Five Dedicated to Ozu

Five Dedicated to Ozu
Studio: Kino
WorkNameSort: Five Dedicated to Ozu

Abbas Kiarostami should be considered an Iranian filmmaker no longer. Instead, he is now an auteur of the globe. After establishing himself as an arthouse darling with existentialist powerhouse films such as Taste of Cherry and The Wind Will Carry Us in his native Iran, Kiarostami has since expanded his palette both geographically and formally. His documentary ABC Africa looked at AIDS-afflicted children in Uganda with a mix of devastating matter-of-factness and ironic jubilance, the kids finding joy in the form of Kiarostami’s digital camera. His segment in the European omnibus film Tickets, set aboard a Rome-bound train, saw Kiarostami further branching out into different languages and cultures while perpetuating his fascinations with transportation, communication and technology. These turns are frequently globetrotting but increasingly inaccessible to the standards of distribution, and we should be lucky simply to have them available on DVD. This especially goes for Five Dedicated to Ozu, a different animal even for an experimentalist like Kiarostami.

The film is best approached as an installation of five short videos. Each of them is a dialogue-free, virtually static long take, shot around the Caspian Sea. On paper they would appear a dull and pretentious slog, but on screen the images are divinely constructed and endlessly evocative: a log swept up in a shoreline current, the bustle on a beachside boardwalk, a group of dogs lounging by the waves, a line of ducks parading across the frame rather adorably (an adverb rarely used to describe Kiarostami’s cinema) and a vision of a swamp at night, lit only by the moon’s reflection on the rippling water.

These are the kind of images poets yearn to express, and the movie is a visual and aural delight for fans of abstract art and non-narrative cinema. It transcends what may appear to be a film-school construct ‘ plant your camera down and observe life for a while ‘ acting at least as a soothing sedative and at most a metaphor for nature’s life, death and rebirth.

Not surprisingly, this difficult 74-minute experiment never received U.S. distribution, but it did play as part of New York’s Museum of Modern Art’s Kiarostami retrospective in March. In that case, the film was broken up in five videos playing in five different rooms, and in the context of the director’s painting and photography work, I can only dream of the impact it had on those lucky MoMA patrons.

But as a singular experience, a film like this is inherently soporific. However, as Kiarostami concedes in Around Five, his exceptional documentary on the making of the movie, it’s OK to nod off during it. ‘You won’t miss anything,â?� he says, and remarks that the most appropriate viewing environment for Five is a comfortable armchair that facilitates napping. So if you’re one of the bored consumers of this acquired taste, take comfort that if you do catch some Z’s, you have the director’s permission.

This article appears in Jul 25-31, 2007.