#also you could fit in the khosrow-shirin romance!

[voluptuarian]

Uh so I want a novel about Maurice of Byzantium and Khosrow II of Persia now

[ratherhavetheblues]

ABBAS KIAROSTAMI’S SHIRIN “I’m surprised the entire world is not in love with her…”

© 2017 by James Clark 

    Kiarostami’s film, Shirin (2008), is an endeavor that is formally simple and thematically complex. It could be called a speculative minefield. What could be easier than to fathom the stars of a romantic film melodrama, Shirin and Khosrow, being a piece of work? What is tough, though, is to see that the audience of women worthies watching the movie could also be termed a piece of work, notwithstanding their giving to the courtly medieval saga what seems to be their personal best. We have in fact, holding forth, a story of wilful, wordy chaos and groundless presumptuousness. On the other hand, the ladies of the 21st century seem to be silent paragons of patient and generous discernment. Though far less noisy, they come to pass as an online shopping spree where the merchandise does not really fit them. That comprehensive disconnect is this mighty little picture’s real drama.

One deadly entitlement, making the rounds of response to Shirin and needing to be run out of town, is that the specifics of the flashback-heavy, olden bathos being watched are nothing but ignorable, ancient verbosity. (The Telegraph complains, “… the subtitles get awfully intrusive.”) Goofy, yes; but, without being abreast of the various self-justifications rattling across a soundtrack like a Depression-Era radio soap opera-cum-thriller (the visual component never seeing the light of day as we fully make the best of a so-called “minimalist” mise en scene of face-on close-ups of the customers), we cannot well comprehend the myriad, silent but expressive, engagements (of a hundred or so distaff contemporary viewers) with the flighty golden oldies. Failing to give appropriate time to the dialogue, even those commentators most fond of Kiarostami’s curious wit will limply report about women’s self-sacrifices, accessible sentimentality, thoughts flickering across faces to seemingly no more point than a flower garden and how the peculiar austerity of the experience conveys a pitch of modernity satisfying even when not fully understandable. But, more than any other carelessly perceived value, there is, from that constituency, the pleasure of seeing filmmaking conventions overturned: eschewing the reverse shot process which covers both ends of a dialogue; a fixed camera position; and the welter of minimalist productions in other Kiarostami films, like Ten, where a stationary figure puts to herself that which voluminous phenomena do for her self-sufficiency.

   Let’s carefully connect with the first few minutes of that mysterious venture, to demonstrate that this vehicle, already freighted with a history of confusing dead ends, is highly dependent on the over-the-top screenplay, titled, “My Sweet Shirin.” We are in the presence of the seated ladies’ body language being galvanized by a stream of disembodied language. Right at the beginning, the credits (which we see, whereas there being no direct delivery to the Tehran filmgoers) come about as choked with reams of Arabic rhetoric and a series of naïve, stolid painted vignettes anticipating the saga. Immediately following that, we are face-to-face with a young urban woman already pretty disappointed with the busy proceedings, antithetical to the spaciousness of modern design. She pops some kind of candy into her mouth offered by a friend offscreen. The theme song, replete with a musical idiom recalling Republic Pictures tunesmiths, would have done nothing to abate her sense of mishap. The candy she chews emphatically finds, therefore, an incongruous affinity to the saccharine entertainment underway. The first sound from the story getting started is that of a door opening and closing. Apart from its metaphorical aspect, the action seems to favor a register which that customer had not expected and does not seem ready to tolerate very long.  She takes another sweet and there is a cut to another part of the viewing, where another young woman makes no effort to mask her boredom. She scratches her head as if to conjure away being delivered to alien territory. (Most of the women are seen in headscarves and burkas; but only some of them suit the ancient style.) Distinctly more peeved than the previous non-fan, she vigorously chews her chewing gum. But something else has been brought to the theatre, a lighting incident in the shadowy room. The screen emits its varying lighting intensities and this endowment, though not to the liking of the patrons to date, touches the upper edge of a couple of empty blue seats. Thereby, the girl with dead eyes, a mechanical jaw and a workable glare is, unbeknown, in the presence of a jetstream, a jetstream her own emotions have something to do with. But a spectator in the shadows behind her seems far more accepting, and the bump to another close-up discloses a very young filmgoer with a bemused smile. The main speaker in this apparition, Shirin, begins with, “Listen to me, my sisters… It is my turn to tell my story, recount it to you. Right here, by the lifeless body of Khosrow.” So, whereas the leaden design management, including the sound design of underwhelming water dripping, offers nothing for the first two customers, this third receptionist finds something to work with apropos of the eventuation of death. (Also in the mix, there are concerns of Khosrow’s kingly duties and the aura of political power—a situation of cross-purposes very germane to what is going on here. Characteristic of this most oddball entry are not simply divisions of perspective—remarkably varied and nuanced—but striking differences of age and neighborhood, while hewing to a female only constituency.)

    Now—hopefully having put to rest the assumptions that very small disclosures are fine here and that Kiarostami rounded up a gang of Iranian actresses (along with French actress, Juliette Binoche) to be filmed sitting in his living room and looking at a card inscribed by 3 dots (the aspect of the story of Shirin supposedly coming to him much later)—let’s proceed to the real demands of this film which, though odd in its form, turns out to be very consistent with the other gems he has created. Not only consistent, however, but an enrichment of the endeavor to probe sensibility in all its isolating emergence.

   One of the real articulative hurdles posed by Shirin is its wild sleight of hand with the process of flashbacks. Consequently, we have to track flurries of narrative incident as giving pause (more or less productive) to the various customers, and which comes our way with no natural order—thereby necessitating a purchase upon the various concerns and the often repeated appearances of the ladies.

   The entertainment eliciting a world of pristine gambits is an incongruously crude vehicle. The graphic design and playlist are just the beginning of the provocation. Kiarostami has retrieved the epic poem of the romance of Shirin and Khosrow in order to have them amount to a nymphomaniac princess and a cowardly king. But make no mistake, this unlovable saga (Kiarostami somehow finding his way to the farce-register of the old Sid Caesar potboiler skits) is a catalyst of disclosure on the brink of a very serious and urgent issue. The first matter to tackle is that of the nature of romance, not simply because we are in the throes of that genre, but also because this carelessly-reviewed pronouncement comprises fabulous (hidden) satirical comedy to offset the solemn blabber about technical innovation. Though the first situation brought to bear is the death of Khosrow and Shirin’s mourning beside his body in a cave or cell with water droplets evident, the prompt torrent of flashbacks includes an incident where, as an adolescent princess of the American Princess persuasion (though residing in ancient Armenia) has had brought to her, by a sort of special delivery, one, Farhad, a young artisan known for his accessary designs. The princess’ servant who finds Farhad gives us some Sid Caesar right from the get-go. “Are you Farhad?” The artisan’s “disciple”—perhaps being cautious; but also a natural for the Caesar show—asks, “Which Farhad?” To which the plebeian fires back, “How many Farhads are there in this dump?” Whereas a previous beholder of Shirin’s scheming is a chubby rural lady whose face shows that the intrigue of the protagonist involves a prerogative welcome to a hierarchical and domestic soul, a subsequent younger and more poised witness to the clown show evinces that the rampant foolishness is more roadblock than rollicking. As the arrangement proceeds, another woman is in the catbird seat, 30ish and rather amused by the rough negotiations. (In a seat behind her there is a woman who still wears the bandage of a nose-job.) The scene with the younger woman disclosed medium-intensity blue edges of two of the seats behind her. The scene with the next viewer produced even brighter highlights, on her hearing about the designer-in-demand being an expert as to the geometrist, Euclid. (Those jetstreams in the movie house recall the jetstreams in the Kiarostami films,Close-Up and Taste of Cherry—coming to bear as elicitations for the sake of savoring an endless and vivid spatiality as quelling the dominion of clutter.) Rounding out the preamble to the far-from-chance encounter of Shirin and Farhad, there is a squabble between the talent scout and the talent’s fan, about the timing of the visit. “Master Farhad comes back each night…”/ “Too late! This lady cannot wait.” Here the eyes from out of our century comprise an elderly lady sound asleep. We had seen her earlier as an irate beholder of gluttonous impatience (which had presumably reared up and bitten her from those she knew very well). Along with her peevishness, as she wakes up she activates two blue jetstreams, her sense of disaster rather close to the mark. What portends from an airhead princess leaves the morose moviegoer (seeking something better) with a tone of resignation and combative sadness, a lacuna despite the now-3 blue medals giving her credit for breaking the smarm barrier. Her watch is supplemented by a very young woman whose ascetic outlook would come as a relief to the previous performer (performance here being remarkably robust and gripping despite the constraints). The rigid girl does not ring any blue bells. Though gamely putting in an appearance, she is clearly far beyond her depth as the commotion of Shirin’s command gets into a cruising speed.

   Thus, it was time for a new set of eyes. And therewith we have an Ava Gardner lookalike to match the young Elizabeth Taylor lookalike of the passage of Shirin’s hard-nose energies in the scene prior to the flashback of the discovery of the new talent who was Farhad. “Ava”—whose big moment, in   The Barefoot Contessa, was all about being (like Shirin) an awesome shit-disturber—seems to have had more of Hollywood thrilling arrival clichés than she wants, and she looks to an unseen friend in the next seat, suggesting (with her eyes and with covering her sneer with her fingers) that they should leave. (On the other hand, very much to the point here, a man in a seat in the row behind her grips the arm rest in, somehow, serious anticipation.) The lookalike is nonplussed by the opening salvos of the presumed new lovers: “I am so grateful for your presence… Your school-fellow, Shapoor, praised your many talents…” While the cut from Ava seems to have her beginning to decamp, the new contemporary fun-seeker casts a very skeptical eye upon this too-tired-scene. “What the…” she might be thinking. She had begun her stint sound asleep. But now she seems curious as to where this “drama” is going. Perhaps she has hoped for something like the ribald double entendre, “… your many talents for geometry and drawing” [straight lines and curves]. Thus the affair dips into the world of Pre-Hays-Code comedy, for instance, Love Me Tonight, where Myrna Loy short-circuits a medical emergency— “Could you go for a doctor?”/ “Sure, send him up.” At any rate, the now-awake viewer silently decries the stilted, courtly introductions. The next lady on tap generates two vivid blue jetstreams as she hears, “I can see that you are skilful and well-built. Your hands show traces of hard labor…” After hearing, “Maybe you guessed the arduous task Shirin wants to entrust you with…” the bewildered designer then proceeds to faint. The next movie-goer is a patrician (resembling Myrna Loy’s delicate features) whose eyes light up in tolerating the antiquated rigmarole. Then a woman with features recalling Barbara Stanwick comes up to the plate, and from the aura of that risk-taker-felon she flashes a broad smile of complicity. But on seeing the fainting spell she musters some Mid-Century maturity in an unbeknown challenge to many of the would-be liberationists on hand. She rolls her eyes, not wedded to reflexive, one-upmanship cool. As Barbara exits the flow, the outcry we hear is, “He is calming down, his eyes are drooping!”

   Though not prone to fainting spells, the other heart-throb on record, Khosrow, is prone to running away and hiding from violent antagonists. Having been routed by a throng led by one of his generals, he forms an alliance with the Romans, who proceed to restore his aged father to the throne of Persia. Part of that package is the inept prince’s marrying Maryam, the daughter of the Emperor of Rome. To help fill out the picture of our questionable princess, there is the episode before the flashback to Farhad’s fainting spell, where Shirin dictates a letter in Khosrow’s name, telling Maryam, “Women get burned. They are the first victims of that fire. Shirin is a lover.” Overseeing this abridgement of a marriage, there is the resemblance of Liz, the disturber of matrimonial peace. On hearing about that long history of victims, she is pensive, her beauty an efficient icebreaker but involving doubts about that form of assertiveness. There are no blue dashes, and her eyes shift. On hearing from Khosrow, “a woman’s jealousy is as destructive as her love,” the divine diviner of film looks to a long career of such adventure and finds it not (quite) where she wants to be. The next talent from the bullpen is a large rural woman who seems as fixed upon domestic consistency as Liz was upon mischief. She wears no scarf and sparks no blue jetstream. On listening to the randy royals planning a love nest in the mountains, she glares like a hanging judge. The next woman who continues the surveillance is a far more tentative observer of ambition. She joins the scene where Shirin dictates, “Write down that Shirin is a lover, not just a sweet presence to save him from his lonely nights.” Our consultant leans forward in her chair to follow closely the breaking of bad news to Maryam. Perhaps a subscriber to the idea that to make an omelette you have to break some eggs.

   The self-indulgence and sense of the fruits (and embarrassments) of power politics create schisms all over the theatre (having, thereby, put into force the makings of a theatre of war). A more than average provocateur along this fold of movie goers is an elderly matron in black with icy eyes, an attitude of motionlessness and a menacing jaw, clearly to the right of the Ayatollah. She pops up frequently to emit her share of hatred toward any forms of sensual levity and her share of support for all and sundry who dish out savagery on behalf of a very ancient social order. Her first gig is to put a damper on the young Shirin being blindfolded in the course of a noisy game of blind man’s bluff by a mob of little hussies. “You are surrounded by flowers. Choose one and enjoy its nectar.” The current viewer seems more at home at the remark, “If you do that [peek], you’ll be defeated.” Unlike the status of the self-styled queens of Hollywood, the foibles of such hereditary dominance as we witness are flash-points being the makings of interpersonal strife right into the new millennium. Though on her first appearance the woman in black lit up some seat tops due to being committed (however blindly) to continued flaccid humbug, when it came to the romantic royals grabbing a moment of joy—Shirin whining, “I feel this joy won’t last”—and the wishful thinking of Khosrow (“The earth is turning for us and even the inhabitants of paradise envy us.”), she makes a rare change of attitude, head to one side, and no blues bless the backrest, perhaps the deflation for her implicit in one possible sense of the phrase, “the earth is turning,” being the unwelcome note.

    Others also have their silent say about provocative leaders. Shirin, with the corpse of the so-called love of her life nearby, declares, “Don’t blame me, if by the side of Khosrow’s dead body I’m remembering the lovely gaze of Farhad.” Watching and listening to this remarkable distraction, a poised young woman with designer shades perched on her head smiles and gives generous attention to this piece of work. A remark from the royal, to the effect, “How to forget that gaze, virtuous, tender and soft?” serves to elucidate the observer’s stance. Her magazine-driven accessories could be a sign of slippage, in face of the “soft;” but the context of the deceased pushes her to puzzlement tinged with anger. An older lady redolent of farmland appears more comfortable with the protagonist’s rambling returns and the latter’s going on to the rationale of “the fault of the world…” (those biological imperatives). But even her rather rude orientation feels some heat. She closes her eyes, the complication of a desperate world getting the better of her. She disappears from view; but before she does she musters a disturbing smile. The primeval protagonists, having met in the first place by a shaggy-dog-fantasy, engender few fans amongst the contemporary young and urban. But some of those not fitting that description are captivated by the exotic register. Running parallel to this divisive device is the precious intrigue of Shirin, about to dash her aunt’s counting on prolonging a family hegemony; but more than that. “More a niece and less a daughter… and you my sole heiress… Sooner or later you will be on the throne, delighted by this accession and grieved by my death…” A rough-hewed lady, in from the country, shows satisfaction that a woman could be so influential. That this headway has been put out there results in the prosaic and yet also undefined passionate woman-observer being amidst an ignition of the blue flash. The queen emits some toehold upon the prospect of seriousness in the midst of daffiness by going over once again that complexity stirring amidst a Hollywood yawner. “Call me aunt, as royalty is ephemeral and blood ties eternal.” On the brink of cliché “women’s values” statement, this wrinkle will constitute a glimpse of the integral sensibility spawning so much chaos. All Shirin can say to that articulation is, “Why mention death? Let’s talk about joyful matters?” At the onset of Shirin’s navigation on horseback to the big and incomprehensible payoff that is Khosrow, a young woman in the modern theatre, perhaps a student, maintains a resentful glare toward the screen and us. Her blue bolt is not matched, in the next scene, by another young woman delighted by a process of heaven-sent gratification, despite bird songs and an allegretto score.

   At about a third of the way in, there is a medley of flashbacking and fast-forwarding apropos of the less than memorable first encounter and meandering passions of the protagonists. We need to look at it for its supplementing moments in which the patrons put their thinking caps on, and for some arresting terminology. Whereas a modernist condemns, by her body language (making direct sense to us), the incoherence of the “lovers’” meeting, the jilted aunt, in her shock and grief comes up with the surprisingly regal aphorism, “The state has its reasons that even reason ignores.” A shot of pre-nuptials-Khosrow before he became consumed by wreckage sends us and the ladies in the dark an orgy. A viewer with prominent earrings shows more tolerance toward the loud laughter onscreen than the preceding college girl manages. A prominent blue and jetstream sizzles to her right. She plays with a few strands of her hair as she bids to jump into the hot water of dead-on-arrival. She gives a little smile in sharing the best hopes of the party animals. But a barnyard howl in the story, from someone very drunk, leaves her a bit aghast. A lady with tired eyes smiles shyly at a burst of laughter and applause. A man’s watch is highlighted behind her. (The ways of time.) Shirin, suddenly on hand, surprises us with, “All those laughs, all that charm, does it make people happy?” The viewer closes her eyes briefly. A guy having fun blurts out, from the soundtrack, “Women and wine, a combination that can’t be matched, Majesty!” (A pair of new eyes is profoundly disappointed. That comes with a couple of very faint jets.) The loose lips go on: “If we add the night, it assures sensuality… The somber sensuality belongs to the ignorant, not to lovers… An endless solitude for a short-lived encounter…”

    Now we come to the darker aspects of this dark comedy, whereby the divisions amount to much more than mere differences of taste in entertainment. Brutal and careless self-serving, as we have seen, could only result in physical violence. Dream-boat Khosrow materializes as a pushover, and the ensuing revolt features hideous smashing and screams from his ill-prepared army. This horror brings to the delivery seats a solidarity not apparent in the preceding flutters of bemusement. First there is one exception, an aged local with eyes wide on the slaughter and her mouth grinding down on one side. At one point, she is aghast at the howls and blood-letting. Then, in order: a chubby girl looks down, eyes nearly closed; a robust senior is angered and sickened and her eyes flinch as the swordfight takes place; a young girl also looks down, and then takes a peek; that senior presence in black looks away, her demands for gratifying order badly disappointed by the repeated slashes to be heard. (In some cases, the lines of blue surface surface. Within the consensus there being definite variations of sensuous intensity.) Before this, in flashback, we find a jealous Khosrow having arrested Farhad and toying with him before having him executed. In the course of mocking the sculptor/ lover, he feels a necessity to diminish Farhad’s creative initiatives, along lines of there being a creative deity doing the job of significant construction. “These mountains were carved by love, and not your hands.” During the outset of this deadly collision the viewer is another sentinel frequently on the spot, namely, a poised investigator, perhaps a college student, with two blue files in recognition that Shirin and Khosrow are junk-yard dogs the likes of which are omnipresent and continually breaching the center of interpersonal wit and depth. Fully aware that the volleying of the two playthings of Shirin must end with Farhad’s death, she suffers a brief crisis of confidence, putting fingers in her mouth and looking away (classical rational education, with its intellectual payoffs, unready to acknowledge that passions—malignant passions—will always have a dominant market share). “My governess used to tell me the story  of a sculptor whose hands were cut off for his disobedience, and then he started sculpting with his feet. But it would be a pity to cut off your hands and feed them to the dogs.” En route to hearing that punishment, Farhad makes it hard for the film viewers and us, by his worshiping Shirin as if she were so much more than she is. The film patron seen at the latter part of the abuse of power is a sleep-deprived, middle-aged figure who, were she elsewhere, could be recognized as a reflective hipster. Whatever, she is the most haunted of the apparitions, far beyond trying to make sense of such an impasse in academic and journalistic terms. Farhad’s final flourish— “I’m surprised that the entire world is not in love with her”—might have worked were this an old movie; but it’s a new movie. Prayerful and vengeful viewers take a shot; and we are once again confirmed that rather hapless guerilla slippage will fill the foyer on the way out. Like them, Khosrow’s questioning the bad patch with the cliché, “What is the new prowess?” does not take us very far.

   The deaths of the protagonists enter the precinct of Taste of Cherry, where a protracted bid to be adored amounts to a very dark joke. Accordingly, it is the minimalists in the seats who steal the show and arrest us as making some waves. One of the sons of Khosrow and Maryam, seeing that his father has never graduated to becoming formidable, takes lethal action while the unkingly king ignores Shirin’s more acute sense of advantage (and thereby having a more accurate bead on the assassin). The kill is brief, blood-curdling and with Shirin going into typical fatuous self-pity. First we hear, “Hit him hard… Once and over!” Then a gentle little lady with a doe’s eyes holds her head as the butchery promised comes to pass. A remark from one of the killers— “Let’s get it over with… It’s done!” reaches another lady, with wide eyes consumed by shock.

   The saga which has become a generally sickening slasher experience creates confusion, confusion thematically primed. In keeping with its tradition of sellable fluff, there is an episode which features Farhad carrying on his shoulders Shirin, astride her horse who had become annoyingly unruly. The ladies treated to that naivete comprise: those who are totally bored (one asleep); those who appreciate the possibility of more fabulousness in our present era, but knowing that many in the room will find it wonderful in itself; and those who frankly don’t see any point in this but feel obliged to pick Kiarostami’s brain. The gory contentiousness now having its innings traces back to a real spate of lifting for the sake of a wide embrace of, while at the same time distancing of, earthly aliens.

   First of all, let’s note that amidst a flurry of flashbacks amounting to a shell game, pressing the matter beyond ethics and political history, the death of Khosrow entails a situational wobble between a pedestrian murder-for-gain (premonition and actuality churning in a haze of anxiety) and the protagonists posting underwhelming bulletins from beyond the grave. These platforms are right up Shirin’s mawkish alley, a means by which to send out some sort of (imagined) sublimity to the world, but particularly to the assembly of women gathered amongst those suggestive blue streaks. While it is only common sanity to commiserate in face of someone’s death, the losses of Shirin comprise a (well-worn) systematic power-grab by which to establish the mourner’s vision of integral life. She attends to the partner having been “got over with,” in a register straight out of Hollywood and its wildly, deranged overblown rhetoric. “Calm down, my love, the hours are cruel…” [particularly the hours in the grave]. A very young woman [with three blue flames along the ridges in recognition of a form of wholeheartedness encountering a thicket of paradox] can’t get over the destabilizing verbiage. Khosrow emotes to little effect— “I wanted serene voluptuousness, forgetting about the knell.” In the spirit of searching for how to sustain a bathetic knell gushing into infinity, she comes up with, “I will share your last breath;” to which he cries, “Don’t leave me! Your absence is fatal to me!” This elicits tears from the new world which becomes a slide, however resolved, into a significant loss. Even if the lion’s share of this breakdown pertains to the poverty of the lives of the royals—Shirin’s, “Calm down and sleep, like an exhausted tide,” [they being far from a force of nature]—a misstep in the seats is vividly in effect.

   Shirin’s being deceased at this point is never recorded—the same bum’s rush as to the careless though-precious demise at the end of Kiarostami’s Taste of Cherry. From that less than splendid pulpit, she turns directly to her audience (in the process of becoming her subjects) to supposedly impart the wisdom she packs like a smart phone. “But you, my sisters, you know the story better than I do.” Dispensing with (awkward) details, she seems intent in launching a sort of mosh pit of bawling from most of those gathered in that theatre—some of her victims of which having until then been at work pondering how shabby the heritage of a fairly new planet has turned out. “Here is another manly game,” she cynically emotes, to a tearful plurality and a very scant minority. The final note, then, is a hybrid of being equivocally appalled by warring and resorting to a good cry which does little or nothing to their being on the hook to contrive structures of apprehension which geeks and academics won’t touch (they being descendants of the advantage-besotted rude son who killed off our protagonists). The clear-eyed Double Major in sociology and psychology cries for the chaos and the waste. A beautiful bourgeois lady is terrified by the bloody specifics of the strife. She cries and then pulls herself together. Her steely eyes could be going anywhere. “And you, my grieving sisters, you listen to me. Through these tears I see your eyes… Are you shedding these tears for me, Shirin? Or for the Shirin that hides in each of you? [Classic Kiarostami irony]. Shirin, who, through her life, received no favor nor any attention.” Juliet Binoche, stepping down from her rendition of Joan, the Martyr, cries. A confused rebel. “She was lonely and no one believed her loneliness… In love with games, rain and sunshine… Tears of seven colors falling on her cheeks… Ah, I am so tired, my sad sisters…” And the last lady we see is the uber-fascist matron. She, a spirit, not a warrior, looks away from the sounds of the assassinations. But she’s seen a lot to like. The tear coming down her cheek is more conformist than caring—unchanging joylessness.