Critics reviews

Exactly no one was surprised that the great Abbas Kiarostami’s final film . . . would be uniformly gorgeous beginning to end. But who could have predicted that the grace note, sending us off into the night with tears in our eyes, would be put over the top with a saccharine ballad by none other than schmaltz master Andrew Lloyd Webber?

Kiarostami’s final work, 24 Frames (2017), may be his most powerful and daring exploration of this tension, its very conception bearing out the conflict between control and expansiveness.

There is no other film whose underlying openness is so vast, so liberating, so fascinating, so personal. The film doesn’t allow refusal. It is there to be journeyed with.

As in the earliest staged films, the single shot is given a simple arc. Figures arrive in the frame, do something, then depart. But sound is tremendously important too. Quiet activity is interrupted by brusque action–too often, a gunshot. More than you might expect, violence provides a spike of action before calm returns. What holds these crisp, gorgeous shots together? Pairings, for one thing.

I could quibble at the margins (I might lose a few of the particular frames, and think perhaps the film is a bit too long), but overall the film is extraordinary and at times profoundly moving, even as Kiarostami displays some wry humor and makes some surprising, but effective, music choices.

The level of Kiarostami's fabrication is not entirely evident—though they all achieve an otherworldly quality that calls into question the truth of what we're seeing. I could quibble at the margins (I might lose a few of the particular frames, and think perhaps the film is a bit too long), but overall the film is extraordinary and at times profoundly moving, even as Kiarostami displays some wry humor and makes some surprising, but effective, music choices.

When Kiarostami took the original photographs, he was presumably trying to capture something in the world: the hunting motif, from the Brueghel painting through the animals being shot, might also be a metaphor for photography itself. By digitally elaborating on these images, it seems he is trying to paint something seen in his mind's eye, a memory or an imagined scene.

Kiarostami transforms the cinematic environment into a contemplative zone in which you feel calm and focused; you can go with the flow of sounds and images, ponder their meaning, or reflect on the cinematic trickery the director used in assembling them. Comparable to Brian Eno's ambient records, 24 Frames invites both cursory and deep readings; regardless of how you interact with it, the film provides immense aesthetic pleasure.

A dialogue is set up between the two mediums: paintings capture a single moment in time, while film is fundamentally rooted in the passing of time, expressed visually. Kiarostami gives his photographs context, but only for a few minutes before and after the image represented by the original photograph. . . . The tension between hyper-mediation and verisimilitude that Kiarostami's frames are built on destabilizes the viewer's grasp of imagined reality and the actual thing.

Needless to say, 24 Frames isn't the ideal starting place for those unfamiliar with Kiarostami, but it is an exceptionally beautiful place for his career to finish — conceptually audacious and adventurous yet a simple, peaceful space to appreciate his artistry.

Each sequence begins with a simple title card that feels as if it is counting down even as it is counting up. We know that, once we arrive at "Frame 24," an end will come: the cessation of a movie, the close of a career. How do you sum up a life? Especially when it's your own. We'll leave such matters to the gods (if they exist), to the ether, and to the literal-minded commentariat. For myself, I'll just say I can think of few things more eloquently hopeless and hopeful as "Frame 24.

I know that so far this review has conveyed little of what it feels to watch these 24 little movies, but the experience is curiously dual: it's very easy to be swept along by the cleverly playful visual patterns and evolving quasi-storylines. Yet at the same time, I suspect that every viewer will simultaneously (re)make the movie in his or her own mind by providing a wealth of personal thoughts and associations.