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In Kiarostami's Shirin, 113 actresses' faces are filmed as they watch a sentimental drama

There's a horrific irony that Neda Agha Soltan should become an icon of Iran's struggle

in the same week a sensitive study of the Iranian female face opens in cinemas. Abbas

Kiarostami's Shirin is an ingenious film that deserves the widest possible audience. It

cannot, of course, match the horror and power of those images of the 26-year-old

student as she lay dying on Karegar Avenue after being shot in the chest last Saturday

evening.

Eyewitnesses maintain she was targeted by the Basij militia,

despite playing a peripheral and wholly peaceful part in the

protest. But, as Shirin also suggests, it's the impact of the image

on the screen – not the truths behind it – that dictates the

spectator's emotional response.

Iran's women face the cameraAs images of Neda Agha Soltan's lifeless face circumnavigate theglobe, Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami has made a compellingstudy of the female face with Shirin

Shirin

Production year:2008Country: Rest of theworldCert (UK): PGRuntime: 90 mins

Rarely has the status of women in the Muslim world been

explored with such devastating simplicity as in Shirin. By

exclusively employing close-ups of the shifting expressions of 113

actresses as they appear to watch a sentimental romantic

melodrama, Kiarostami demonstrates the cultural, political and

emotional intelligence that is often downgraded in patriarchal

societies. Expanding upon 'Where Is My Romeo?' – Kiarostami's contribution to the

2007 portmanteau, Chacun son cinéma – and his 2008 multimedia installation,

Looking at Tazieh, this is a masterly variation on the 1920s Kuleshov experiment that

demonstrated filmic meaning's heavy dependence upon context.

Moreover, it continues his audacious attempt to put the abstract into arthouse and even

seems to reinforce the contention that Iran has developed a cinema of moral anxiety

similar to the one that emerged in Poland in the late 1970s, when Andrzej Wajda,

Krzysztof Zanussi, Agnieszka Holland and Krzysztof Kieslowski anticipated the

rebellious spirit of an oppressed society prior to the formation of the Solidarity trade

union.

It's tempting to suggest that Iranian film-makers like Kiarostami, the Makhmalbaf

family, Jafar Panahi, Abolfazl Jalili, Rakhshan Bani-Etemad and Bahman Ghobadi have

been reflecting a similar undercurrent of popular discontent, as so many recent releases

have explored topics that would previously have been considered taboo. And what is so

intriguing is that the majority of these insights into women's rights, urban poverty,

prostitution, drug addiction, bureaucratic incompetence, legal intransigence and the

growing student fascination and familiarity with outside ideas and new technologies

have been granted export licences by a regime that is supposedly stricter than Poland's

pre-glasnost communists.

Shirin consists of a group of women watching a movie adaptation of Nezami Ganjavi's

12th-century fable about the rivalry for an Armenian princess between Farhad the

sculptor and the Persian prince, Khosrow. The storyline is an irrelevance, however,

despite the impassioned performances of an ulterior vocal cast and an emotive score.

What does matter is the art of screen acting, the perceptiveness of the camera and the

persuasive power of cinema.

Kiarostami reportedly mocked up an auditorium in his living room and coaxed his cast

into exhibiting a range of emotions while following three dots on a blank sheet of paper.

With Hedieh Tehrani, Niki Karimi, Leila Hatami and Juliette Binoche among those

enduring the relentless gaze of Gelareh Kiazand's camera, this is a compelling catalogue

of such basic audience responses as rapture, distraction, longing, fear, laughter and

tears.

However, it's also a subversion of narrative norms that lauds cinema's ability to offer

consolation, as it compels the viewer to speculate upon the personality and domestic

Directors: AbbasKiarostamiCast: GolshiftehFarahani, JulietteBinoche, MahnazAfshar, Niki KarimiMore on this film

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What's this?

situation that prompts each woman's reaction to the unseen scenario. Moreover,

Kiarostami courageously confounds fundamentalist attitudes by challenging the

wearing of burkas, as he showcases the expressive beauty of the hijab-framed face in

close-ups as affecting as those of Renée Falconetti in Carl Theodor Dreyer's silent

masterpice, The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928).

Kiarostami's use of subtle shifts in expression to celebrate life is mesmerising. But Neda

Agha Soltan's lifeless face will rightly and undoubtedly leave the deeper impression.

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