The director Pamela Anderson called the “original gangster” of beautiful cinema
We’re living in Pamela Anderson’s age of liberation, and if that doesn’t thrill you even the littlest bit, you’re not paying enough attention.
The Canadian actor had her career hijacked early on when she landed the role of CJ in Baywatch, and for five seasons, she did a lot of slow-motion jogging in a red swimsuit and occasionally voiced her opinions on crystals, mermaids, and the odd elf. No matter how hard you try to reverse-engineer the character, it’s difficult to get beyond the raging desires of the male libido that brought it to life.
It’s been a few decades since Baywatch introduced Anderson to the world, and after a handful of high-profile marriages and paparazzi-fuelled scandals, she’s finally stepping out from behind the looming shadow of her own persona and surprising pretty much everyone. Whether she’s handing out pearls of horticultural wisdom in her gardening TV show or launching into a solo scat routine in The Naked Gun, she has shut down and shamed the press of the 1990s and early 2000s without even having to mention it.
It should come as no surprise to anyone now that the former Baywatch star has layers, but in case you’d forgotten or weren’t studying the matter closely, here is another reason to listen to what she has to say. During her appearance in the much-loved Criterion Closet, Anderson revealed that she is a cinemaphile through and through.
The first film she selected while perusing the closet shelves was the hot and heavy French melodrama La Piscine, in which Alain Delon smoulders by a pool in the countryside, giving off enough pheromones to cast a hallucinogenic pall over anyone in his line of sight, following which she picked David Lynch’s Blue Velvet, Henri-Georges Clouzot’s La Vérité, Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless, and Federico Fellini’s La Strada, but it was an Iranian filmmaker who garnered the most praise.
Brandishing a copy of the Koker trilogy, Abbas Kiarostami’s exploration of life in the eponymous small Iranian town, she said, “[He] was the original gangster when it came to those kinds of beautiful films that are so poetic”.
Let us set aside, for a moment, the stunning snub of Fritz Lang, Powell and Pressburger, Ingmar Bergman, and every other director who made beautiful, poetic films before the late ‘80s; Kiarostami did make astounding use of the cinematic medium and deserves to be celebrated alongside (if not outright above) his forebears in the category.
Although Anderson singled out the Koker trilogy, which includes 1987’s Where Is the Friend’s House?, 1992’s Life, and Nothing More…, and 1994’s Through the Olive Trees, you could also point to Taste of Cherry and The Wind Will Carry Us for inclusion, showing how the director was one of the pioneers of New Wave Iranian cinema, and unlike many who followed, he was able to navigate within the boundaries of the government’s harsh censorship by creating a minimalistic style that revealed a great deal about his subjects.
His films are full of long takes, long shots, and spare dialogue, inviting the audience to read between the lines to find the personal, spiritual, and often existential meaning behind them, with many about filmmaking itself, blurring the boundaries between fiction and documentary. He remains one of the great minimalists of his generation, and reinforced the power of cinema’s ability to illuminate everyday life in ways that can move audiences a world away, and Anderson certainly recognises it.
