The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (224 page)

Kershner has never settled, or secured a position from which he might dominate a film. In 1958,
Stake Out on Dope Street
was an early offshoot of Roger Corman’s mezzanine empire, a second feature with a brash urban rawness. But sixteen years later, Kershner was still servant to the casual spontaneity of Donald Sutherland and Elliott Gould—so much so that the original title,
Wet Stuff
, was amended to remind us of the actors’ earlier success in
M*A*S*H
.

In between, Kershner has had an inconsequential career.
The Hoodlum Priest
was his first large project, though centered on Don Murray’s do-gooding intentions.
The Luck of Ginger Coffey
was a clumsy movie, made in Canada from a Brian Moore novel.
A Fine Madness
is a moderate comedy, and
The Flim Flam Man
contrives to waste George C. Scott. But
Loving
is a world apart, an anguished, tender, and disrupting movie with fine performances from George Segal, Eva Marie Saint, and Sterling Hayden—it has the sort of unconventional but lifelike approach to hurt feelings that Bob Rafelson has taken to exploring.

Kershner had his best opportunity ever with
The Empire Strikes Back
(under the care and control of the Lucas empire), but he was less successful in the Sean Connery comeback as James Bond or in the sequel to
Robocop
.

He has not worked much as a director lately. But he acts occasionally—as Zebedee in
The Last Temptation of Christ
(88, Martin Scorsese);
On Deadly Ground
(94, Steven Seagal);
Angus
(95, Patrick Read Johnson)—and he produced a small thriller,
American Perfekt
(97, Paul Chart).

Abbas Kiarostami
, b. Teheran, Iran, 1940
1970:
Nan va Koutcheh/Bread and Alley
(s). 1972:
Zang-ze Tafrih/Breaktime
(s). 1973:
Tadjrebeh/The Experience
. 1974:
Mossafer/The Traveller
. 1975:
Dow Rahehal Baraye yek Massaleh/Two Solutions for One Problem
(s);
Man ham Mitoumam/So Can I
(s). 1976:
Rangha/The Colors
(s);
Lebassi Baraye Arossi/The Wedding Suit
. 1977:
Gozaresh/The Report; Bozorgdasht-e mo’Allem/Tribute to the Teachers
(s). 1978:
Solution
(s);
Jahan Nama Palace
(s). 1979:
Ghazieh-e Shekl-e Aval, Ghazieh-e Shekl-e Dou Wom/Case No 1, Case No 2
. 1980:
Behdash-e Dandan/Toothache
(s). 1981:
Be Tartib ya Bedoun-e Tartib/Regularly or Irregularly
(s). 1982:
Hamsarayan/The Chorus
(s). 1983:
Hamshahri/Fellow Citizen
. 1984:
Avaliha/First Graders
. 1987:
Khane-ye Doust Kodjast?/Where is the Friend’s House?
1989:
Mashgh-e Shab/ Homework
. 1990:
Nema-ye Nazdik/Close-Up
. 1992:
Zendegi Edame Darad/And Life Goes On
. 1994:
Zire Darakhatan Zeyton/Through the Olive Trees
. 1997:
Ta’m e Guilass/Taste of Cherry
. 1999:
Bad ma ra Khahaad Bord/The Wind Will Carry Us; Beed-o Baad/Willow and Wind
. 2002:
Ten
. 2003:
Five Dedicated to Ozu
. 2004:
10 on Ten
. 2005:
Roads of Kiarostami
(d) (s);
Tickets
(codirected with Ken Loach). 2007:
Kojast Jaye Residan
(d) (s); “Where Is My Romeo?,” episode of
Chacun Son Cinéma
. 2008:
Shirin
. 2010:
Certified Copy
.

Very large things have been said on behalf of Abbas Kiarostami. Laura Mulvey has likened the breakthrough of
Taste of Cherry
winning the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 1997 to the appearance of
Rashomon
at Venice in 1951. Quite early on, Godfrey Cheshire saw the masterly humanism of Kiarostami and called it “a cinema of questioning.” Phillip Lopate has said that “we are living in the Age of Kiarostami, as once we did in the Age of Godard.”

Well, I take all of that seriously, just as I can see, without question, that there are creative stirrings in Iran that deserve the most sensitive reception, if only to break out of the straitjacket in which so many Westerners are taught to think of Iran and all its neighbors. At the same time, we may note that
Taste of Cherry
played at Cannes (not without doubts, for it deals with suicide) before it played in Iran. And when Kiarostami accepted a congratulatory but formal kiss from Catherine Deneuve, along with the Palme d’Or, there were serious repercussions in Iran.

Consider
Taste of Cherry
, which is generally rated among his best, if not the best, by Kiarostami’s adherents. It is about a man who drives around the hilly, twisty roads on the outskirts of Teheran (I think), searching for someone who will assist in his suicide. Much of the film is shot as from the man’s Land Rover, with the sound of its engine. There is no music, for Kiarostami is as suspicious of that as he is of conventional storytelling. The film has the feel of Italian neorealism: the sound and the picture are a little rough; the acting is nonprofessional; and we never discover why the man wants to kill himself—that may be too much “narrative,” though equally it may impose on the actor a slightly doomy portentousness that I find monotonous. But maybe Kiarostami intends that; maybe he wants us to feel the mundane level of being urged to kill yourself.

The neorealist look, however, is subtly undercut by a much more formal eye for beauty—especially in the long-distance twists and vanishings of the dirt road. In those passages, you feel Kiarostami’s shaping eye and you can believe that he was first trained as a painter and graphic artist, and that he still takes very beautiful (if arty) photographs of landscape.

The man picks up several passengers, and they decline his request for help. There is a developing suspense—what will happen? Do we care? And gradually the arguments against death begin to resemble a testament to life. This is culminated in the last passenger, an older man, who will help but who speaks movingly of the small epiphanies in life, like the taste of mulberry. But a pact is made, the old man will help.

We then see our central character going out to his appointed grave, at night. There is thunder about. He composes himself. Fade to video footage, which quite quickly reveals the man as his actor, with a film crew (Kiarostami included) looking on. Soldiers in the distance, who were marching to make up a shot, are told to relax. There is the sound of jazz.

The ending is exhilarating and wondrous. We feel that life has won just as the bare “story” to which we have been exposed is revealed as a game, a routine. I do see and appreciate the putting together of something like a documentary style with the sudden revelation that it has all been a film all along. I feel that modernism, the intellectual surprise, the sense of some need to step back from and admit the archaic quality of self-contained stories in such an age of film.

But humbly, I suggest that Godard and many others did it, in another age, with more humor, intellect, beauty, and terror. Abbas Kiarostami is a fascinating figure. He represents a country that may be regaining its imagination. We need to attend. But if this is modern movie mastery, then our medium is gone and this is funerary art.

Nicole Kidman
, b. Honolulu, Hawaii, 1967
For this reference book, Nicole Kidman was the actress of the new century, as well as the star/celebrity/icon who threw herself into a run of audacious and independent pictures. No, it didn’t last too long, and this is a tricky moment for seeing the overall arc of her career. But the cinema would never have had its glory without the urge in many of us to go crazy over the look of these lovely strangers and their insolent, reckless hint that they know we are watching. This entry is a pseudo-clerical accounting of her work. I have written in other voices elsewhere. (If you can’t find that book in stores—
Nicole Kidman
[2006]—I have fortress walls made of it.) The child of academics, she was raised in the U.S. and in Australia, and as a very tall girl with profuse red-ginger curls she did a lot of acting while a teenager in Australia
—BMX Bandits
(83, Brian Trenchard-Smith);
Windrider
(86, Vincent Monton), and the TV series
Vietnam
—before she had a hit as the threatened and finally naked young wife in
Dead Calm
(89, Phillip Noyce). That word-of-mouth came to America and it brought her to the attention of the Tom Cruise empire and won her the role of neurologist Dr. Claire Lewicki, in
Days of Thunder
(90, Tony Scott)—let’s keep all our neurologists twenty-three!

It is one of the more lunatic debuts, but there is no lunacy greater than that of your co-star and producer falling in love with you. And so Nicole was Mrs. Tom Cruise, towering over him physically and in her literary ambition, but very happily assisted by his patronage. She was very funny and smart in the neglected
Billy Bathgate
(91, Robert Benton);
Malice
(93, Harold Becker);
My Life
(93, Bruce Joel Rubin); commanding the camera with new authority in
Batman Forever
(95, Joel Schumacher). Her Isabel Archer in
The Portrait of a Lady
(96, Jane Campion) erred in casting (her voice was helplessly wrong) and temperament (she was too assured, too modern), but she worked very hard against these obstacles.
The Peacemaker
(97, Mimi Leder) and
Practical Magic
(98, Griffin Dunne) were minor films. But she was a sensation onstage (in London especially) in
The Blue Room
, written by David Hare, after Arthur Schnitzler, and directed by Sam Mendes. It was an event that signalled her sexual arrival—and thus a premature crack in the marriage that had had nothing but
Far and Away
(92, Ron Howard) to feast on.

The other great event in her early period was
To Die For
(95, Gus Van Sant), a giddy black comedy in which she played a young woman who would do anything to get on television and who persuaded us that it was the mania of the moment. The discovery that she could be hilarious and deadpan was so sudden and intense that hardly anyone noticed it—or could duplicate Buck Henry’s material.

But Cruise and Kidman had a plan—they gave several years and residence in England to Stanley Kubrick’s
Eyes Wide Shut
(99). If only Hare and Mendes had done that story of sexual superstition. If only someone had had the wit to let Kidman play all the female roles—so that Tom Cruise can’t help seeing her everywhere. As it was, Kidman’s character and image was away from the screen too long, and as the best thing about that forlorn venture she seemed the most wasted.

As that very big creative venture failed, so the marriage came apart. But those who predicted Nicole would be stranded without a patron were much mistaken. Instead, she seemed liberated, exhilarated, and far more than anyone had reason to expect: she was a delicious, sly, Russian slut in
Birthday Girl
(01, Jez Butterworth); she was totally attuned to the circus romanticism of
Moulin Rouge
(01, Baz Luhrmann)—where she sang, danced, acted, and burned her candle at every end; and yet she was just as striking as the frigid mother in
The Others
(01, Alejandro Amenábar). Two years later, she took the obvious Oscar for her heartfelt yet very glamorous impersonation of Virginia Woolf in
The Hours
(02, Stephen Daldry).

She was a big star again and so she yielded and did the kind of films foolish stars did:
The Stepford Wives
(04, Frank Oz);
The Interpreter
(05, Sydney Pollack);
Bewitched
(05, Nora Ephron) and
The Invasion
(06, Oliver Hirschbiegel). Four utterly drab, conventional pictures—and four flops. On the other hand,
Dogville
(03, Lars von Trier) was a radical departure permitted by her presence;
The Human Stain
(03, Benton) was an old-fashioned odalisque movie, with Anthony Hopkins; and
Birth
(04, Jonathan Glazer) is one of the most daring and emotional films of the decade, But
Cold Mountain
(03, Anthony Minghella) was a signal failure and a turning point. As she came closer to forty she resisted it as best she could with cosmetic wars. She was still brave (if not foolhardy) with
Fur
(06, Steven Shainberg), the film that ran variants on the idea of being Diane Arbus, and she did well in
Margot at the Wedding
(07, Noah Baumbach). She was chilly in
The Golden Compass
(07, Chris Weitz), but the film went nowhere. As she married singer Keith Urban, she did two films that seemed to mark her decline:
Australia
(08, Luhrmann), a crushing disaster; and
Nine
(09, Rob Marshall—but scripted by Minghella), where she is the tamest of the director’s women.

She has many projects lined up, but she needs a hit or two very badly. This is the most testing moment of her career.

Krzysztof Kieślowski
(1941–96), b. Warsaw, Poland
1969:
From the City of Lodz
(d). 1975:
Personel
(d). 1976:
Spokoj
(d). 1979:
Amator/Camera Buff
. 1981:
Dlugi Dzien Pracy; Przypadek/Blind Chance
. 1984:
Bez Konca
. 1988:
Dekalog 1: I Am the Lord Thy God; Dekalog 2: Thou Shalt Not Take the Name of the Lord Thy God in Vain; Dekalog 3: Honor the Sabbath Day; Dekalog 4: Honor Thy Father and Thy Mother; Dekalog 5: Thou Shalt Not Kill/A Short Film About Killing; Dekalog 6: Thou Shalt Not Commit Adultery/A Short Film About Love; Dekalog 7: Thou Shalt Not Steal; Dekalog 8: Thou Shalt Not Bear False Witness; Dekalog 9: Thou Shalt Not Covet Thy Neighbor’s Wife; Dekalog 10: Thou Shalt Not Covet Thy Neighbor’s Goods
. 1990:
City Life
. 1991:
The Double Life of Veronique
. 1993:
Trois Couleurs: Bleu/Blue
. 1994:
Trois Couleurs: Blanc/ White; Trois Couleurs: Rouge/Red
.