Review of Shirin (2009) by Alex B — 09 Sep 2012

Shirin (Abbas Kiarostami, 2008).

I am normally a fan of both capital-A-art-film (Begotten is in my top ten films of all time) and Abbas Kiarostami (I was pretty rapturous about A Taste of Cherry, and only slightly less so about Ceritifed Copy), so Shirin, about which I knew not a bloody thing other than that it seems to be Kiarostami's least accessible film (The Guardian called the film âa strain on the viewerâ?). It turned out that the capsule description on Netflixâ"which is so often incomplete, or entirely wrongâ"was perfectly accurate in this case; the film is an hour and a half of close-ups of women watching a movie (anecdotally, not even the movie portrayed here). There are men in the audience; they can be seen in the background occasionally. But all of the close-ups are of women, mostly Iranian, one French.

Normally, I get it. I understand what Radha Bharadwaj was on about in the vastly underrated Closetland, I saw without any problems what Stan Brakhage was doing in pretty much every one of his movies I've seen, Derek Jarman's Blue made perfect sense to me, even if I didn't think it actually worked all that well. But here, I didn't have clue one what Kiarostami wanted to tell me. I am more than willing to entertain the possibility that it's not the movie, it's me, and this one simply went right over my head. But if Kiarostami had a point to make here, in my estimation, he missed it. We have a series of close-ups and nothing more. *.