Conversations conducted for Movie Mutations and Abbas Kiarostami (both 2003). — J.R.
Open Spaces in Iran and Africa:
Conversations with Abbas Kiarostami
by Jonathan Rosenbaum and Mehrnaz Saeed-Vafa
1. Taste of Cherry: spring 1998 (Chicago)
The hero of Abbas Kiarostami’s Taste of Cherry is a 50ish man named Mr. Badii contemplating suicide for unstated reasons, driving around the hilly Tehran outskirts in search of someone who will bury him if he succeeds — he plans to swallow sleeping pills — and retrieve him from the hole in the ground he has selected if he fails. Over the course of one afternoon, he picks up three passengers and asks each of them to perform this task in exchange for money — a young Kurdish soldier stationed nearby, an Afghan seminarian who is somewhat older, and a Turkish taxidermist who is older than he is. The soldier runs away in fright, the seminarian tries to persuade him not to kill himself, and the taxidermist, who also tries to change his mind, reluctantly agrees, needing the money to help take care of his sick child. The terrain Badii’s Range Rover traverses repeatedly, in circular fashion, is mainly parched, dusty, and spotted with ugly construction sites and noisy bulldozers, though the site he’s selected for his burial is relatively quiet, pristine, and uninhabited. Read more
From the Chicago Reader (September 18, 1987). — J.R.
All of James Benning’s features can be regarded as shotgun marriages in which he attempts to wed his distinctive formal talents and interests — framing midwestern landscapes with beauty and nostalgia, using ambiguous offscreen sounds to create narrative expectations — with an intellectual and/or social rationale. Landscape Suicide is almost certainly his most successful and interesting foray in this direction since his One Way Boogie Woogie of ten years ago. Delving into two murder cases — Bernadette Protti’s seemingly unmotivated stabbing murder of another teenage girl in a California suburb in 1984, and Ed Gein’s even more gratuitous mass slayings and mutilations in rural Wisconsin in the late 50s — Benning uses actors to re-create part of the killers’ court testimonies, juxtaposed with the commonplace settings where these crimes took place. Boldly eschewing the specious psychological rhetoric that usually accompanies accounts of such crimes, he creates an open forum for the spectator to contemplate the mysterious vacancy of these people and these places, and their relationships to each other. The performances of both actors, Rhonda Bell and Elian Sacker, are extraordinary achievements, and the chilling, evocative landscapes have their own stories to tell; the fusion of the two creates gaps that not even the film’s confusing title can fill, but the space opened up is at once powerful and provocative. Read more
From the Chicago Reader (November 1, 1987). — J.R.
Judging from this interminable Australian punk film, the 1978 freak scene in Melbourne was almost identical to that in London a decade earlier, with one important difference: politics in this motley crash pad are so marginalized that they barely squeak into the movie as incidental comic relief. Writer-director Richard Lowenstein seems as bored with the proceedings as most spectators are likely to be; consequently there’s probably more gratuitous camera movement per square inch here than in any other film of 1986. The house where all the layabouts lay about belongs to Sam (Michael Hutchence), lead singer for the rock band Dogs in Space, and in order to justify the title further, period snatches of TV coverage of astronauts are arbitrarily cut into the proceedings. Boredom is counter-revolutionary, reads a prominently placed placard, but the boredom in this case — scarcely alleviated by the ‘Scope format and a few intermittent flashy visual effects — isn’t even focused enough to seem moderate. The Dolby music in the film is written and performed by Iggy Pop, Brian Eno, the Marching Girls, Chuck Rio, Gang of Four, and Boys Next Door; other actors include Saskia Post, Nique Needles, Deanna Bond, Tony Helou, and Chris Haywood. Read more
