Shirin
Abbas Kiarostami
2008 - 92 min - Couleur - Iran, France

112 women from Iran, plus a 113th, from France, none other than Juliette Binoche, are presented before us here by Abbas Kiarostami. What are they doing? Nothing, a lot, intensely. They are sitting in a cinema, watching the screening of a love story apparently. Based on a 12th century Persian poem, Khosrow e Shirin, adapted by Farrideh Golbou, the story of Shirinshifts the three sides of a love triangle between a king (from Iran), a queen (from Armenia) and a sculptor (from Iran).
Every one of their faces is watched in close-up by the camera. The audience (we) never sees what the women in the cinema (they) are looking at so passionately. We only share the soundtrack, full of various events, which, as it always is in cinema, is off camera. Beside the main screen, there is another, which is just as astonishing, changeable and lively: that of the faces of the audience who display their emotions in response to the film.