Shirin (Abbas Kiarostami)

Take 112 Iranian actresses and French actress Juliette Binoche and put them in a film theatre. Then let them watch a 90 minute Iranian film, that is based on a 12th century poem and capture nothing but their reactions. The sound wil tell the story and with some help from the musical score, the viewer empathises with the women who watch the film. This is the concept of Kiarostami's latest film; Shirin. But does it work?

In the 12th century poem, princess Shirin of Armenia finds a portrait of the prince of Persia at her bed. She decides to leave Armenia to find him, but the tragedy ends in unanswered love. While this is all told in sound get more absorbed into the story than you'd think and it leaves a lot for your imagination. We never really know what this princess Shirin of Armenia looks like or who this prince of Persia is. 

In contrast to the story where nothing is shown, the women in the audience  manipulate our thoughts and emotions. For example, at one point in the film there is laughter sounding through the theatre, but the women in the audience are not laughing. Is it a laughter of humiliation or a laughter of joy? We are unsure and wait for the women's response, which is laughter of joy after all.

So there is freedom for interpretation and manipulation, but what is Shirin actually about? Is it just an experiment by a pretentious filmmaker who tries to be inventive but ends up making a radio play? Or more important; is Shirin cinema? Filmmakers like Stan Brakhage, or even Hitchcock consider silent cinema the purest form of cinema, because everything is told by means of visual narrative. A more common opinion is that the marriage of sight and sound brought cinema into adulthood. But do sight and sound in Shirin really have an equal role? Kiarostami seems to do the exact opposite of what many filmmakers do. The visuals follow the sound, rather than designing the sound world according to its visual counterpart.

While there are some men in the audience, Kiarostami's focus is primarily on the women. Shirin is a story about a woman who chooses her own destiny and decides to find the man she loves. In a country where marriages are still arranged and women don't have the same rights as men, Shirin holds a message for the women of Iran.

Whatever you think about the experimental Shirin, it is an inventive film nonetheless, like many of Kiarostami's films. However, the film's main strength also becomes its main weakness. The emotional scenes and audience reactions are the strongest parts in the film, but in moments where there's no convincing, strong emotion, Shirin may seem hollow. Still Shirin is a daring and succesful experiment by Iran's leading filmmaker. 

**** (out of 5)