Shirin (Abbas Kiarostami, 2008)

7.5/10
Abbas Kiarostami's film of voyeurism, role-reversal, redefining and questioning the definition of an "audience", what have you - for 90 minutes we watch a hundred or so Iranian woman watch a film, from a head-on point of view. Which is to say the movie is projected "behind" us, the viewers. We never see the movie and only hear the soundtrack, and the all-female audience's (there are some men in the audience but always seated behind the women and never focused on directly) reactions help us piece the narrative together, though voice-overs and dialogue make it easy enough to follow. The other caveat is that the audience we're watching isn't really watching a film - they're merely looking at a point of light occasionally obscured by cardboard cutouts to create the appropriate reflections and shadows, are told how to act by Kiarostami, and the entire "Shirin" soundtrack to the movie they're watching has been added after. I've read from people who got equally caught up in the narrative and the reactions and found themselves crying along with the audience, but I was too intrigued by the technical aspects of the movie to get very caught up in the (highly melodramatic) "non-film". An endlessly interesting movie, but not always while you're watching it.