"Through the Olive Trees" (1994) / "Certified Copy" (2010)

Watching two Kiarostami films back to back, the first an early film, the second his latest, made 16 years later, it is striking to see how little Kiarostami has changed over time. For some directors, this may be perceived to be a defect in the evolution of style, but in Kiarostami's case the fact that he hasn't changed much proves the durability of his thinking. Through the Olive Trees, of all Kiarostami's works, relates the most to his most recent film, Certified Copy, the latter which is also the Iranian director's first film made outside Iran. Through the Olive Trees is about love which begins as simulation and ends as reality; Certified Copy is essentially the same film -- though in some ways with noticeably less complication and sophistication. Both films, one feels, began as isolated images, auratic images that impelled the director to unveil the processes that brought them to being. In Through the Olive Trees -- whose title succinctly summarizes the gist of the film -- Kiarostami was perhaps struck one day, as he stood on a cliff or hilltop overlooking a wide green valley, by the distant image of a young girl walking through a grove of olive trees. The girl, of course, is wearing a hijab, and her figure is only barely perceptible as she disappears from sight under the tree boughs. The image is overpowering, poetic because it is inexplicable. How does one conjure up this image again, what story could bring it back to life? Watching the end of Through the Olive Trees, one feels that Kiarostami wrote the story specifically to recapture the emotion of this singular image, the sight of a young girl walking under the green cover of olive trees: what would a young man feel at seeing her, so out of reach that she becomes almost phantasmal? Such a film would dwell on the beauty of women, on the mystery of youth and maturity in women, in blithe girls and pensive mothers, and, especially, on the special kind of beauty which the hijab confers on feminine nature. Through the Olive Trees is one of those rare Iranian films -- at least, of those produced after the Islamic Revolution -- that manages to demonstrate the "Eternal Feminine" without needing to rely on any overt eroticization of female beauty. (The character of the strong and determined Miss Shiva is a case in point in which the metaphysical stability of a strong woman shines through her voice and uprightness.)

Certified Copy is a film that would be impossible to make in Iran; Kiarostami, in making it, has effectively signed himself into exile (especially after having to witness the unjust imprisonment of his close friend and collaborator, Jafar Panahi, who makes a youthful appearance in Through the Olive Trees) -- and we sense that, like Andrei Tarkovsky and other master directors who were forced to live in exile from their native country, Kiarostami will expect to work abroad for an indeterminate length of time. (Already his next film, titled The End, looks to be produced and filmed in Japan and France.) Certified Copy, by any measure of decency, is a tame film, but I recall the distinct shock -- or so I was led to imagine what might be "shocking" for Iranians to behold -- of seeing Juliette Binoche wear a low neckline blouse with her brassiere visibly in view (and which she eventually takes off, in a church!). There was something quaintly european, even slovenly, about Binoche's appearance, compared to the strict attire of the Iranian women who populate Through the Olive Trees. But it was still Binoche, and her charming smile sufficed to bring us back to the matter-of-factness of the liberal West, where women are indeed allowed to wear what they like and flirt and think as they like. Certified Copy, in this regard, feels like the kind of film that Kiarostami always wanted to make, not only about what the West, what Europe, means to him, but also what an empowered and liberalized woman would look and talk and act like if she were removed from the context of Iranian culture. It is important, I think, to remember that Kiarostami was raised in a culture that categorically forbade women to not only dress as Binoche dresses, but to act and think and speak as she does: and Binoche delivers in all respects another portrait of the Eternal Feminine. But Kiarostami is no immature idealist, and Binoche is as much defined by the circumstances of her francophone culture as she is by the circumstances of her relationship to the art professor James Miller (played by William Shimmel) and her relationship to the geographical environment (Tuscany) in which she lives and works. Kiarostami's ability to write her so purely in her own voice demonstrates the maturity of his vision. The final image of the art professor looking at himself in the mirror, as he contemplates the reality of his situation (is this really happening? why am I here?), while church bells play in a Tuscan background colored by the warm light of sunset, punctuates the essential Kiarostami technique of building up a film from the retrospective angle of its ending: one feels that the ending had been written first, before the scenario shaped itself into a discourse on the nature of the "copy", authentic and inauthentic. 

One reviewer has astutely observed that Kiarostami's thesis that european culture is itself a simulation, a copy, of the Antique, as opposed to being anything "original" or unique, testifies to the director's outsider privilege of being an Iranian: as a man raised in a persian culture in many ways more ancient than the relics of Europe, Kiarostami's insight into european society enjoys a perspective equal to that of a dispassionate man viewing a  beautiful girl walk through a grove of olive trees that spreads out in the valley below.