Venice. Shirin.

"Given the respect he enjoys as a modern auteur, Abbas Kiarostami's latest film is unlikely to be ignored but this outlandish work suggests that Kiarostami has abandoned narrative cinema for now, prefering instead to explore the more experimental extremes of cinematic language," writes Dan Fainaru in Screen Daily.

"Here it's watching the audience watch."

Updated through 9/5.

"His latest, Shirin, wherein 112 Iranian actresses and Juliette Binoche are shot watching a 12th-century Persian play, with the play's performance itself kept entirely offscreen, is unlikely to pack 'em in," writes Ronnie Scheib in Variety. "Yet Shirin offers a feast for the bedazzled eye and a crash course in narrative obsession for the benumbed mind."

"This deceptively simple film is much closer to Kiarostami's experimental theater play Taize than to such features as A Taste of Cherry and The Wind Will Carry Us," explains Deborah Young in the Hollywood Reporter:

In Taize, a traditional religious play is performed in costume while screens show films of an Iranian audience's emotional involvement with the story. Here the narration is taken from an 800-year-old Persian love story about Shirin, the princess of Armenia, and Khosrow, the prince of Persia. On screen, however, we see only the reactions of a female "audience" watching a film that only exists in the mind of the viewer.

In fact, Kiarostami has stated that the actresses are staring at three dots on a sheet of white cardboard off-screen, while imagining their own love stories; he chose the Shirin narration only later, after he finished filming.

"Does the device work?" asks the Guardian's Andrew Pulver. "Shirin might be happier sitting on a video monitor in the Pompidou Centre on 24-hour loop. But that may be doing this film a disservice. The powerful fable takes up much of the slack, and the visuals end up engendering otherwise unnoticeable subtleties, such as the threatening figures on seats in the rows behind."

Update, 8/31: "One can trace the same tendency back to the imaginary reverse angles of Kiarostami's last narrative features, Taste of Cherry and The Wind Will Carry Us, which also might be described as audiovisual variations on the famous Kuleshov experiment," notes Jonathan Rosenbaum, responding to reports on Shirin that have appeared so far. "So regardless of whether or not Kiarostami is abandoning his arthouse audience, his commitment to fiction and fooling the audience clearly remains intact."

Update, 9/5: Shirin has Ronald Bergan looking back on the history of close-ups on women's faces in films from Dreyer through Godard.

Posted by dwhudson at August 30, 2008 2:25 PM