The short Solution and the feature A Wedding Suit belong to the period in Abbas Kiarostami's work that can be described as neorealist and have clear genre overtones. Solution is a witty adventure/absurdist sketch about a man that can find an extravagant solution to any difficult situation. A Wedding Suit is a drama about three teenage friends that secretly share a wedding suit that does not belong to them: a seductive symbol of adulthood and social status. Garage Screen will show the Russian premiere of the restored films.
In Solution, a man carrying a fixed wheel tries to hitchhike to his broken car that he has left at the side of a highway, and—as nobody is willing to give him a lift—has to be inventive. This unusual and minimalist road movie can be regarded as a condensed presentation of Kiarostami's style. It has nothing but a road running into the distance and a man inside a landscape—crossing it or even paving a new path across it. These images, among others, will become iconic in Kiarostami's filmography.
The protagonist in A Wedding Suit is a young apprentice working for a tailor who, among other things, makes bespoke suits. Secretly, and after a long and insistent persuasion on the part of his friends who promise him favors in return, he borrows a new suit made for a client to let them try it on. However, the rehearsed symbolic sale of the costume does not go as planned. A Wedding Suit continues the theme started in The Experience and The Traveler: Kiarostami's films about childhood, friendship, and coming of age, in which an authentic portrait of the Iranian society presents itself. This time, however, the realistic and dramatic narrative is complemented with obviously comical, humorous notes, at times entering the territory of satire and suspense. More than a symbol of social status, wealth, and adult life, which the protagonists aspire for, the suit that changes hands introduces the idea of identity as a combination of the original and the copy, one's own and somebody else's, difference and similarity, which will recur in Kiarostami's later works. Taking the risk and putting on somebody else's suit that is too big for them, the boys transform and at the same time lose themselves, disappearing in the role that has nothing individual to it.
The program opens with the scientific short for children Colors and an educational film How to Make Use of Leisure Time: Painting. Rhythmical like an advert, the vibrant formalist exploration of the colors of the everyday reminds us that before his career in filmmaking, Kiarostami worked as an artist and designer. The short also offers insight into consumer culture in Iran before the revolution. How to Make Use of Leisure Time is an entertaining explanation of the importance of painting and restoration, which is also, to a great extent, focused on color and pigment.
The films will be shown in Persian and Azerbaijanian with Russian subtitles.
Colors, 1976. 16 min
Solution, 1978. 11 min
A Wedding Suit, 1976. 59 min