hero is an indefatigable surveyor, who beats the countryside, runs at hue and dia. As the protagonist of Taste of Cherry driving through the suburbs in construction of Tehran, in order to find a volunteer to assist him in his suicide. Or the child of Passenger (1974) who travels 400 kilometers by bus to get from his province to the capital and attend a football match. Each time, the uncertain journey echoes his inner journey, the character being led to weave a host of ambivalent relationships with the world.
This is because reality is itself uncertain, a map with a thousand paths, whether it is the congested streets of large cities or the obtuse tranquility of the countryside. If it escapes him, it is because the Kiarostamian hero is a great anguish, a paranoid obsessive, like the impostor of the brilliant. Close-up (1990), who pretends to be a celebrity and will end up confused by a stratagem in which the staging takes part. To approach the fundamental ambiguity of everything, Kiarostami thus never stopped inventing devices, like Ten (2002), taking place entirely by car, orThrough the olive trees (1994), putting in abyme a film shoot.
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