ABSTRACT
In this chapter, I am going to undertake an unusual step: using the concepts of complexity and simplicity as my basis, I am going to offer comparative analyses of a Hollywood blockbuster, Inception (Christopher Nolan, USA/UK, 2010), and an Iranian art house film, Five Dedicated to Ozu (Abbas Kiarostami, Iran/Japan/France, 2003). Stranger bedfellows one is unlikely to meet outside of the kind of free-wheeling works written by Slavoj Žižek, who, in The Fright of Real Tears (2001), for example, puts films by Krzysztof Kieślowski to work alongside various mainstream (and other art house) films, as well as pornography. However, while Inception and Five make an unusual pairing, in analyzing them together, I hope to achieve a number of things.
