Oh boy, it's time for a yet another wall of text.
Happy Together (Wong Kar-wai, 1997)
This one's about the turbulent relationship of a gay couple that become separated while on vacation in Argentina, and they're eventually left with no choice but to seek comfort from each other, albeit in an extremely dysfunctional way – all the jealousy and manipulation towards each other are portrayed in full fashion, but just when you think the film title is incredibly ironic, you do get to see hints of what exactly pulls these two characters together.
Stylistically, this film is very experimental, even for WKW, as it utilises everything in the book: it mixes black-and-white photography with extremely bright and vibrant colours, and it uses a variety of techniques from jump cuts, step printing, variable shutter speed, to things like Bay-esque super-fast panning shots (I don't know the technical term for that), and it all somehow comes together into an energetic piece bursting with emotion. 9/10
Tropical Malady (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2004)
The first half of this film is a much more positive story about a gay couple than that last film. I don't really have that much to say about it. They do romantic things together, and it's pretty endearing I guess? The second half is something completely different. It's about a soldier that gets lost in the jungle and is hunted by the spirit of a tiger shaman. The pacing in this section is incredibly slow, as it's effectively just an hour of a soldier running through the jungle. Some great cinematography makes this an overall positive experience, but just barely. 6/10
And now, it's time for the...
Abbas Kiarostami Extravaganza!
Close-Up (Abbas Kiarostami, 1990)
A relatively straightforward docufiction detailing the trial and the events leading up to it of a man who impersonated the director Mohsen Makhmalbaf. The trial itself is, I believe, the real thing, and Kiarostami got everyone involved in the events to portray themselves for re-enacments. The film has some poignant things to say about human identity and ambition, but most of it is just told by the man on trial in defense for himself, and as such it's not very interesting from a cinematic standpoint. But, this is after all documentarian in nature, so it's set to portray reality as is and nothing more, and it does so competently. 8/10
The Wind Will Carry Us (Abbas Kiarostami, 1999)
This film is all about the exploration of binary opposites, with themes of local and global, connection and disconnection, and life and death. It's about a group of journalists pretending to be engineers coming to a remote village to document a ceremony for a dead centenarian, only to find themselves stuck in this village when the centenarian doesn't end up dying as soon as they expected. In the process we witness one of the journalists, whom the story is focused on, slowly integrate into and accept the laid-back and communal style of living in this remote village. The village itself is fascinating and almost labyrinthian in nature, with houses stacked on top of each other and pathways hidden away, going across rooftops and who knows what else. Kiarostami utilises this disjointed geometry wonderfully in his direction, showing every little nook and alley, and tying it well into the theme of cultural disconnect. 9/10
Like Someone in Love (Abbas Kiarostami, 2012)
An Iranian director makes a Japanese film. That's something you don't see every day. This film is essentially a day and a half in the life of a student and a part-time escort who, despite being faced various troubles in her personal life, is persuaded into meeting a client, who turns out to be an elderly, academic man. He seems to mainly seek company in his lonely life, while the girl makes a great case for herself as the worst prostitute ever, as she tries to coerce the man into sleeping with her, only to fail at doing so and falling asleep. The next day the man drives the girl to her school, and the man encounters the girl's fiance, who mistakes the man as her grandfather. And that's about it, as soon after the film ends, in an extremely abrupt and jarring fashion. We never see the relationship of the elderly man and the escort develop, or why the girl and her asshole fiance are together (it's even directly asked in the film, and the girl tells us she doesn't know), and the themes presented seem woefully underdeveloped. Kiarostami spend a lot of time detailing the minutiae concerns this girl has in her personal life, only to have the main story begin about halfway through and end seemingly in the middle of it. I really don't understand the thought process behind this film.
In all of his films, Kiarostami seems to have a fascination with cars (another film of his I've seen previously, Taste of Cherry, is a particularly prominent example as it takes place almost entirely inside a car), and here he takes great advantage of it by shooting the reflections of the neon lights of Tokyo, as well as the bright blue skies contrasted with overpass roadways during daytime scenes. Other than that, the cinematography is a hit or miss, with some scenes being gorgeously lit, and others suffering from the flatness and shallow focus of digital cinematography. Kiarostami also does fall back on shot-reverse shot too much for my liking, as I never find that to be an interesting way to set up a scene. I would really like to like this film, as what is there is actually quite good, but it ends so abruptly that I can't shake the feeling that there should be at least half an hour to this film that I'm missing. 7/10
Certified Copy (Abbas Kiarostami, 2010)
I watched this film together with Crudblud, and I'm sure he has some things to say about it as well, as we both really enjoyed it. This time the film takes place in Italy, and is spoken in a combination of English, French and Italian. It portrays an afternoon in the lives of a British writer whose book discusses authenticity of art, and a French woman who has an antiques store in Italy. I was a little concerned going into this film that its philosophical set-up would lead to a factor of pretentiousness, as in other films Kiarostami has a habit of using his characters as ideological mouthpieces for his own train of thought, but luckily my concern was completely unfounded; if anything this film sets itself to satirise pretentious thinking, and the two main characters are the most genuine and humanistic that I've yet seen in Kiarostami's films. Their individual disillusionments and perceptions give these characters realistically flawed humanity, and as throughout their day they come to ostensibly increasingly dislike each other, they paradoxically also grow closer to each other, as following an encounter with a barista who mistakes the man for the husband of the woman, the two begin to play a game of pretend marriage that throughout the course of the film begins to blur the line between what is real and what is fake.
In a wonderfully meta fashion it ties into the thematic set-up of authenticity that the two both deal with in their professions, and Kiarostami constantly feeds us with visual imagery that ties into this thematic connection as well. The dialogue is poignant and funny, it flows extremely well and the performances from both of these main actors are great. The cinematography is quite varied as well: some of his typical car porn is included, but he prominently utilises long tracking shots and the occasional use of shot-reverse shot fits well in this much more personal, dialogue-centric film. Overall, it's just an extremely well executed narrative that is both satisfying and thought-provoking. 9/10