I've seen "Taste of Cherry" and "Ten" by this filmmaker. I found them exceptional in a few ways, but not rewarding experiences. I doubted the decisions of the filmmaker and that's poison to a shared life with one.
I still do. But this has changed my impression that he is incapable of making wise, effective choices.
Now I must see the other two in this "series."
Here's what you'll experience. The filmmaker is Iranian in situation, but French in intellect. That means his movies will be about movies, or will cast life as a movie with discrete references to films.
In this case we have a film being made. To elaborate on the distance between us and the film the first scene is a man introducing himself as the actor who plays the director.
The film within is cast and begins shooting. We see take after take, seemingly repeated endlessly. Each time, something goes wrong because reality intrudes. Slowly the film becomes about that reality instead of the film: the boy and girl playing a young married couple are from the nearby village and he has been courting her and has been turned down by her grandmother. (Her parents are dead.)
He has seen her only a few times, but is in love with her. He thinks he saw an expression once in her that reciprocates. Now in between those interminable takes he begs her to express her love. These take the form most purely of her reading, deliberately ignoring him, and he (an illiterate) telling to turn the page if you love me.
She demurs through the whole film until the end which has a very long slow scene. Very long, wordless. And she gives an answer that we impute so indirectly is it a far literally far observation. One amazing thing that occurs is our wonder that the filmmaker expects us to tolerate what he is doing. The other is that we do.
So I would recommend this.
But there's an issue that disturbs. This works for me because the society depicted is so alien, so unbelievable. The women here are women only in that they are allowed to have children. They are beings only in the most technical of senses. One wonders if such a place can really exist on the planet, or if it is a concoction or art to merely show the weakness of man.
I say this because I have a notion of symmetry in folding. I think successful art that represents itself has the same "semantic distance" on both sides. In other words, there is the same degree of abstraction between our real world and the foundation world of the film, and that is the same distance to the film (or art) within. I find this so prevalent that I pose it as a law of introspection.
So here we have a film that I assume was made for Iranian viewing, by viewers that would accept the world of women we see, wouldn't wonder at the third world infrastructure, would knowingly accept the dilemma of proud illiteracy. That places the world of the viewer very close to that of the movie within. Or does it? Is the Tehranian who sees art films more like me than the primitives we see here?
Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 3: Worth watching.
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