warren oates wrote:How is this the most interesting or illuminating story to tell about these characters? What do you learn about each of them by the end of the film that you didn't know the first time you met them? What do they learn about themselves? We know what the boyfriend wants, but what does the girl want? What about the professor?
Are these really questions that have any relevance to a film like this one? Or are they the necessary workshop questions for a certain kind of film or screenplay, one that is playing by these rules and that must be held accountable by a viewer if it breaks them? You're claiming that Kiarostami wasn't faithful to the tenets of central-conflict theory in this, one of his most elusive films, when I think it's a dubious proposition at best that any of his films could be considered beholden to them. No, I have barely more of an idea about who these characters are by the end of the film, but I have dozens of intriguing, stimulating, affecting ideas about who they
could be. It's not that it's wrong to ask what the characters want, (in fact, the way Kiarostami employs suspense and red herrings demands it), but you're barking up the wrong tree if you expect empirical answers to your questions. It's a fundamentally ambiguous film.*
warren oates wrote:And some bonus questions for those who've seen more Kiarostami films: What do you discover about the loneliness/alienation of big city life in Japan (or anywhere in the modern world) that adds to Kiarostami's already strong investigation of these themes in earlier films like Close-Up, Taste of Cherry and Ten? What do you learn about prostitution in the film and how does that compare to what's featured in Ten?
Plenty! Just focussing on the professor's position, we have a character who's managed at a late age to create a life of hermetic comfort in his well-appointed apartment, while the rest of the world is literally kept at bay (windows), observable, analyzable, and, perhaps most significantly, delectable, all seemingly without risk to his person. I mean, hell, he can have a prostitute delivered to his apartment with more ease than a bowl of soup. Even that "hometown, homecooked" soup is a way of making contact with another world without personal risk. He's a translator and a sociologist, an expert in "objective" evaluation of milieus other than his own. I think there's an element of self-parody in Kiarostami's depiction of the character, as the filmmaker is of course also tussling with "translating" another culture than his own in making the film. The professor has a neighbor who has devoted her life and interests to him, but he's skillfully managed to shrink the issue into a dispute over car parking. He hires a prostitute who might also be his daughter or student, but their mutually enforced naivety prevents the transaction from having any appearance other than that of blissful, semi-comic innocence. And all of this is enabled by the modern, cultured metropolis, a space where the most perfidious self-deceptions and social abuses can occur as long as certain rules and limits are respected. Of course, the false confidence inspired in the professor by this utopia eventually leads him astray, and he discovers some of the pain, danger, and violence lying just under the polished surfaces of his everyday life. The ending is apocalyptic, a bitterly funny update of that old adage "don't throw stones in glass houses". I think it's one of the best city films I've ever seen, and I could go on much longer talking about what I think it has to say about the life I and billions of others lead.
I do think it's considerably weaker as a film about Japan, and especially as about prostitution in Japan. The subject is introduced and depicted in a way that seems, not incorrect, but alien, and overly familiar from other outsiders' cinematic takes on the country, giving justification to Straub's criticism of Kiarostami as a "tourist". This is part of the reason that I think there's an element of auto-critique in the depiction of the professor, a metafictional acknowledgment that the director's film might have failings as an objective, realist, document.
warren oates wrote:*[Wages of Fear, in fact, is such a strong story that it was successfully remade decades latter by William Freidkin. The day that anyone remakes Like Someone In Love because it's got an amazing story I'll eat all of my posts. The other thing to say about Wages of Fear is that the incredible tension works so well because we know so much about the characters, what they are trying to do and the dangerous obstacles in their path. There's a whole hour or so devoted to that kind of set-up and it pays off in droves later on. Like Someone In Love on the other hand, in rather stark contrast to so many other well-constructed Kiarostami films, sets up almost nothing that pays off later on except for the boyfriend's jealous volatility and the brief episode about Akiko's grandmother.]
Neither Clouzot or Friedkin are total auteurs in the way that Kiarostami or hundreds of other directors are. That isn't to say that they're lesser filmmakers, just that they are more adaptable, in both senses of the word. There's a reason that the remake of
Breathless is such a punchline in some circles, and it's not because of any qualitative judgement of the end results. It's just that the original film is so ferociously idiosyncratic that any attempt at a remake is doomed to either drastically reimagine the narrative or hollowly ape it, making the relationship between the two films tenuous at best and derivative at worst. The day someone does a faithful, not-awful American remake of
Close-Up I'll eat my posts.
*Similar, in many ways, to the work of Kurosawa Kiyoshi, who I was delighted to see is thanked in the credits. I like to imagine that during production Kurosawa and Kiarostami took many long car rides together, with back-projected images of tree lined avenues reflected in an endless loop across the windshield.
