Final comment

Ed Lake

• Last Updated: October 18. 2009 4:30PM UAE / October 18. 2009 12:30PM GMT

Film director Abbas Kiarostami says that despite restrictions, he has no intention of leaving his native Iran to make films elsewhere. "There's nothing that has persuaded me yet to leave," he says. Jaime Puebla / The National

Throughout his career Abbas Kiarostami has returned again and again to the image of the winding road. From the desert paths that lead Badii to his grave in the Palme d’Or-winning A Taste of Cherry to the carriageways of Iran which he documented in a photo exhibition bearing the title Road at Dubai’s Meem gallery last year, the path ahead has always been a luminous presence in his work. It seems odd, then, that the great Iranian filmmaker should find himself stuck in a cul-de-sac. Yet that, by his own account, is just where he is now.

“With Shirin I might have reached the end of the line,” he explains through his interpreter when we meet at the Emirates Palace. “I’ve said in other interviews that I might make other films, but I would like in my experience of cinema for Shirin to be my last work.”

We’re at the Middle East International Film Festival where Kiarostami has been serving as president and tutelary spirit on the panel for the narrative feature prizes. The fact that his jury gave its main award to Valery Todorovsky’s Hipsters, an exuberant and campy musical about Russian teenagers in the 1950s, itself suggests a new receptiveness to alien influences on Kiarostami’s part. It would be hard to imagine a good film that less resembled his own work. But it would be a mistake to read too much into his selection.

“It is neither good criticisms nor awards that determine the fate of a good film,” he tells me. “What determines it is time. We make our superficial judgments and have done at each festival, but we know completely that the last word will not be ours.”

Not that there’s anything wrong with putting in a word for posterity. Kiarostami is very clear about how history should remember his own most recent movie. For instance. “I will make other films,” he repeats, “but I would like to place Shirin as my last film.”

His translator is worried. “I don’t know what that means,” she says. Yet it seems clear enough: Shirin all but demands to be taken as Kiarostami’s final word, regardless of what comes next.

The 2008 feature is probably his most difficult film. It’s certainly the one that takes his signature device – a fixed camera that seems to be pointing in the wrong direction – to its logical extreme.

In earlier works, Kiarostami imposed strange restrictions on the viewer’s perspective. In Close-Up, crucial meetings were recorded using a broken microphone so that the sound cuts out mid-scene. The whole of his film Ten was shot from two camera angles inside a single car. With Shirin, this shrinking tendency runs out of road. Minimalism has to stop when there’s nothing left to get rid of.

The soundtrack is a narration of the Iranian traditional love story of Khosrow and Shirin, accompanied by stirring archaic music. The visible component of the movie is simply a series of female faces, lit as though by a cinema screen. They look moved and absorbed in the story, and it is from the expressions that we are invited to reconstruct the film in our imagination.

In reality the actresses, including Juliette Binoche, were staring at a mark on the wall; the director decided on the soundtrack once he had finished shooting and pieced it all together so it seemed like the actresses were reacting to what the viewer heard, a very Kiarostami-like piece of sleight of hand.

But where to go next? Time for a U-turn, and for Certified Copy, Kiarostami’s first feature to be shot outside Iran. “The film is finished,” he says, “and it was a new experience for me. Working with an actress, with professionals altogether ... the film has to be released and then we can see what it turns out to be.”

Binoche returns for a more sustained acting role, playing a gallery owner who begins an ambiguous flirtation with an English writer. It is, Kiarostami says, “a little bit more narrative compared to my other films,” and was shot on location in Tuscany with a trained cast and crew, a budget– all those things one never expected to see in an Abbas Kiarostami film.

Was it difficult to make the transition? “It was simpler than all my other films,” he says. “This was the simplest film for me to work on – even more simple than the work I’ve done on my shorts, because I was working with a professional team both in front of and behind the camera.”

There were other benefits to shooting in Tuscany, too. “I did not have the complicated issues to do with film production that I would have in Iran. I felt a sense of complete freedom to express what I have to say.”

Kiarostami has had a vexed relationship with the Iranian censors over the years. In 2005 he told the Guardian his films had been banned for the past decade. The situation doesn’t seem to have improved in the meantime. “I would like to continue to work in my own language and in my own country, but it is turning out to be more difficult day by day,” he says. “My energies are diminishing and the problems of Iran are becoming greater.”

In an interview with The National last year he said it was the difficulties of filming after Iran’s 1979 revolution that first drove him to take up photography. Indeed, a retrospective of his photographic work is coming to the Meem Gallery in Dubai next month.

Is it possible that the new difficulties in Iran will cause him to redirect his creative energies again? “There is no event that doesn’t have an effect on us,” he says. “That’s the law. It just depends on what your reaction is in the face of things that don’t appeal to you. You can find shelter in alcohol and opium. You might get depressed. Or you can think, since I’m not going to do those things, what can I do?”

I bring up the example of his former assistant director, Bahman Ghobadi, who shot his most recent film, No One Knows About Persian Cats, without government permission and now says he doesn’t want to work in Iran again.

Is Kiarostami ever tempted to follow his protege’s example to go out with a bang and not come back? “I should have added this response also to the opium and alcohol,” he says. “You can also leave your home.” But he won’t do that.

“Based on what I’ve witnessed of Iranians leaving Iran, I haven’t seen a very positive outcome,” he says. “I have no criticism of anybody else that should choose to leave their home... If Bahman Ghobadi believes that he will make films under better conditions outside of Iran, I only congratulate and praise him. So long as he does make them.”

For his own part, Kiarostami plans on staying put. “I don’t believe in leaving my home,” he says. “The place where I sleep well at night is my home. We make films in order to live. No matter under whatever conditions, my home, at the end of a dead end, is where I’ve been living, and there’s nothing that’s persuaded me yet to leave it.”

Here’s hoping that for Kiarostami, the end of the road is just another place to start over.