With decades of major award bait material (Palme d'Or; a rare Original Screenplay Oscar nom. on a foreign-language pic; dozens more on this one alone), co-writer/director Jafar Panahi would have been Iranian cinema royalty by now if only his moviemaking weren’t suppressed in his own country. This latest one of his best, a strikingly original prisoners’ revenge story that opens and closes in deadly earnest, but daringly plays out as farce in-between. It starts when a car accident brings one-time prison warden (along with pregnant wife and young daughter) to a rural car garage where the grizzled mechanic recognizes the driver as the man who tortured him in jail. But is it really him? Followed and then abducted by the former prisoner, his life and health destroyed by the beatings he took in jail, he suddenly has doubts just as he starts to bury the man alive. He seeks absolute identification to ‘justify’ his actions. And from here up to the last reel, the tone turns to absurdist journey as we gather other victims to verify identification. A professor, a wedding photographer, the bride (groom in tow), a wild galoot hungry for vengeance. Largely played as a dark roundelay in some bizarro On the Road farce Feydeau couldn’t have thought up. With laughs that ought to stick in your throat, but don’t. What can you do but laugh between the bribes you need to pay for just about any service. Iran’s landscape may look like Utah, but laminated ‘No Tipping Allowed’ cards on every diner table unheard of. Dangerous stuff from Panahi. Wondrous, too.
DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: You don’t expect an Iranian film about delayed justice between a sadistic prison official and his tortured victims to make you think of a tweedy period farce like THE WRONG BOX.’66, but it does. https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2013/05/the-wrong-box-1966.html
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