For those who think Romania writer/director Cristian Mungiu (4 MONTHS, 3 WEEKS AND 2 DAYS/’07) isn’t tackling enough of his signature Modern Romanian Misérables tales*, here’s Iranian writer/director Houman Seyyedi to the rescue. If that’s what you’re looking for, he’s damn good at it. This award-winning downer, a convincingly tricked out nihilistic fable features Mohsen Tanabandeh as a homeless, middle-aged day laborer drifting from town to town after losing wife & child to an earthquake. Finding temp construction work on a low-budget Holocaust film, he’s roped in (along with other day laborers) as a Concentration Camp extra in gas chamber scenes where he and his faceless building crew get treated a bit too realistically. There’s a sense of irony run amuck as film production herders rush from shot to shot to keep on schedule. But Seyyedi has much worse in mind than unsettling cos-play as Tanabandeh’s character inexorably sinks toward disaster: tapped to play Hitler; sleeping in the unheated gas chamber set, forced to double on early call kitchen duty, blackmailed by relatives of the local whore who secretly moves in with him on site. Luckily, since he can’t read lines, he ‘acts’ by counting up to his next move; dialogue to be looped in later. But any remaining laughs freeze in your throat as a series of missed communications lead to on-set tragedy and a revenge any Nazi resistence fighter would envy. The film a bottomless black hole of Misérables’ revenge. Fascinating, but very bleak.
DOUBL-BILL/LINK: *Cristian Mungiu used different paths and more complicated character motivation to cover similar territory in GLORY/’16, where no-good-deed-goes-unpunished. https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2025/01/glory-slava-2016.html
No comments:
Post a Comment