Did any one else...

This film is a bit of a critic's darling but why is anyone's guess. It has absolutely nothing to say. Desperately disappointing.

It took me four attempts to actually see the whole lot of the film. I found it by far the hardest of the Kiarostami's i've seen so far to get through but I really liked it by the time it finished and I hope to watch it again.

Hes got this way of producing films which have a really rich, dense texture but appear so deceptively simple, almost like there's nothing going on.

This one is definitely the most radical departure I've seen him make from classical narrative cinematic conventions. The complete lack of any substantive plot or character development (to the point where we really only see two or three of the characters throughout the whole film), apart from the protagonist, makes this really formally interesting for me.

Also the way it appears at first like he is going to do nothing more then introduce the same motifs which appear in Life and Nothing More and A Taste of Cherry, only to deliberately undermine the expectations of the viewer by employing these recurring scenes and images to give substance to some different perspective (what it is exactly im not too sure) on the set questions which he seeks to explore throughout his work.

My favourite of his films after A Taste of Cherry and Close-up

You are joking, right?
Romance, true romance, if it has an object - it has and always be, imagined. You may love the girl, but your romance is your projection/s onto the unknown. Do I need to spell it out to you?
Persian poetry is cited (by those in the know) as a turning point in the history of art, at least literature - it is probably where most of our contemporary conceptions of romance were born, or took root.
Imagine, if you have ever felt that your love was too big to fathom, or control, maybe that feeling and/or its expression was as influenced by the Persians as understanding your desire to *beep* your mother, was influenced by the greek myth/s and Freud.

You were "told that in your readings"!? Sheet. That's another thing that can go wrong with academic approaches. You were told how to read something!?
Re that serenade; do you listen to Farsi without prejudice - wow, it is a stunning, sing-song language, don't you think.

To watch and enjoy this, you need almost a couple of hours to kill, and to be relaxed, and be able to NOT PROJECT for once in your unintelligent life. How could you give credit to a film that delivered everything you wanted -(projection)- from it??

I guess this film is almost meditation. Have you ever meditated? Try it and it might be your greatest, personal revolution.

Finally, it's so "funny", with modern media, non-stop information and entertainment, and people are as stupid as ever.