GILDED BIRDS

Igor Toronyi-Lalic, arts editor of the Spectator and director of the London Contemporary Music Festival, on a screenshot from the Abbas Kiarostami film, “Where is the friend’s house?”

GB Tell me why you chose this.

ITL Images within films are never just stand-alone images. This image is an amazing summation of everything in the film in a strange, sublime, transcendental way. It’s very rare for there to be one image in a film that is such a summation of everything without it being incredibly corny or clichéd, but this is one of those films where if you don’t cry, there’s something wrong with you. And this is such a beautiful moment. It’s so fleeting, it’s barely there. The story of the film is very simple. It’s there in the title. A schoolboy has accidentally taken his friend’s notebook and he’s trying to return it. On this journey he meets lots of people and learns about the terrible moral world that the adults inhabit and eventually he meets this beautiful soulful old man who makes lovely wooden doors and windows. Along the way the old man finds a flower and puts it in the notebook. It’s barely noticeable. We don’t even see it up close and the boy doesn’t notice at all. I think for me, beauty is always in things that are unnoticed moments of grace, things that happen by chance and disappear just as fast. This moment tells you so much about loyalty and friendship and beauty, which is what the film is about. It’s a film about the aesthetics of love and friendship and treasuring things, like some biblical myth where we learn everything we need know through the most unbelievably simple means. It’s a cartoon-thin plot and through the paper-thinness comes this divine sense of grace and transcendence in a moment as fast as a breath. Any other film maker would have lingered on the shot of the flower and added music and panned back to the faces of the boys, but the whole film is a lesson in not adding that fluff. It’s effortless and true. Kiarostami trusts the audience.

GB And yet so few people are aware of his films. I remember you once wrote a piece about how the Oscars are a terrible guide to good films.

ITL Awards usually are. The problem with the Oscars is it’s a very specific criterion: you have to have opened in the county of LA between specific dates. And yet it’s considered to be  global cinema’s great awards ceremony and people are wondering why there are not more diverse films. It’s not real aesthetic diversity where there are slow films or narratively weird films or films that don’t quite make sense within a Western aesthetic. There might be a Korean film but it’s one that basically replicates Hollywood schlock. Kiarostami was never nominated for an Oscar, even for a film in a foreign language. I think the foreign language category of the Oscars is almost the worst category. It’s a pat on the back for foreign people doing Hollywood.

GB This film has timeless, universal themes, but do you think Iranian people get more meaning from it?

ITL Probably. It’s always a problem with translation. The title is from one of the most famous Modernist Iranian poems which is why it’s grammatically incorrect. Kiarostami also wrote poetry but it was terrible. Not everyone is going to be great in every medium. But this poem by Sohrab Sepehri is very beautiful. The film is almost a translation of this poem. It feels like it’s lifted from some ancient text.

GB There are scenes in the film that are very cute because we’re seeing through the eyes of a child, like the zigzag journey up the hill.

ITL Yes, it’s cute but never twee. They’re such good actors. When the kid, Ahmadpour, is crying in the school scene, Kiarostami made him cry by tearing up his favourite polaroid, which is just dreadful, but it worked. I think a lot of people in Iran would see this film as Western and find it incredibly boring. But it is quite hard to dislike because it’s so charming. 

GB I’m interested in the fact that a sophisticated adult who was actually willing to make his actors cry has made a film that seems to be telling us that life is more beautiful and simple when through the eyes of a child. Is there a contradiction there?

ITL I think he has the child in him. The child isn’t thinking, they’re just doing. I think these two kids are the greatest actors in the history of cinema. Every reaction feels so authentic. The devastation of thinking he’s found the house and then it being the wrong house is so deep, so obviously inside this boy. It’s such a beautiful moment when the child’s decides to disobey his parents and do what he thinks it right, without any sentimentality or feeling of heroism. He knows the truth in an intuitive way. 

GB Aesthetics is a serious business to you. 

ITL Yes, I haven’t chosen this film because it’s Iranian or for any political reason. I’m interested in aesthetic life. This film interests me because it’s a paean to aesthetics. The beautiful moments are so subtle you can almost miss them, like the subtle light from the windows that appears in the background. 

GB Are we meant to feel that this beauty is in peril in some way because we know that the wooden doors and windows are gradually being replaced by metal ones?

ITL The beautiful thing about the film is that the flower tells us, no. And the fact that we’re still watching the film. The film is a manifestation of that light. It is another window. It’s so quiet, just like that light. You know that this instinct will win. It’s so clear, what’s right. We can all be the old curmudgeons sometimes but this film is a revelation of what is right and wrong in the world.

GB Your work is also quite sincere and highbrow. 

ITL I grew up thinking that snobbery was a terrible thing and you should accept everything. But now I see that the doors and the windows have been changed, I think you need to be more like the old man who has judgement and discretion, and live a principled life. Everything about his life is integrity itself, even down to those thick socks he wears. I do try to search out what I genuinely think is true and beautiful rather than clouded by all the other noise from things like society and politics that crowd in needlessly on the art. It’s important to carve out space for aesthetics which is constantly being hemmed in by all these other things that take up too much airspace in our lives and our energy. That flower, that throwaway fleeting thing, is everything. The reason that this image of a flower isn’t cloying or twee is because it isn’t an image on its own. It’s not even a perfect flower. It’s already wilting and losing its petals.

GB What makes something worthy of the word Beauty to you?

ITL I think this is why I couldn’t choose a self-contained image that’s some working out of beauty according to formal principles of perfection. You have to be seeing beauty revealed in the beauty. That’s what this image does. I really need all art to work things out within itself and not just be the thing. It’s the process of thought being expressed, of seeing thinking being unravelled. I need that action. This is what this film is doing. It’s making beauty into a verb. It’s not beautiful. It’s beautying. It’s a beauty that’s very shyly and modestly being beautiful rather than peacocking its beauty.