Harsh lessons
Abbas Kiarostami portrayed childhood with great sensitivity. But his son says he was a tyrant
In his lifetime the Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami was revered by fellow directors as much as by critics. Martin Scorsese proclaimed he “represents the highest level of artistry in the cinema.” For Jean-Luc Godard, “film begins with DW Griffith and ends with Abbas Kiarostami.” Born in Tehran in 1940, he was also a photographer and a poet and brought his feeling for those forms into his elegant, elliptical films. Of all the great Iranian directors of the 1980s and 1990s—Mohsen Makhmalbaf, Majid Majidi and Jafar Panahi—the reputation of Kiarostami, who died in 2016, was the most stellar.
One of his most admired later films was Ten (2002). A road movie of sorts, it featured a young woman (played by Mania Akbari) driving around the Iranian capital giving lifts to friends and strangers, listening to their anxieties, sometimes revealing her own. Since then Akbari, who now lives in
London, has become a noted director in her own right. Last year she started an online platform called Cryptofiction to showcase the work of contemporary independent filmmakers—many with ties to the Middle East.
Cryptofiction is shrewdly assembled, an ongoing and valuable resource to anyone interested in international cinema. I was especially thrilled when I received a link to Leech, a film by Kiarostami’s son Bahman. He’d helped to edit his father’s features, including Certified Copy (2010) starring Juliette Binoche. He’d also been making documentaries for nearly two decades.
Within minutes of starting to watch Leech, my delight turned to queasiness, then repulsion, then befuddlement. Essentially a home movie, it begins with an extended clip from Kiarostami’s documentary Homework (1989), a revelatory exploration of why young Iranian schoolboys struggled to complete their after-school assignments. That film was autobiographical; it started with the offscreen director admitting: “to be honest, I’m having difficulty getting my own boy to do his homework… I want to know if it’s only my child that has this problem.”
Leech then shifts to 1994. “One of the kids from my last film is with me now,” announces Kiarostami. “He’s all grown up.” What follows is excruciating: the great auteur needlessly humiliates his teenage son for failing many of his school exams. Worse still, as far as he is concerned, is the reason: Bahman is too preoccupied with making films of his own. “Piss on them!” Kiarostami hisses from behind the camera. “I assure you—they’re worthless… when you look at this footage, you’ll be ashamed.”
Bahman looks at the ceiling, bites his lip. He’s often on the brink of tears. It seems likely this is not the first time he’s been given a tongue-lashing. Perhaps most discomfiting is the way Kiarostami doesn’t wield his camera as a pen or a paintbrush so much as a tool of humiliation. He even ventriloquises his son: “Camera! I am not giving a shit! Camera—I want to live like a parasite!”
Leech is disturbing because of Kiarostami’s reputation as an artist committed to children and progressive pedagogy. He started out designing children’s books before, in 1970, helping set up and lead Kanoon (the Institute for the Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults). His earliest films, vividly deploying rhythm and colour, were made for children. One of his most affecting features, Where is the Friend’s House? (1987), the first in the Koker trilogy, follows a young boy as he goes on a long journey to return a notebook belonging to a classmate.
It’s tempting to wonder if Leech is a hoax. After all, Kiarostami’s films explore the thin line between truth and fiction. Working in an authoritarian country, he knew that cinema is often inseparable from propaganda—that moving images can deceive. His 1979 film First Case, Second Case featured experts discussing how to deal with classroom miscreants; one of the least punitive went on to become Iran’s “hanging judge” and sanctioned the executions of teenagers. An Iranian friend to whom I showed Leech was adamant: “Asking for recantation and shame on camera, this is straightforward interrogation. Television torture from the early revolutionary period in Iran.”
In 2002, Bahman (now 24) found the original home-video footage, confronted his protesting father about it, and filmed the results. In the final section of Leech, the bullying patriarch is shown scared (“I’m sweating now”) and claiming to be the injured party (“I suffered a lot because of you”). He says he shot the original material so his son would one day watch it and take responsibility for his past actions. In making a film out of that footage and recirculating it years later (initially via the Telegram app and then Cryptofiction) was Bahman attempting an act of cinematic patricide? Or is it better thought of as a familial example of a #MeToo case? Leech, in its very different fashion, is almost as complex and mysterious a film as anything the Iranian master ever made. ♦