Most films coming Stateside from Iran focus on middle & upper-middle class. Cosmopolitan urban elites with attitudes & sensibilities that feel familiar to the West. Not here, where the focus is on society’s lower depths, a proletarian POV, les misérables of Tehran. Directed in minimalist/Neo-Realist style by Jafar Panahi, better-known Iranian writer/director Abbas Kiarostami has script credit, his car-centric world view swapped out for pizza deliverymen on motorbikes. The pizza looks lousy; the traffic worse. But we’re here for class division & income inequality, the obscene distance between Haves and Have-nots. On display here in Hussein, a big bear of a man, bigger than normal from cortisone treatments that show him pale as a ghost in sunlight. Engaged to the older sister of a fellow deliveryman, he barely shows interest. The fiancée, normal-sized, deferential, meets him at a jewelry shop beyond their means. His cheap suit and her manner tagging them immediately as inferiors. Gently told they might be better served at a street market gold stand, Hussein snaps inside. Or does he lose hope. Or see his likely future. Something. Back on the job, he passes an evening in unexpected luxury, invited into the apartment of a rich young man whose date has just imploded. The apartment, a DisneyLand fantasy compared to his shabby tenement home, fascinates him. As does the rich boy’s openness. Is it a put-on? And when he leaves the next morning, something violent & tragic has taken hold of his mind. The film opens with this violent act, the rest playing out in flashback. Panahi doesn’t point out the time shift, assuming we’ll pick up on it. And on a lot more, too. Mesmerizing stuff. Simply presented; cumulatively devastating.
DOUBLE-BILL: Barely tolerated by the authorities, when Iran banned Panahi from making films he took a leaf out of the Abbas Kiarostami playbook, circumventing official government edict by shooting his next movie (the award-winning TAXI/’15) from the interior of a taxi. Criticizing society while earning a hack license.
No comments:
Post a Comment