Shirin

The latest film by the great Iranian film maker Abbas Kiarostami is a fascinating ninety-two-minute, intimate view of the emotions of 112 Iranian women along with the French Juliette Binoche, who are in a theatre and (seemingly) following a Persian love story. The faces of the Iranian actresses watching the story of Shirin (such as Hedieh Tehrani, Niki Karimi, or Leila Hatami) are carefully framed in static images. This is an unprecedented experiment, in that the director does not let his audience see what the women actually see – the audience watches the women and never gets a glimpse of what they are looking at. The film that the women are following in the theatre is present only through its rich soundtrack. Shirin is actually a prolonged concept of Abbas Kiarostami’s three minute film Where Is My Romeo that was a part of the anthology To Each His Cinema (2007). The director was so inspired by this idea that he decided to expand it into a long feature film. The story of Shirin is based on a 12th century Persian poem by Farrideh Golbou, ‘Khosrow e Shirin’, which involves a love triangle between an Iranian king, an Armenian queen and an Iranian sculptor. A challenging work by the Iranian master that one has to follow like a classical piece of music – with one’s emotions. (LC)

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