Oblique Strategies

And Life Goes On is dedicated to the victims of the earthquake, and like most of Kiarostami’s work, it’s a wry tribute to ordinary people failing to achieve the goals they so obsessively pursue, stubbornly persevering against all odds and absorbing new dimensions of experience along the way. In Kiarostami’s first dramatic feature, The Traveler, made in 1974 during a boom in European-influenced Iranian filmmaking, a boy desperate to attend a soccer game in Tehran swindles his parents and his friends in a succession of moneymaking ventures, one of which entails taking pictures of his classmates with an empty camera. What you carry away from the movie is not the outcome of his efforts, but the little boys’ faces, staring with shy pride at the lens. (In the same program, there’s a funny and touching short video chronicling Kiarostami’s return, years later, to see what became of the young thug-in-training.) Taste of Cherry has a middle-aged man bent on suicide driving around the hills in search of someone to assist him, his despair interrupted by conversations, comically practical and existential, with the strangers whose help he would enlist. And a puckishly mounted double bill of two works by Kiarostami and his friend Mohsen Makhmalbaf, Close-Up (1990) and A Moment of Innocence (1996), reflects with a tender hilarity on the process of filmmaking and the line that blurs fiction and what we’re pleased to call reality. “We can never get close to the truth,” Kiarostami has said, “except by lying.” He’s one of the most truthful liars we have.

SEEING WITH BORROWED EYES: The Films of Abbas Kiarostami | At the LOS ANGELES COUNTY MUSEUM OF ART, 5905 Wilshire Blvd., April 13–28