Film Freak Central

SDAFF '22: No Bears

****/****
starring Naser Hashemi, Reza Heydari, Mina Kavani, Bülent Keser
written and directed by Jafar Panahi

by Walter Chaw Jafar Panahi's No Bears is about imprisonment--a topic near and dear to the Iranian filmmaker's heart, as he has been, and is currently, a prisoner at the discretion of Iran's fascist government. First sentenced to six years in prison in 2010 for making films critical of the regime (a conviction that included a 20-year ban on filmmaking of any kind), Panahi spent that time under house arrest but was finally physically imprisoned in July of 2022 for raising a fuss on behalf of director and fellow prisoner-of-conscience Mohammad Rasoulof. Through clever subterfuge, Panahi has continued to direct new movies during his ban, of course--good ones, perhaps none so good as his latest, in which he plays himself, looking for a little peace and a wifi signal in a remote border town. He's directing a film by proxy, watching from his laptop as his AD, Reza (Reza Heydari), listens to his instructions regarding blocking, camera, even performance, transmitted across a physical and emotional distance through Reza's earbuds. "It's not the same without you," Reza tells Panahi; the energy is off with Panahi working through a surrogate. He can't pinpoint how, exactly, and Panahi, as he portrays himself, isn't one to make an awkward situation more comfortable. He listens more than he speaks. He waits for people to finish, then gives them an extra couple of seconds to regret what they've said. I've seen Werner Herzog do this in his documentaries, too--letting the camera run long past the point at which decorum would dictate relief from scrutiny. Panahi now lives under constant surveillance, after all, so why should any of his subjects suffer less?

A Hero (2021)

Ghahreman
**½/****
starring Amir Jadidi, Mohsen Tanabandeh, Fereshteh Sadrorafaii, Sarina Farhadi
written and directed by Asghar Farhadi

by Walter Chaw A Hero is Asghar Farhadi's Iranian Neorealist version of Stephen Frears's gaudy American prestige flick Hero, in which a man lauded as one type of person is secretly another type of person, thus calling to the stand society's process for determining object choice and assigning value. Not a new conceit, in other words. Here, it's given Farhadi's "miserablist parade" approach, whereby the exhausted didacticism of the premise is meted out with the punishing drip-drip of water torture. Freed for 48 hours from a debtor's prison, Rahim (Amir Jadidi) has a clandestine--because of divorce or something--meeting with his girlfriend, Farkhondeh (Sahar Goldust), who produces a handbag she's found abandoned that's full of gold coins. Problem solved, yes? No. Exchange rates being what they are in this global economy, the gold isn't quite enough to cover Rahim's obligations, and so he hatches a plan to make a big show out of giving the money back, the better to capitalize on his freshly-minted Good Samaritan persona. It works until it stops working, as these things do.

TIFF '21: Wrap-up

by Bill Chambers I've been covering TIFF for, gulp, 25 years now. If I didn't expect to mark this silver anniversary in the confines of my living room, I have no complaints. Some of the show ponies were geoblocked for Canadian press or offline altogether, but although I'm fully vaccinated, I wasn't about to risk transmission or stew for hours in a mask to see the May-December romance Dear Evan Hansen, or another remake of Dune, or a Secret Steven Soderbergh Screening that turned out to be, lol, Kafka, which is almost as good a prank as moving Best Actor to the end of the Academy Awards ceremony. I did at least get to stream my white whale, Jane Campion's The Power of the Dog, so no regrets. No regrets, no complaints.

Sundance '20: Yalda, A Night for Forgiveness

*/****
starring Sadaf Asgari, Behnaz Jafari, Babak Karimi, Fereshteh Sadr Orafaee
written and directed by Massoud Bakhshi

by Walter Chaw About 20 minutes into Massoud Bakhshi's shrill Yalda, A Night for Forgiveness (hereafter Yalda), I put my hands over my ears to blunt the constant keening. It's also the point where I started wondering what this film was on about. There's something brilliant and fascinating at the core of Yalda--a movie about an Iranian variety/game show in which the fate of someone sentenced to death hangs on the forgiveness of one of the people they've wronged--that makes its hamfistedness a real pity. Gathered are what we might call the plaintiff and the defendant to sit in an "Ellen"-style talk-show nook to tell their stories and air their grievances and then let the audience deliver a verdict via text message, whether or not a blood-money bounty will be paid to the aggrieved should they decide to exercise some grace. That's horrible. It's not more horrible than the U.S. justice system, which offers no such opportunity of recourse for the accused (heaven forbid a Christian nation ever exercise forgiveness and actually value life), but it's horrible just the same.

SDAFF '19: Just 6.5

Metri Shesh Va Nim
****/****
starring Payman Maadi, Navid Mohammadzadeh, Parinaz Izadyar, Hooman Kiaee
written and directed by Saeed Roustayi

by Walter Chaw With only ten minutes left in its running time, Saeed Roustayi's Just 6.5 introduces a brief musical sting in a film that, up to that moment, had relied entirely on diegetic audio and long, rapid-fire monologues delivered at high volume and intensity for its soundtrack. Said cue highlights erstwhile villain Nasser Khakzad (Navid Mohammadzadeh) drawing a line in the sand in a matter concerning the dispensation of a house he's bought for his parents. It's the fulcrum on which the entire film rests: not whether or not the Iranian state will confiscate a home, but the level of desperation that drives the lower classes into crime--and then the addictive nature of wealth that makes it impossible to retire from crime. As Nasser confesses when asked why he didn't quit while he was ahead, "My eyes were still hungry." The whole film is about the question of class and the possibility of ever climbing from one to the next. Everything in Just 6.5 is a barter at the world's late-capitalism bazaar. For instance, the crazed narco cop on Nasser's tail, Samad (Payman Maadi of A Separation), is dangled a bribe by drug lord Nasser that would essentially vault him into a different circle. It's a boost he needs, we gather from a few tossed-off comments about his kid and a phone call he gets at the worst time that he has to take while the whole world is crowding in around him. He doesn't take it because of "his honour," but he might as well have. It makes no difference.

Telluride '16: Short Films

by Walter Chaw

Dirt */**** (d. Darius Clark Monroe) One of those time-loop conceits that opens with a guy burying a body and ends with...no, not telling. Dirt has an issue with editing and looping, the fallout being that image overlaps noise, confusing function. It's possible to do this meaningfully; it's also possible to junk it up so completely that every transition begins with unnecessary obfuscation. That's what's happened here. Dirt isn't promising, but it is brief.

Hot Docs '16: Sonita

***½/****
directed by Rokhsareh Ghaem Maghami

Hot Docs, the Canadian International Documentary Festival, runs April 28-May 8, 2016 at Toronto's Bloor Cinema. Visit the fest's official site for more details.

by Bill Chambers By coincidence or zeitgeist design, Sonita is my third consecutive Hot Doc about the disenfranchised's quest for "personhood." Here it's the titular Sonita Alizadeh, an Afghan teenager who fled the Taliban and, as the film begins, is living in a fleapit in Tehran with her sister and young niece; an unseen brother apparently resides nearby, close enough to duck in and trash her belongings while she's out. Sonita's nightmare family expects a lot from her--when they're evicted, her hookah-smoking sister barks, "Go find us a new home! Now!"--and that includes that she will one day soon return to Afghanistan to be sold into marriage. She has dreams of becoming a recording artist, though, and a wilfulness that director Rokhsareh Ghaem Maghami tries desperately to cultivate without violating the documentarian's Prime Directive of impartial observation. When Sonita's mother extorts Maghami for $2000 to buy her subject six more months in Tehran, Sonita and Maghami get busy and make a video for Sonita's prosaic but politically-charged rap song "Brides for Sale," which goes viral and attracts the attention of a nonprofit that wants to fly Sonita to America, birthplace of her beloved Michael Jackson. (In a memorable sidebar, she's baffled by an Iranian map of the world that colour codes the U.S. as a desert--propaganda at its most diabolical.) Because I didn't follow Alizadeh's story as it happened live, the final third of Sonita played for me like a heist movie, with Sonita tiptoeing back into Afghanistan to retrieve her passport while keeping her final destination on the down-low. But there's a sadness gnawing away at the suspense: Sonita's mother is determined to find a man who will pay nine grand for her so that one of her sons can afford his own $9000 wife (she's the kind of older person who enforces the awful traditions to which she was subjected out of spite), and in Iran Sonita's social circle is drying up because nobody wants to be seen fraternizing with an outlaw (given that women there are technically not permitted to sing)--institutionalized misogyny has left her without a sanctuary. Sonita's victories are by no means Pyrrhic, yet the lonesome final shot shows that freedom and isolation are sometimes uncannily similar.

A Separation (2011)

Jodaeiye Nader az Simin
***½/****
starring Peyman Maadi, Leila Hatami, Sareh Bayat, Shahab Hosseini, Sarina Farhadi
written and directed by Asghar Farhadi

by Angelo Muredda In Armond White's latest "Better-Than" list, the champion of surreal juxtaposition pits Asghar Farhadi's A Separation against Joe Cornish's Attack the Block and finds the former wanting. "Action vs. Talk," he summarizes, in the poetry of tinyurl. Apart from the arbitrary matchup he stages between two very good films about getting to know your neighbours under the harshest of circumstances, White isn't completely off the mark. I won't defend his trite claim about A Separation's alleged "Iranian didacticism," but the film certainly is voluble. Farhadi wears his dramaturgy on his sleeve, opening with a carefully trained two-shot of middle-class couple Nader (Peyman Maadi) and Simin (Leila Hatami) at divorce court, parked in adjacent chairs as if settling in for a parent-teacher interview. They face us directly as they make their respective cases to a bored, unseen auditor: Simin wants to emigrate to the West; Nader refuses to leave his dementia-suffering father behind or grant his wife permission to leave with their eleven-year-old daughter Termeh (Sarina Farhadi, the director's own daughter)--more an effort to stall their separation, it seems, than an arbitrary flexing of his patriarchal muscle. Voluble, as I said, but not verbose. It's a provocative and deceptively straightforward setup, promising naturalism via Maadi's and Hatami's easy rapport while undercutting it with the artifice of their situation. Though the judge is unmoved by either side in this rhetorical showdown--"My finding," he tells Simin, "is that your problem is a small problem"--the stakes of this "small" quagmire, which is also a national and a gendered one, are made painfully clear to us by the couple's impassioned performances.

Source Code (2011) + Certified Copy (2010)

SOURCE CODE
****/****
starring Jake Gyllenhaal, Michelle Monaghan, Vera Farmiga, Jeffrey Wright
screenplay by Ben Ripley
directed by Duncan Jones

Copie conforme
****/****
starring Juliette Binoche, William Shimell
written and directed by Abbas Kiarostami

by Walter Chaw The one part of Source Code that isn't duck-ass tight poses so many questions about the nature of our hero's heroism and the aftermath of the film that it opens up what initially seems a hermetically-sealed conceit into something of real depth and fascination. Far from the solipsism of failures interesting (Timecrimes) and not (Primer), different from marginal successes like 12 Monkeys and Déjà Vu, Duncan Jones's sophomore feature (after the similarly thorny Moon) plays most like a child of Last Year at Marienbad and a companion piece to Abbas Kiarostami's contemporaneous Certified Copy. It speaks in terms of quantum physics and string theory, but without pretension, achieving the almost impossible by introducing difficult concepts at the same pace with which its characters--not a dummy among them--are able to understand them without gassing (or worse, falling well behind) the audience. That it presents itself as a mainstream, popular entertainment is more to its credit, giving lie to the notion that Hollywood is bankrupt of ideas. Rather, it's the destination for gifted filmmakers--some of them smart enough, and resourceful enough, to hold fast to their idealism and intelligence for, if not an entire career, then at least long enough to set a bar.

Satrapolis: FFC Interviews Marjane Satrapi

April 13, 2008|I sat down with Iranian writer/cartoonist/columnist and now filmmaker Marjane Satrapi at Denver's Hotel Monaco, right off 16^th Street Mall--just a few minutes from the Convention Center, where this year's Democratic National Convention will be held. I thought it a serendipitous place to interview a figure known for being outspoken on at least two of the three subjects you don't talk about: politics and religion. Colorado is traditionally a Red State, which belies the way its cultural centres, Denver and Boulder, vote--offset, perhaps, by nearby Colorado Springs, home to Ted Haggard's New Life Church, the Air Force Academy, and Focus on the Family. Always dangerous for me to stray too far from movies (I don't actually know very much about anything outside of movies, let's face it), but I savoured the chance to wade into deep water with the author, touring the U.S. with the film adapted from the two volumes of her brilliant Persepolis. Someone who says things impulsively that tend to get her in trouble, Ms. Satrapi's a kindred spirit.

Offside (2006) - DVD

***½/**** Image A Sound A Extras A
starring Sima Mobarak Shahi, Safar Samandar, Shayesteh Irani, M. Kheyrabadi
screenplay by Jafar Panahi and Shadmehr Rastin
directed by Jafar Panahi

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Offside finds Jafar Panahi in a light mood. At least, in a lighter mood than when he made The Circle, his previous dissertation on the depressing state of women's rights in Iran, which painted the nation as a Kafka-esque hell full of paranoia and punishment for any woman with the fatal courage to get out of line. That movie is a brilliant sucker-punch you don't easily forget, though its huis clos mentality leads one more to despair than to hope that something can be done. His latest film is the flipside to The Circle: a tribute to the resourcefulness of young women who will get their football fix any way they can while still pledging allegiance to the idea of their nationality--even when the reality is a hostile force bent on keeping them at home. It is, against all odds, funny, mischievous, and brazenly positive; and it'll send you out soaring, your faith in humanity restored under conditions you never thought possible.

DIFF '04: Tradition of Killing Lovers

Rasm-e ashegh-koshi
Tradition of Lover Killing
***/****
starring Hossein Mahjoub, Hossein Abedini, Gohar Kheir-Andish, Arman Nikzad
written and directed by Khosro Masumi

by Walter Chaw An Iranian film of surpassing simplicity and beauty, Khosro Masumi's debut Tradition of Killing Lovers involves a man sent to prison for smuggling lumber. While interred, his young son Jallal tries to pay off the family's debts by running the remote region's lone chainsaw to scattered smuggling camps. Shots of Jallal, impossibly dwarfed by the chainsaw blade poking straight up from a knapsack on his back, framed against a bleak Iranian winter, conjure innumerable visual references from as varied of visionaries as Satyajit Ray and the Akira Kurosawa of Dersu Uzala. Moments where Masumi shows civilization as a series of close-set houses, thick as mushrooms, sprouting corpse white from the blighted earth, hint at the corruption just beneath the surface of what seems a sunny fable. (Not otherwise a supernatural thriller, Tradition of Killing Lovers boasts of one of the most chilling reveals of any film this year.) And though the performances veer from the excellent (Salar, the father, and Jallal) to the Bollywood (sister Majan and her Dudley Do-Right constable/suitor, Latif), with a courtship subplot and kvetching mother threatening at every moment to disrupt the quiet poetry of the central story, it doesn't really matter, as the stars of the show are the Iranian outback and the young boy bravely travelling across his desolate reality. Think of it as an Iranian The Swimmer (the Burt Lancaster film about a man getting home by loping across the backyard pools of his suburban neighbours): at its best a sad, existential journey through the emptiness of the self, interested in something so simple and complex as honouring the father and being to his own self true.

Crimson Gold (2003)

Talaye sorkh
****/****
starring Hussein Emadeddin, Kamyar Sheissi, Azita Rayeji, Shahram Vaziri
screenplay by Abbas Kiarostami
directed by Jafar Panahi

by Bill Chambers Those planning on taking in Roland Emmerich's The Day After Tomorrow this weekend solely to judge the credibility of its disaster-movie hijinks would be better off buying a ticket to its competition in several North American markets, Jafar Panahi's Crimson Gold (Talaye sorkh), in which a scenario of inevitable, cyclical doom unfolds with astonishing veracity. The shooting of a jewellery-store owner by a thief who turned the gun on himself inspired master filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami to reverse-engineer the thief's motives in a screenplay written specifically for his former assistant director Panahi, fresh from the bittersweet triumph of The Circle. (Widely acclaimed everywhere, it was banned in his native Iran.) Some details specific to Iran's theocracy notwithstanding (a party is raided by police because men and women are dancing together), Crimson Gold is arguably a more globally inclusive film than The Circle, as it deals with the insidious threat of classism that on some level affects us all.

Ten (2002) + Lilya 4-Ever (2002)

Dah
**½/****
starring Mania Akbari, Amin Maher, Kamran Adl, Roya Arabashi
written and directed by Abbas Kiarostami

Lilja 4-Ever
***/****
starring Oksana Akinshina, Artyom Bogucharsky, Lyubov Agapova, Liliya Shinkaryova
written and directed by Lukas Moodysson

by Walter Chaw The plight of women in oppressive and/or emerging cultures, on film, is a slipstream metaphor for the travails of all the citizenry of that place and, from there, the existential struggle of modern man--a heavy burden, to be sure, and one that forever teeters on the precipice of trite to the one side, affected to the other. (With "condescending" the great beast, crouched and ready to pounce.) Women are too often grail repositories of fear and loathing--indicator species, much like children in film, to be examined for hints of what's toxic in the spirit of the time. That two foreign films by male directors find their way to the United States in fast company of one another, dealing with the plight of women (all women, all society, all the world) in ways frank and raw, is arguably not so much coincidence, then, as a synchronicity that, no matter their relative success, represents a sharp spur and a whip to the collective flank.

Tycoon (2002); Under the Skin of the City (2001); Stone Reader (2003)

Oligarkh
Tycoon: A New Russian
*½/****
starring Vladimir Mashkov, Mariya Mironova, Levani Outchaneichvili, Aleksandr Baluyev
screenplay by Aleksandr Borodyansky, Pavel Lungin, Yuli Dubov, based on Dubov's novel Bolshaya pajka
directed by Pavel Lungin

Zir-e poost-e shahr
Under the City's Skin
***/****
starring Golab Adineh, Mohammad Reza Forutan, Baran Kosari, Ebrahin Sheibani
screenplay by Rakhshan Bani Etemad, Farid Mostafavi
directed by Rakhshan Bani Etemad

STONE READER
*/****
directed by Mark Moskowitz

by Walter Chaw The collapse of oppressive regimes is a double-edged sword for a country's film industry. Official censors are out of work, but they take their government's sponsorship of the film industry with them. Entertaining a stream of strange bedfellows from the United States and France, the Russian cinema in the age of Perestroika struggled to find a balance between artistry and commerce--the same instinct that promoted the creation of underground trades in fake Levi's spawned, too, a steadily gathering horde of cheap knock-off films designed, like their Yankee brothers, for minimal but satisfactory fiscal return. Departing quickly from the early optimism of pictures like Alexander Sokurov's Days of Eclipse and Pavel Lungin's Taxi Blues, the "Russian New Wave" (led like the French nouvelle vague by a cadre of critics) has expressed itself lately through cultural remakes of classics of world (including early Russian) cinema. The S. Dobrotvorsky-scripted Nicotine, an interesting take on Godard's Breathless, is the best of the cultural doppelgängers; Lungin's Tycoon is among the worst.

Hot Docs '03: And Along Came a Spider

Va ankaboot amad
***/****
directed by Maziar Bahari

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover You'd think it would be clear-cut: a serial killer who murders 16 prostitutes should be treated with a maximum of scorn. But that's not how it happened in Iran, where the notorious Saeed Hanei dispatched members of society who were already believed to have been the scum of the earth. The sadistic "spider-killer," already high on killing from the Iran-Iraq war, believed that he was doing God's work, and interviews with his family reveal that they are proud that their son/husband/father was taking a stand on those who would corrupt the earth. Public opinion is hardly clear-cut, as revealed by the ambivalence of his co-workers in condemning his actions and by the approval of hardliners who applaud him. As a film about the killings, And Along Came a Spider does a fairly good job, exploring the messed-up religious upbringing that shaped Hanei's consciousness (as revealed through remorseless interviews with his family) and showing the impact of his actions by talking to the children of one of the victims. As a document of Iranian society's response, it's not quite as effective, relying on Hanei's co-workers and brief mentions in the press. But there's enough evidence here to indict at least a particular fundamentalist state of mind, and the film hammers the nails into its moral coffin with some skill.

Your Secret is Safe with Payami: FFC Interviews Babak Payami

August 25, 2002|I met Babak Payami last week while he was drinking an espresso in a leather-upholstered booth at a chichi Denver eatery. In town to discuss his second film, Secret Ballot (Raye makhfi), Payami was not the craggy visage in a fisherman's knit-wool sweater with a shock of white hair--the living incarnation of Samuel Beckett as would befit the author of a film that plays like a cross between "Waiting for Godot" and "Endgame"--I expected. Instead, I was greeted by a compact, powerful-seeming man in a sweater. Articulate and confident, yes, but there the similarity to papa Sam ended.

Secret Ballot (2001)

Raye makhfi
***½/****
starring Nassim Abdi, Cyrus Abidi, Youssef Habashi, Farrokh Shojaii
written and directed by Babak Payami

by Walter Chaw It begins and ends with waiting, while the middle of Babak Payami's Secret Ballot (Raye makhfi) is invested in the Theatre of the Absurd--this is Samuel Beckett, in other words, applied to the Iranian voting process, as an unnamed election agent (Nassim Abdi) travels to a remote Persian island on a quest to gather votes from citizens who may not know that it's election time, are probably unfamiliar with the candidates, and almost certainly aren't affected by the outcome anyway. If anything, Payami's picture confirms that things are the same all over.

Kandahar (2001)

Safar e Ghandehar
**/****
starring Niloufar Pazira, Hassan Tantai, Sadou Teymouri
written and directed by Mohsen Makhmalbaf

 

by Walter Chaw Kandahar is a science-fiction film about a terrifying and unknowable alien culture and the human anthropologist who must disguise herself to gain entry into its Byzantine infrastructure (thus often reminding me of Mary Doria Russell's The Sparrow), and it is the recipient of perhaps the most serendipitous release in film history. Iranian filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf's Kandahar is either a stunningly incompetent film or an amazingly evocative one. Perhaps best described as both, the piece alternates between sledgehammer images and awful didactic exposition. An argument can be made, and a good one, that the plight of Afghani women under the medieval rule of The Taliban deserves to be treated as a medieval passion play, with all the implied attendant allegorical characters (the pilgrim, the fallen child, the doctor, the thief) and mannered execution.