The Dastan +2 Gallery in Tehran is the venue for a painting exhibition by French novelist, screenwriter, actor, and Academy Award honoree Jean-Claude Carrière. Titled The Discreet Charm of Jean-Claude Carrière, the program runs until 22 November. Carrière who is also a Rumi scholar was honored for his lifetime cultural achievements by the Persian literary monthly Bokhara on Thursday at the Center for the Great Islamic Encyclopedia. The ceremony was attended by French Ambassador Philippe Thiébaud, Carrière’s Iranian wife Nahal Tajaddod, and a number of celebrities and cultural figures. Carrière has written nearly 150 screenplays in collaboration with some of postwar cinema’s most iconoclastic filmmakers, among them Milos Forman, Jean-Luc Godard, Andrzej Wajda, Nagisa Oshima, Peter Brook, and, most notably, Luis Buñuel, who cited him as “undoubtedly the writer closest to me.” Buñuel hired the young Carrière in 1963 to work on the screenplay for Diary of a Chambermaid, beginning a decades-long collaboration that generated a half-dozen films including Belle de Jour (1967), The Milky Way (1969), The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972), The Phantom of Liberty (1974) and That Obscure Object of Desire (1977), as well as Bunuel's autobiography My Last Sigh.
