“The Pear Tree” - Dariush Mehrjui (1998)

At first The Pear Tree (Derakht-e Golabi, 1998) seems more like a contemplative meditation than a story. There doesn’t seem to be a clear narrative journey, but only a collection of memories of the distant past on the part the man character.  But as you follow along, you see that the film reflects the protagonist’s interior passage towards self-discovery. Directed by Dariush Mehrjui and co-scripted by Mehrjui and Goli Taraghi, the seemingly meandering and uneventful The Pear Tree actually turns out to be one of the most interesting Iranian films and one whose theme is universal. In fact when I saw the film, it evoked for me not so much thoughts of other Iranian movies or of Iranian society but of Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries (1957).

The film stars Homayoun Ershadi and Golshifteh Farahani in the principal roles, and both gave memorable performances.  Ershadi was a successful architect who came to the film world relatively late in life – his first leading role came only the year before, at the age of fifty, in Abbas Kiarostami’s Taste of Cherry (Ta'am-e-Gīlās, 1997).  But although Kiarostami’s film won the Cannes Film Festival’s 1997 Palme D’Or, I would say that Mehrjui’s The Pear Tree is far superior.  And Ershadi’s performance in the latter film is correspondingly much better, as well.

Golshifteh Farahani, who has established herself as Iran’s leading screen siren (although she has recently been exiled from her country by the Iranian government), made her debut with this film when she was only fourteen.  Even here with her first film and barely a teenager, Ms. Farahani displayed the kind of innocent radiance that has left its indelible stamp on all her films.

The story of The Pear Tree concerns a successful writer and intellectual, Mahmoud, who has gone on a retreat to his family’s rural estate near Mount Damavand, northeast of Tehran, in order to overcome a serious case of writer’s block: he has been unable to complete the current chapter of his book project for the past six years. While he is there trying to write, he begins to think a about some past events in his life that he had long suppressed.  What triggers these thoughts is the contemplation of a familiar pear tree in the garden behind his house.

The story actually amounts to something of an internal struggle in Mahmoud’s own mind concerning what were the driving concerns of his life and what was his true, authentic nature.  It reflects the eternal tension between the needs of the inner life (the life of the ego-dominated self) and the outer life (the immersion of the self with the external world of others).  It is a dualism that has been given many variants, from Romanticism versus Classicism to the Nietzschean dualism of the Apollinian versus the Dionysian.  A way of looking at this dualismis to say that on one side of this divide, there is the internal self that is isolated from the rest of the world and looks out onto it in an calculating and analytical fashion.  This is the “inner/ego” stance. On the other side of the dualism, there is the urge to abandon that isolation and become one with another, external being – the “outer/selfless” stance.  We all pass back and forth between these two conflicting modes, never settling in one place.  For Mahmoud, the awareness of this tension came for him when he was twelve years old and spending his summer at this same rural estate where he is now trying to cure his writer’s block.

The story passes through five uneven stages as it explores the tension between Mahmoud’s (and our) two ways of being.

1.  Mahmoud and the Pear Tree
At the beginning of the film, Mahmoud is in his study at his estate, “Damavand Garden”, trying to put pen to paper.  He is locked into the inner/ego mode. His concentration is interrupted by his old family gardener, who pesters Mahmoud about their pear tree that “refuses” to bear fruit this season. The gardener feels that Mahmoud is all-powerful and can cure this petulant pear tree by a simple command, but Mahmoud just wants the gardener to go away and stop bothering him.  After all, he has promised eight articles to four newspapers and his students and publishers are awaiting the completion of his current long-overdue book project.  As far as Mahmoud is concerned, what goes on in the garden is inconsequential, for he is addicted to the life of philosophy and art.

But the gardener and the local village chieftain, who is also a gardener, won’t let go.  They remind Mahmoud of the time (probably at least thirty-five years earlier) when he watched his cousin, Ms. Mimcheh, ride a donkey near that same pear tree.

2.  Remembering Mimcheh
This reminder awakens in Mahmoud some long suppressed memories, and the film moves to a series of flashbacks when he was twelve years old and kept company at the estate that summer years ago with his female cousin, known to everyone in these recollections only as “M” (in Farsi: “Mim”, the diminutive of which is “Mimcheh”) [1]. Mim was an attractive, naughty tomboy, who is said to be “a few years older” than Mahmoud. The recollection of Mim shifts Mahmoud’s thinking over to the outer/selfless mode. Mahmoud at that recollected time was a shy young lad and totally infatuated with the insouciant young lady [2]. 

In these sequences there are many recollections of Mahmoud’s romantic obsession with his beautiful cousin.  Although Mahmoud is totally enamored and a willing slave to her every whim, she dismisses his ardor with cordial derision.  She makes the lovesick boy do her bidding.  For example since Mimcheh despises her opium-addicted uncle, who is a retired military colonel, she assigns Mahmoud the task of stealing his military uniform so that they can use it for their costumed play-acting. Mahmoud dutifully carries out the task as ordered, and thereafter Mim dresses up as a colonel, giving even more orders for Mahmoud to carry out.  They do share a common passion, though – for poetry and philosophy – and they discuss together the books that they read.  Mahmoud dreams of being a great writer, while Mimcheh dreams of being an actress and often spends her time organizing dramatic episodes in the orchard for herself to star in.

There is one particularly affecting scene showing Mahmoud secretly watching Mimcheh taking an afternoon nap. It is subtly filmed and skillfully suggests both Mahmoud’s watchful admiration for his sleeping goddess and the way such moments and images can long linger in one’s memory.

But there are threats to this idyl looming. Mim, though young, is of marriageable age, and Mahmoud is worried that her family will arrange a marriage for her before he gets old enough to contend for her hand.  He begs her to wait for a few years for him to grow up.  Moreover, Mim gets a letter from her father, a political refugee living in Paris, inviting her to come to live there with him.  That offer is evidently soon accepted, because except for a brief encounter with Mahmoud in Tehran the following winter, Mim disappears from his life.  That long-ago period when he was twelve is the last time that Mahmoud and Mimcheh ever spend time together.

3.  Back in the Garden with the Pear Tree
The scene shifts back to the present and Mahmoud’s inner/ego mode. He is still unable to write, and begins to berate himself for wanting to write merely to satisfy his ego-driven desire to be famous in the community. The gardeners are still pestering him to do something about that recalcitrant pear tree. Exasperated with this trivial interruption of his creative process, he tells them just to go ahead and cut it down.  But the village chieftain exhibits his compassionate side and urges the others the pear tree a little more time.

Alone again, Mahmoud wrestles with self-accusations in the form of imaginary discussions with his university students, who look up to him and are impatiently waiting for his next work to be published.  But as he tries to force himself to write some sentences, he pauses and falls again into a reverie about Mim and what happened later.

4.  Mahmoud’s Early Career
Mahmoud thinks back about the start to his professional career as a writer, and again there are flashbacks. In this section, there is a more intimate struggle between the inner/ego and outer/selfless sides to Mahmoud.  He is retrospectively trying to reconcile the two.  But he is at this point recollecting a period in his life that was more matter-of-fact and “objective”, and so all the flashbacks of this section are shown in black-and-white.

He recollects that his first published work was a book of poems dedicated to Mim, who was then living in Paris.  As he recollects, he says to himself that he was then still in love, but in a more mature way – “this is a new and truthful love which is more worldly”. 

But he also recollects how he came to be hoodwinked into dedicating his life to politics. He became a leftist and a political opponent of the Shah’s government; and as an utterly devoted political party member, he gradually forgot about Mim. The many letters that she wrote to him from Paris, increasingly inviting and amorous in tone, went unanswered. She no longer wanted to be an actress; she had by then taken up literature, like him.  In her letters, she tells him that she is waiting for him.  But Mahmoud is too busy to respond. The present-day Mahmoud recollects to himself about this:

“Had I answered Mim’s letters, everything would have turned out differently.  I wanted to do everything else and then attend to her letters.”

His professional life had become dominant.  He didn’t abandon her; he was just preoccupied.

In another flashback, he recollects a terminating, cataclysmic moment. He was finally jailed by the Shah’s police for his political activities and thrown into a cell. From one of his cellmates, a distant relative of Mim, he learns that Mim had died in an accident in France.

In a final visionary dialogue with one of his imaginary university students, there is the following exchange: 

Student: “Were you serious when you wrote to Mim and told her that you would come to her ‘next year’”?

Mahmoud: “Yes.”

But our powers are limited, and despite all our efforts, some things cannot be undone or redone.

5.  The Pear Tree
In the final scene Mahmoud goes out to the garden again, alone this time, and stares at the pear tree.  He sees it now as just another living part of the great, unfathomable web of life.  At the film’s close he peacefully sits himself under that pear tree and recollects a time during that long-ago summer when he was just sitting on a branch high up in that same pear tree and

“staring at a spider that was knitting a thin web quietly and patiently.” 

Mehrjui’s cinematography in The Pear Tree is superb.  There are very many tracking shots, dissolves, and soft focusings, but they are unobtrusive and are all effectively and seamlessly woven into the film’s fabric. The film stands as one of Mehrjui’s most accomplished pieces of cinematic storytelling. Nevertheless, the most memorable imagery is associated with Golshifteh Farahani’s performance as Mimcheh. Her impact on the film is a reminder that the most important aspect of filmmaking is not what you do with the camera, but what you have in front of the camera.

As I mentioned earlier, it is interesting to compare The Pear Tree with Bergman’s Wild Strawberries.  There are several points of commonality:

• Both film titles focus on a tasty fruit, which symbolically suggests nature and perhaps youth.
• Both protagonists are elderly intellectuals who were shy and felt awkward in intimate situations.
• Both protagonists recollected their pasts and felt that they had perhaps made the wrong choice in life and had missed out on a big chance at true fulfilment.
• However, both protagonists come to some form of acceptance at the end of the story.

Wild Strawberries is a fine film, but for me The Pear Tree is even better than the more famous Bergman film (which is considered one of that master’s best).  The Pear Tree is more immersive, more luscious, more passionate than Wild Strawberries.  And it resonates deeply with my own personal experience.

At the end of The Pear Tree, the viewer is given to believe that Mahmoud has come to terms with his life.  In precisely what way, though, is not clear.  Is he now more settled concerning those lingering memories about what Mim may have meant to him, and is he now ready to go on with his work?  Or has he just given up and now feels there is no compelling reason for him to continue to write at all?  Should he just let things be and be content with whatever is?  The film’s final tone suggests personal contentment, but I see no real narrative progression to such a state.

We don’t know much about what happened in Mahmoud’s life in the two decades following his prison term in the Shah’s jail. We know he became a very successful intellectual and writer. He mentions early on, when he reflects on why he has gone alone to his family estate to write, that he is now free – “no wife and children”. So we can presume that after Mim’s death Mahmoud went on to marry and raise a family. But Mim represented something more than just an attractive woman to him. One might say that she was his aesthetic ideal, his poetic muse – an image that fired the affective side of his consciousness and helped make him the writer he became.  But was that all she meant to him?  I wonder. 
★★★½

Notes:

1. It seems that Mahmoud could not bring himself to pronounce her full name.
2. In Iran, first cousins can marry each other.

“The Patience Stone” - Atiq Rahimi (2012)

The Patience Stone (Syngué Sabour, 2012) concerns a young woman’s self-realization in war-torn Afghanistan. Like many of the films produced in neighboring Iran, this French-Afghanistan co-production takes on the big issues of how one can fashion a meaningful life in difficult social circumstances. But unlike those comparative Iranian examples, which can only be made under severe restrictions that necessitate oblique references to the underlying social issues, the themes expressed in The Patience Stone are remarkably explicit for a work from that general region of the world.  The film is directed by Afghani filmmaker Atiq Rahimi and showcases the talents of Iranian actress Golshifteh Farahani. The script by Rahimi and Jean-Claude Carrière is based on Rahimi’s 2008 novel of the same name that won the prestigious Prix Goncourt in France.

A distinctive feature about the film is that much of it is essentially an interior monologue reflecting the thoughts of the young woman.  But this monologue is not a narrative voiceover on the soundtrack, but is instead presented diegetically in the story, as the woman talking aloud to herself during moments when she is (more or less) alone.  (I’ll get to this “more or less” bit shortly.)  This monologue aspect makes the film very talky and is a weakness; but at the same time the woman’s sense of isolation is central to the story, and in this case we must accept the film’s central motif on its own terms.

The setting is a war-torn Middle Eastern country that to English-speaking audiences is not named but which will be readily identified as Afghanistan. The senseless savagery of war, wherein all sides are dominated by a pervasive and compulsive destructiveness, is evoked by the film’s blurring of just who is fighting whom.  This is not just the fog of war but the subhumanity of war.  There is no identification of the warring parties or what they might stand for, which is reminiscent of Miklós Jancsó’s superb anti-war film, The Red and the White (1967).

The young woman in the film's focus I will simply refer to as the “wife”. She has two young daughters and must attend at home to her husband, an injured guerilla combatant who at the film’s outset has already been comatose for fourteen days and with no clear prospects for recovery.  The ensuing narrative progresses through five stages.

1.  The Hell of War
The opening 25 minutes depict the horrific circumstances of the wife and her family.  Her comatose husband’s mother and brothers have run away, and her only other relative is an aunt whom she barely knows. When intense firefighting occurs, she huddles her kids downstairs in the compound’s cellar, leaving her husband lying in the apartment. On one such occasion, armed combatants enter her quarters and callously steal her husband’s wedding ring and watch from his inert body. On another occasion after her neighbor’s entire family is brutally slaughtered by guerillas, the wife decides she has to find the whereabouts of her aunt and seek to shelter her daughters there.

2.  The Patience Stone
The wife eventually finds her aunt, who turns out to be an independent and sturdy woman who supports herself by privately entertaining men.  Now finally with someone she can talk to, the wife tells her aunt about her compelling need to confess her inner thoughts to someone; and so she has even been confessing things to her unconscious husband. The aunt responds by telling her the legend of the patience stone.  It has been said that if you find this stone, you must tell the stone everything, all your secrets.  Eventually, her aunt tells her, the stone will shatter, and you will be delivered.  Moved by this legend, the wife returns to her own comatose husband tells him that he is to be her own patience stone and that she will tell him all her secrets.

3.  The Two Militiamen
Now two militiamen barge into the wife’s home and threaten her.  Asked by the senior militiaman how she survives without anyone else around, the wife lies by saying she makes her living as a prostitute.  He curses her but leaves her alone.  The next day her aunt tells the wife that her lie saved her life: the jihadis never rape a whore, she says – the pride of manhood for them only comes from raping a virgin. 

The next day the junior militiaman, who stutters so badly he can barely talk and is sexually inexperienced, comes to the wife’s apartment and unsuccessfully does try to rape her.  Afterwards, the wife is reminded of her aunt’s pronouncement: “those who don’t know how to make love make war.”

4.  The Stuttering Militiaman
The stuttering militiaman returns, and for the first time in her life the wife has an encounter with a man who actually wants to please her.  She learns that the stuttering man is also a victim, having been tortured and presumably sexually abused by his senior militia combatant. 

5.  Conclusion
Finally there are (perhaps somewhat predictable) climactic events that bring the story to a certain closure.

The focalization in The Patience Stone is entirely on the wife, and her discursive monologues cover her inner journey with respect to three themes or subjects: the role of men, the role of women, and the way to self-realization:

• The role of men
  Aside from the stuttering militiaman, the rest of the men in this film are uniformly selfish and obsessed with their own sense of pride and personal achievement.  The only thing that matters to the men of this society is to maintain “face” and to be respected in front of other men.  I already mentioned the pride that the soldiers felt in raping a virgin. This preoccupation with “face” is not only ruinous to others but self-destructive, too.  It turns out that the wife’s husband was shot not in battle but by one of his own fellow combatants over an insulting reference to his mother.  Later, the wife recalls how her father’s obsessive addiction to gambling in quail fights (a variant of cockfighting) came at the expense of his own family’s welfare.  He loved his quails more than his own children.  And on reflection of her own earlier married life, the wife realizes that in their marriage her husband had only treated her like a piece of meat.
  
• The role of women
  The aunt, who has managed to survive on her own in a mysogynistic society,  is a worldly-wise commentator and mentor for the wife.  At one point the wife overhears a religious parable broadcast over public loudspeakers and asks her aunt about it. The story tells how the Prophet Mohammad had confided to his wife Khadija about his fears of evil spirits and how he had been calmed by Khadija’s counsel. The wife wondered how the Prophet could be vulnerable to evil, and her aunt tells her that, after all, the Prophet was just a man, and it was Khadija’s role to help Mohammad “attain his prophetical truth”.  She goes on to tell her niece, “Khadija is the one who should have been a Prophet”. The wife returns to her dwelling inspired that she could someday  have a truly meaningful relationship with a man.
• Self-realization through social engagement
  We all understand our world through stories – the ones we hear and the ones we tell.  In fact it’s when we tell stories that we construct our understanding of our world, and of ourselves, too. We need to engage with and talk to others, people with whom we can share our thoughts and arrive at a higher mutual understanding. The need is particularly great for men and women to talk together, to share their secrets, because each can contribute something precious to the other. But this opportunity for shared, intimate dialogue between the sexes is often barred by rigid social conventions. A remarkable feature of The Patience Stone in this respect is the degree to which matters of sexual intimacy are frankly discussed. This is not done for dramatic stimulation, but is a natural element of the story about shared intimacy.  The stuttering militiaman in The Patience Stone embodies this idea.  He couldn’t talk to people, and so he couldn’t engage.  In fact the third time he comes to the wife, he doesn’t want sex, he just wants to talk.  He needs this connection so that he can know himself – and become a man.

It is interesting that a number of outstanding male filmmakers, such as Antonioni, Bergman, Mizoguchi, and von Sternberg, have focused their attention on women’s psyches.  The men in their films are often weak or selfish, and it is the women who have real character.  Rahimi here goes further, though, and casts the men in this film as very far from possible redemption.

The cinematic realization of the story of The Patience Stone would have been enhanced if there had been more dramatized presentations, such as when the wife describes her father’s obsession with quail fighting. A few more such dramatizations would have added body and “flesh” to the narrative and helped move it along. As it is, there is an enormous narrative burden on the character of the wife. The beautiful and magnetic Golshifteh Farahani does well in the lead role, but the extreme demands for emotional expressiveness, which include fear, grief, anger, and terror, sometimes seem to exceed her range. Nevertheless, she carries the film, and it is hard to imagine anyone else doing as well. There is something intuitively fascinating about her persona that draws the viewer in.  We want to follow along what she tells us and know her more.

★★★

“The Fish Fall in Love” - Ali Rafie (2006)

Sometimes a significant aspect of a narrative, besides the telling of events in the "present", is the slow disclosure of the backstory.  A stranger or long-absent colleague shows up in a community, and there is something about that person’s background that represents a puzzle that must be disclosed – both to us and to some of the members of that community.  This is the driving force behind The Fish Fall in Love (aka When Fish Fall in Love, Mahiha Ashegh Mishavand, 2006).  In fact the puzzlement around the film’s backstory is pushed to an extreme that perhaps represents the film’s weakness as well as its fascination.

Because the backstory is so much the focus in The Fish Fall in Love, and the viewer spends much of his or her time trying to unravel it in order to uncover the motivations of the main character, it can also help to be mindful of the backstory behind the film’s creator, the distinguished Iranian playwright and stage director, Ali Rafie.  Rafie originally studied sociology and theater in France, graduating from the Sorbonne with a PhD in 1974.  When he returned to Iran, he was soon jailed because of his criticisms of state censorship, but he eventually went on to establish himself as both a practitioner and academic, – achieving distinction as a stage director, stage designer, costume designer, and playwright.  Finally at the age of sixty-eight, he undertook his first venture into filmmaking with The Fish Fall in Love.

In this story, the most significant actions occur outside of the events depicted.  Either they took place before the film started – the backstory I have been telling you about.  Or they take place offscreen.  Or perhaps more significantly, they take place after the last frame has been shown.  The plot concerns a middle-aged man, Aziz, who returns to his hometown after a long absence and wishes to settle some affairs.  We want to know why he was absent and what he plans to do now that he’s back.  The fate of several people in the story will depend on what he chooses to do.  Although there are numerous scenes involving a number of related characters, the focalization is centered around three main figures:

• Aziz (played by Reza Kianan), who is returning to his hometown after twenty-two years
• Atieh (Roya Nonahali), the former girlfriend of Aziz
• Touka (Golshifteh Farahani), who is Atieh’s daughter

With the many little scenes, the story meanders along, offering slivers of information that one might piece together in order to guess what Aziz is up to.  But I partition these scenes into four main sections.

1.  Prologue
Aziz is traveling in a hired car from Tehran to an Iranian port town on the Caspian sea.  At a roadside café along the way, Aziz chats with a young man, Reza, who is traveling in the same car.  Reza's job at a local fish farm qualifies him to be an expert on fish.  So Aziz asks him the difference between farmed fish and fish caught in the wild, and Reza explains that farmed fish are flabby and tasteless, because of their confinement.  On the other hand, wild fish are more adventurous and fearlessly swim upstream in order to spawn – hence they are sometimes called “lovers”.  This will be a metaphor for the entire film, because Aziz, who has spent time in prison, is inhibited and suffers from self-doubt – he is not a wild fish.

A little later on up the road to the Caspian, their car is stopped at a police checkpoint, and Reza is arrested and handcuffed, for some undisclosed charge.

2.  Aziz arrives in the seaport
When Aziz arrives in town, he visits a restaurant run by a woman who silently recognizes him through a small window.  It is Aziz’s former fiancé, Atieh.  Although it takes awhile, we eventually learn that this restaurant is actually a house that belongs to Aziz’s family, and he has returned to this town to reclaim it.  Atieh, along with her daughter, her sister, and an adopted lady friend, has been using this building to host her restaurant for the past ten or so years.  Now they are all terrified that Aziz is going to reclaim his old home and leave the women destitute and without a home or a place for their business.

Aziz goes on to meet old friends, Rahmat and Younes, who relate to him what has happened in the town during his long absence.  They are interested to know whether Aziz is going to meet up with Atieh, but Aziz shrinks from the idea – “I’m scared she’ll tell me to get lost,” he says.  We eventually learn that Aziz’s absence from the town is associated with his having been jailed more than twenty-two years earlier (they refer to him as having been a “revolutionary”, so he was presumably jailed for political reasons after the revolution).  His well-to-do father had managed to buy his son’s liberty and get him out of the country by selling the family factory to Rahmat.  Also at the time of Aziz’s arrest, Atieh’s father, in order to stifle “gossip” about his daughter and Aziz, had  forced her to marry the first available suitor. 

This is the first mention of “gossip”, which is referenced several times in the film. I take this referent to be a veiled codeword for the oppressive conservative social forces and attendant pervasive surveillance that one must always be mindful of in Iran ever since the revolution.

We also learn that after several years of a loveless marriage, Atieh’s abusive husband had disappeared in his fishing boat, leaving her alone with her six-year-old daughter, Touka.  Afterwards, Atieh had then opened her restaurant in order to make ends meet.

It further turns out that the Reza we already saw and who was arrested in the early Prologue section is Touka’s fiancé.  Aziz knows that Reza is in jail, but noone else seems to know about Reza’s whereabouts.

The scenes with Aziz in this section are interspersed with scenes of the four women merrily bustling about in the kitchen of their popular restaurant and enthusiastically serving their customers.  When Aziz shows up at the restaurant, though, Atieh, defensive about having used his home for more than a decade, assures him that they will all soon clear out of his house and that he can immediately occupy an upstairs bedroom.

So the stage is set, and issues must be resolved.  Are Aziz and Atieh going to renew their old love affair?  Or is Aziz going to go through with his plans to reclaim his old house and force the women out?  What will be the fate of Touka and her jailed fiancé, Reza?

3.  Plans and Preparations
This section of the film indicates that further steps are being taken, but it is unclear what will happen.  Aziz has decided to stay awhile in the town, and the main motivation for this is his concern about Reza’s fate, which reminds him of his own arrest some twenty years earlier.  Aziz secures the services of a lawyer, but his legal intentions are unclear (although the women assume that it is associated with Aziz’s reclamation of his house).  Aziz also discovers, thanks to his friend Younes, that he still owns a hillside cabin outside of town, which he had years ago  promised to his fiancé Atieh to be their married home.

Nevertheless, under the sway of Touka’s romantic optimism, the four women do what they can to comfort the shy and taciturn Aziz by serving him delicious meals every day. But when Aziz visits the restaurant for a serious discussion about the house, the over-stressed Atieh faints and has to be taken to the hospital.

4. Going Home
With Atieh away in the hospital, Touka and the ladies continue to serve delicious meals to Aziz, and they gradually get to know each other better.  When Atieh comes home from the hospital, the four women and Aziz begin dining together and the social ice has been broken.  Aziz seems to be such a genial gentleman; he couldn’t really be intending to turn the women out of his house, could he? 

But when Aziz’s lawyer shows up at the restaurant while Aziz is away, Atieh fears the worst.  She tells Aziz off when she sees him and accuses him of once again letting her down and leaving her miserable.  Stung and silenced by her vituperation, Aziz returns to his room and prepares to leave.

In the final scene, Reza is seen to have been released from prison, and he arrives at the Restaurant and rings the doorbell. Meanwhile Atieh goes to Aziz’s upstairs room the next day and sees that he has departed.  Then in the final shots she is seen driving her truck, with considerable doubt and trepidation, towards Aziz’s family cabin.

The story of The Fish Fall in Love is really about the fear of expressing love in the face of possible rejection. Aziz, once confined in prison (as was Rafie), is no longer the “revolutionary” that he was in his youth.  Life’s disappointments have apparently worn him down.  He is now like the farmed fish, not the fearless “lover” fish who swims upstream.  There is a telling conversation that he has with Touka in the third section of the film.  Touka, grieving about the disappearance of Reza, says that she is crying a bellyful of tears.

Aziz:
"You know the luckiest people are those who know how to sob a bellyful of tears”.

Touka:
“Can I ask a question?”

Aziz:
“If it’s an easy one.”

Touka:
“Why didn’t you come home after you got out of prison?”

Aziz:
“I did come back, but noone was waiting for me.   I wanted to forget everything.”

Touka:
“And did you forget?”

Aziz:
“What would you have done in my position?”

Touka:
“That depends on how much I loved her.”

Aziz:
“Or how much she loves you.”

Aziz here reveals his own vulnerability and focus on his own losses – he felt rejected when he return for the town years ago and discovered that Atieh was married.  He realizes that Atieh will probably never forgive him for abandoning her – even if he had been forced to leave the country by circumstances outside of his control.  Atieh, too, is fearful of expressing her true feelings to Aziz.  She feels that in the male-dominated society with which she has had to struggle to survive, Aziz is just another male ready to reclaim what belongs to him.  She has managed to survive over the years by her own hard work and expressing herself in the best way that she could.  In Iran, as in many countries around the world, the preparation of food can serve as a significant form of personal expression for women, whose wider self-expression is curtailed in other dimensions (for a further example of such culinary self-expression, see Dariush Mehrjui's 1992 film, Sara).

The young people in the film, Touka and Reza, are much less timid.  This is particularly true of Touka, who sustains the film’s narrative energy and who is effectively portrayed by the beautiful and spirited Golfshifteh Farahani.  Touka is the fearless fish, daringly dashing about the town and into customary male-oriented environments in search Reza’s whereabouts.  It is she who counsels her mother at one point when the two of them are observing Aziz and the other women from a distance, “Aziz needs love, Mother”.

The fear of expressing one’s love is confounded by the further fear of expressing oneself in the face of an oppressive social climate.  In such a climate one often only knows little pieces of the truth, and one must guess the rest.  As viewers of the film, we are placed in the same situation of making guesses.  There are clearly cultural limits to what Rafie is able express in his story, so we have to make some further guesses.  It is quite possible Aziz and Atieh may have had premarital sex back in those old days and that Atieh had been pregnant at the time of Aziz's banishment.  This would explain why Atieh’s father had to marry his daughter off immediately. It would also mean that Touka is actually Aziz’s daughter.

As for what Aziz actually did with his lawyer, we can at least guess that Aziz sold his house to buy Reza’s freedom from jail, just as his father had done for him many years earlier. Speculating further and from the point of view of practical likelihoods, you might make the guess that Aziz, seeing that Atieh has no love for him, has headed back to Tehran alone.

But if you are more romantically fired, like Touka, you will see it another way.  Aziz, not having the fortitude to make a passionate expression of love, has left it up to Atieh to decide whether she truly wants him.  He has left the house (which he has just sold) and gone to the cabin to see if Atieh will come to him.  And, indeed, Atieh does come.  So it turns out that Atieh, more than Aziz, is the passionate fish that swims upstream.

For my taste, this film is a bit too roundabout and dispassionate.  What passion there is comes not from Aziz, but from the women, like Atieh and Touka.  This is not the only Iranian film I have seen in which the women have more emotional fortitude than the men.  They are the often the fearless lovers willing to take the risks of swimming against the current.
★★★

"About Elly" - Asghar Farhadi (2009)

When middle-class Iranians in Tehran have a holiday, they often like to escape their dry urban confines and trek up north to the Caspian seaside, where everything is cooler and greener. It’s also an opportunity for people to be a little more casual and relaxed in the open air. About Elly (Darbareye Elly, 2009) is a deceptively clever film about one such holiday visit, where events don’t go exactly as planned.  Over the course of the three-day weekend by the sea, the viewer is exposed to the fascinatingly complex social dynamics of people under stress.  In particular, this film has things to say about some of the nuances of Iranian culture under these circumstances (but, of course, much of what happens relates generally to how all of us interact with others).

The film was written and directed by Asghar Farhadi, whose subsequent production was the more famous and highly praised A Separation (2011), which won the US Oscar for Best Foreign Film.  Without diminishing the excellence of A Separation, however, I would say that About Elly is even better and is Farhadi’s best work so far.

The principal characters are a group of holiday travelers who are linked by old friendships formed years before at law school: 

• Amir and Sepideh are a married couple whose daughter, Moravid, is in kindergarten.
• Peyman and Shohreh are a second couple with a little boy and girl, Arash and Anita.
• Manouchehr and Naazy are a third couple.
• Ahmad, also an old friend in addition to being Naazy’s brother, has returned to visit Iran from Germany, where he recently went through a divorce.
• Elly is Moravid’s kindergarten teacher and has been invited along on the trip.

Sepideh is the vivacious social organizer and energizer of the group.  Without her, as she herself points out early on, the entire Caspian trip wouldn’t have happened.  One of her principal goals for the trip is to match up the now-available Ahmad with the pretty and modestly charming Elly, in the hopes that  romantic developments will ensue.  This match-making quickly becomes an open secret among the entourage, and whenever Elly is out of earshot, they all teasingly encourage Ahmad to make his move.

When they all arrive at the seaside villa, they are informed by the local caretaker that the villa they want is only available for one night and that there are probably no other nearby accommodations during this busy three-day holiday period.  It turns out that Sepideh had known beforehand that only one night was available, but she had not told the others about it, figuring that once they got up to the seaside they could find further accommodation for the other two days. She explains to them her reasoning: if she had told them all beforehand about the villa being available for only one night, she couldn’t have convinced them to set out on the trip in the first place.  In her mind, a little deception was needed to make things happen.  

Sepideh then pleads with the local caretaker woman in private that they really need a nice place, because Elly and Ahmad are on their honeymoon.  This little white lie moves the woman to make an extra effort to accommodate the group, and she arranges for an abandoned villa by the sea to be opened up to them.  But note that Sepideh’s little fibs are not just incidental to the story; indeed they constitute one of the major themes of About Elly – how do we convey the truth to others?  

In this connection I would offer the comment that whenever we are in any group, there is a shared understanding concerning issues of mutual concern.  We point to people and things in the world in front of us and discuss them, hoping that we understand each other, even though we know that we all have our own individual interpretations about these things.  Sometimes, in order to spur cooperative group activity in a certain direction, though, we may exaggerate or even innocently bend the literal truth about something.  This of course can be dangerous.  

The difficulty of conveying exactly what we mean is symbolized early on in the film when the holiday makers have fun playing the game of charades (pantomime game).  In that game the goal is to arrive at a shared meaning; but later on in the story words will be used to mislead – to try to generate separated, distinguished understandings of what has happened.

Anyway, returning to the film story, as the viewer watches the evolving socializing of the various people, he or she is likely to assume that the principal narrative line will be about the emerging relationship of Ahmad and Elly.  But on the second day of their outing (about thirty-five minutes into the film) the story takes a disruptive dramatic turn.  The three little children are playing by the beach, and Elly is asked to watch them while the other adults attend to their various activities and chores.  The viewer doesn’t see exactly what happens in this situation with Elly and the children, but it soon emerges that Arash has wandered out into the sea and is lost, and Elly is not around. There is now a desperate effort by find Arash in the sea and save him from drowning.  The panic-stricken group do just manage to rescue and revive the nearly-drowned Arash, but then the attention of the group turns to Elly.  Where is she?

The rest of the story is concerned with finding out where Elly is and what has happened to her. There are two conjectures. She may have drowned attempting to rescue Arash.  Or she may have abruptly left the group and gone back to Tehran without telling anyone. What makes the second conjecture plausible is that it is known by several group members that Elly had only wanted to stay one night at the seaside villa and then return to her infirm mother back home.  In addition, they wonder if the demure Elly had been offended by the boisterous teasing that had been the social undertone of the interactions on the trip.

Now the finger-pointing begins.  With Elly missing, a police investigation ensues to find out the truth of what happened to her.  What had begun in the film as an exercise in social bonding and harmonizing now dissolves into finding blame and searching for excuses to maintain individual innocence.  As they attempt to discover the truth about Elly, the group uncovers the many little lies that had been accumulating during their time together.  The lies were all understandable within their specific social contexts, but now they are exposed as violations of the truth.

Then the story takes another turn when a phone call to Elly’s home in Tehran uncovers the fact that Elly had a fiancé and that upon hearing news of Elly’s disappearance, the fiancé is now rushing to the Caspian area to investigate.  This discovery adds a further layer of guilt, because the group may now appear to have some moral taint in connection with having arranged an apparent romantic tryst between Ahmad and Elly.  Now the new issue becomes who among the group knew that Elly had a fiancé.  To protect themselves, it seems to some of them that further falsehoods may be necessary.

These three phases of the film thus reflect the shifting social dynamics among the group. 

1. In the first phase of the film, before Elly’s disappearance, the socializing was oriented around finding ways to bond and achieve social harmony.  This involves some minor falsehoods, but the goal was to achieve social unity.
2. The second phase covers the period after Elly’s disappearance and before the appearance of the fiancé.  Here the social dynamics are all involved with selfish concerns.  How can each of them establish his or her own innocence and separation from the group?
3. The third phase, after the arrival of the fiancé, sees the group members reluctantly working together again, this time to arrive at an agreed-upon story to tell the fiancé.

So the story moves from group-thinking –> selfish-thinking –> group thinking as it evolves through the three phases.  As the story progresses, all of the characters, including Elly and her fiancé, participate in deception in one form or another.  Most of these falsehoods, particularly those of Sepideh, were uttered in support of group harmony, not just for selfish reasons.  In fact the biggest liars in the story, Sepideh, Ahmad, Manouchehr, and Naazy, are the most selfless and compassionate.  They exude innocence.  The three characters most closely adhering to the literal truth, Amir, Shohreh, and Peyman, are in fact the most selfish people in the story.

This is what makes About Elly a fascinating tale.  We generally make knee-jerk affirmations about the importance of telling the truth and not lying.  But the story about truth is often more complicated in social situations.   When should one really utter the unvarnished truth?  That is a question that goes back at least as far as Plato’s Dialogues. Indeed the title, “About Elly”, is ironic, since the film is really “About Self” and how the selfish individual relates to a group.  The people in this story are mostly concerned with themselves and have little empathy for Elly [1].  

In About Elly, Farhadi has pulled off a tour de force that cinematically evokes aspects of Michelangelo Antonioni’s work, which also often involves complex ensemble acting performances. Indeed Farhadi remarked in a recent interview that earlier Italian filmmakers had a major influence on his development. Particularly comparable here is Antonioni’s L’Avventura (1960), which also begins with a group of people on a holiday that is disrupted with the early disappearance of what appeared to have been the major character. But while Antonioni’s focus in L’Avventura eventually centers on two remaining characters, Farhadi accomplished the more difficult feat of maintaining the narrative focus on the entire ensemble throughout About Elly.  It’s interesting that Farhadi manages to maintain the visual coherence of this collective interaction without using as much complicated moving-camera cinematography as was employed by Antonioni.  Unfortunately, Farhadi again resorts to shaky, hand-held camera framing in order to evoke emotional agitation.  To me this technique is distracting and ineffective.  On the other hand, I must admit that the in-the-water close-up cinematography used in the rescue of Arash scenes (how could this be done without agitated framing?) is convincing and very effective.

The acting performances in About Elly are uniformly superb.  Golshifteh Farhanai's performance in the role of Sepideh is particularly compelling, but all the principal characters have distinct personalities and associated social proclivities that are consistently and believably sustained throughout the film.  As the tension mounts during the various crises, each person responds in a way that drives the organic behaviour of the group forward.  This is what makes the ensemble performances work so well and achieve a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts.

Of course, there is a special Iranian flavor to what goes on in About Elly. As you would expect, there is the nuanced social backdrop concerning how men and women behave towards each other, particularly inside a traditional culture such as Iran’s that is also influenced by modernism. But there is also an even more specifically interesting Iranian cultural attitude that should be highlighted in this connection, and that concerns the cultural attitudes about literal truth.  In general, I would say that Iranians have a stronger-than-usual cultural inclination to avoid telling people what they don’t like to hear.  And this can often involve concealing the truth.  This tendency to prevaricate may be culturally reinforced by the Shia Islamic tradition of taqiyya, which sanctions hiding the truth in certain circumstances. The disposition to occasionally mislead is also probably supported by the famed Iranian tradition of social etiquette, known as taarof, which directs people to speak and act with the utmost courtesy.  One might argue about the proper boundaries and limits of such practices, but their sustained existence in Iranian cultural behaviour offers clear evidence that successful social interactions go beyond black-and-white utterances about what is true and what is good for the overall group or society.  In fact many times we don’t know exactly what is true, and mere adherence to a literal, but uncertain, truth about something may not lead to the most “positive” (an admittedly interpretation-dependent term) course of action.  Thus in the final verbal exchange that takes place in About Elly, Sepideh evidently lies one last time.  Was this final lie ultimately a selfish act?  You can reflect on what her reasons may have been for doing this and whether or not you agree with them.
★★★★

Notes:

1. The Farsi word in the title, ‘Dabareyeh’, means ‘concerning’ in English and has been translated as ‘about’ in the English version of the title.  But ‘about’ has additional connotations in English beyond ‘concerning’, including 'around' or 'nearby'.  This injects some extra suggestive meaning into the English form of the ironic title.
    

"Boutique" - Hamid Nematollah (2003)

Certainly love is the principal driver of artistic expression, and the film medium’s capability of immersing the viewer in the rich, particularized experiences of its subjects onscreen makes it ideally suited to telling stories of love.  Nevertheless, really good love stories in film are often hard to come by, presumably because each person’s love experience is personal and unique – watching someone else's romantic experiences may not relate much to one's own amorous dreams.  Indeed the lover’s dream world often follows no evident logic at all, so how is it possible to tell it's story? Nevertheless, sometimes a film can mysteriously conjure up that subjective dream world for the viewer to see and feel as his or her own.  Boutique (Butik, 2003), the debut outing of Iranian writer-director Hamid Nematollah, tells the story of Jahangir and Eti, two star-crossed young people living in the big city.  Actually, it’s Jahan’s story – the focalization is entirely on Jahangir, and everything is seen from his perspective.  But Jahan's story is mostly about Eti.

Jahan lives in a downtown apartment with three other equally impoverished bachelors all trying to make a go of it in modern Iran.  At least Jahan has a job, working as a clerk at a clothing outlet boutique in a shopping mall.  “Doc” is a long-ago dropout from medical studies who is apparently going to try his hand at street vending.  Reza is out of work and living off family support.  And Behzad is a fragile young man whose depression is being treated by regular sessions of electroshock (electroconvulsive) therapy.  (It’s amazing to me that electroshock therapy is still administered to thousands of people all around the world, even though so little is known about its neurological effects.) 

Very early on in the film, Jahan recognizes a young woman walking on the sidewalk and approaches her.  Apparently this pretty teenager, Eti, had earlier visited Jahan’s boutique and had made a deposit for a pair of slacks, but she had neglected to come and complete the transaction.  This is the first of what will be many encounters, almost all of which will be on the city streets.  Young people everywhere have the problem of finding places where they can be relatively alone.  In Iran this is particularly difficult, but sometimes there is the “safety in numbers” shelter that comes with the hustle and bustle of the crowded city streets.

Of course, there are other things that inhibit Jahan and Eti in their encounters.  One is the problem of their relative impoverishment.  Jahan is poor and basically has nothing – he and his flatmates sleep on the floor in sleeping bags in their unfurnished apartment.  Eti also has nothing: it is later revealed that she is a teenage runaway who has no source of income and is staying with “some friends”, who can’t even afford their own living quarters.  Jahan is warned by one of his more established friends, Davoud, that he shouldn’t spend time with a girl off the street like Eti.  And naturally, Eti is suspicious of any man who might be suspected of wanting to take advantage of her.  So Eti continually vacillates between first infectious flirtatiousness and then, as if she has to remind herself not to be too friendly to men that she doesn't know very well, sulking withdrawals and accusations that Jahan is being presumptuous.

It’s also not surprising that Eti’s effervescent and enthusiastic confidence is mixed with utter naivete – something we would naturally expect in an exuberant and unworldly young girl.  She tells Jahan that she wants to go abroad.  When Jahan asks her how she will live, she assures him that she will get a job as an entertainer, because she is pretty and has a good singing voice.  She tells him that she is now trying to raise 400,000 tomans to give to a “good” man whom she knows and who will take her to a foreign country.  Jahan doesn’t say much to that, but he knows that 400,000 tomans (about US$ 400) is an absurdly low amount of money for such planned travel.  Eti is clearly being taken for a ride by some sort of con man.

Jahan tries to help Eti, but he and his mates are all trying to make their way in a world that is driven by money, privilege, and corruption.  There is an enormous separation between rich and poor, between the corrupt elite and those struggling to find a job.  Jahan’s boutique is owned by Mr. Shapoori, a heroin-addicted autocrat who treats his employees like puppets.  In fact the heroin and opium drug culture is a major element of Jahan’s environment, with some of his friends heavily addicted and involved in the trade.  The money that they do manage to acquire comes from that segment of society.  In fact this cynical depiction of the influence of drugs in society made me somewhat surprised that the film was allowed to be shown in Iran.

Nevertheless, Jahan manages to give Eti the pair of slacks that she covets and manages to get her a little extra money, too.  To do this, he has to borrow money from the boutique’s till, and this costs him his job – that is, until he shows sufficient subservience to Shapoori so that he can get the job back.  Jahan also manages to find some money, through the benevolence of his friend, Davoud, to attend to Eti’s urgent need for some dental surgery.

All the while, Jahan and Eti are getting to know each other better.  As they go about town to attend to their various errands, Eti maintains a constant, vivacious chatter, telling Jahan about all about her passions.  Jahan smiles but retains his cool and upright cordiality. 

Is Eti sincerely interested in Jahan, or is she just using him in order to somehow secure her desired 400,000 tomans?  Maybe it could be a bit of both.  And how committed to Eti is Jahan, who always plays his hand pretty close to his vest?  In a climactic scene when she really needs him to rescue her, he is powerless and ineffective.  What should he have done?  What could he have done?  In real life, even those involved in such circumstances often cannot answer questions like that.  

The violent, downbeat ending of the film is perhaps too much to be expected and dramatically disappointing.  We always knew that the loathsome Shapoori would be there at the end to cause trouble and infect the innocent with his cynical debauchery.  Perhaps this kind of denouement attends to and merely reflects the generally fatalistic current of Iranian culture, but it represents an abandonment of the narrative progression that had come before.  In any case the ending does highlight the frustration and sense of powerlessness that many people with dreams feel in today’s world.

What ultimately makes Boutique an effective film, though, is not the external narrative structure, but the subtle and evolving relationships, both healthy and twisted, that are depicted in the film.  This is aided by the acting in Boutique, which is excellent throughout. Mohammad Reza Golzar is suitably sensitive and manly as Jahangir, and Reza Rooygari has a compelling presence as the insidious Shapoori. Of course, the principal relationship is that between Jahan and Eti, and the  development of their friendship, with all its tentativeness is the key to the story.  This works because of the superb performance in the role of Eti on the part of the beautiful Golshifteh Farahani (Bab'Aziz, 2005; Half Moon (Niwemang); 2006; Ali Santouri, 2007).  It is perhaps less due to Ms. Farahani’s technical acting skills and more a consequence of her own natural, vivacious manner and screen presence.  In any case the then twenty-year-old Golshifteh was recognized for her performance by winning the Best Actress award at the Three Continents Festival held in Nantes, France, that year.  More recently in January 2012, Golshifteh was in the news again when the Iranian government banned her from returning to her home country, because she had allowed a nude picture of herself to be published in Madame Le Figaro magazine to protest the restrictions on women in Iranian society.  She reported [1] at the time  that she was

“told by a Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guide official that Iran does not need any actors or artists. You may offer your artistic services somewhere else."

I hope for the sake of all the rest of us, especially for those Iranians who hold a more enlightened view, that somewhere soon she will be given the opportunity to grace the screen again with her presence. 

Overall, I recommend Boutique, a film that deserves more attention than it has so far received.
★★★

Notes:

1. Damien McElroy and Ahmad Vahdat, "Iranian Actress Banned from Homeland after Naked Magazine Shoot", The Telegraph, 18 January 2012, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/iran/9023031/Iranian-actress-banned-from-homeland-after-naked-magazine-shoot.html#.TxcCZb1_hsk.facebook.

"Bab’Aziz" - Nacer Khemir (2005)

In Nacer Khemir’s Bab’Aziz (2005), the red-headed and seemingly half-mad dervish observes:

“The people of this world are like the three butterflies in front of a candle’s flame.

The first one went closer and said, ‘I know about love’.

The second one touched the flame lightly with his wings and said, ‘I know how love’s fire can burn.’

The third one threw himself into the heart of the flame and was consumed.”

This is the kind of Sufi wisdom that Khemir tries to convey in his tale of an aged and blind Sufi dervish (different from the red-headed one), who travels across the desert sands with his young granddaughter in search of an epic gathering of Sufi practitioners said to take place once every thirty years. One might assume that such a journey through a picturesque landscape would provide a compelling narrative backbone of the tale we are watching. But this is not the case, and it points to the narrative shortcomings of the film. In fact that blind man’s journey is only a vehicle to relate four other stories that are told piecemeal and concurrently by various participants in the pilgrimage. Each of these stories is apparently supposed to reveal another side of the inscrutable Sufi way.

Khemir, a Tunisian-born artist, writer, and filmmaker residing in Paris, fashioned this film (the full title of which is Bab’Aziz - The Prince Who Contemplated His Soul) in an attempt to present to world audiences the mystical Sufi side of Islam – something markedly distinct from the image of fanatic dogmatism often appearing in the popular media. In Khemir’s words [1]:

“Sufism stands against all forms of fanaticism. Sufism is the Islam of the mystics; it is the tenderness of Islam. But in order to give a better definition, let me use this Sufi saying: ‘There are as many ways to God as the number of human beings on earth.’ This quote alone is a representation of the vision of Sufism. One could also say that Sufism is the pulsating heart of Islam.”

In pursuit of his expressed goal of presenting the mystery of Sufism, Khemir injected into the film’s dialogue poems and phrases drawn from ancient Sufi masters Rumi, Attar, Ibn Arabi, and Ibn Farid. Khemir also seems to have recruited a remarkably broad international team of Middle Eastern and European production and post-production collaborators, including contributions from Michelangelo Antonioni’s longtime screenplay collaborator, Tonino Guerra (L'Avventura, La Notte, L'Eclisse, Red Desert, Blow-Up, Zabriskie Point).

The story begins with the aged dervish, Bab’Aziz, and his 10-year-old granddaughter, Ishtar, managing to survive a fierce desert sandstorm and then resuming their trek across a vast, horizon-to-horizon desert of sand – the kind of desert image from your childhood dreams or from illustrations of the tales of the “Arabian Nights”. Such an evocative landscape signals to us that we are in for a tale of mystery and magic, parables and fables. In fact the setting seems so primitive and eternal that we feel that events must be taking place somewhere back in medieval times, although later on in the film there are occasional appearances of motorcycles, buses, and jet planes to remind us that the film’s actual setting is the present day.

As Bab’Aziz and Ishtar continue their trek, Ishtar asks her grandfather to continue to relate his apparently interrupted tale about a handsome young prince. But not long after Bab’Aziz resumes telling this tale and before he can finish it, the twosome encounter other travellers in the desert, and they have their stories to tell, too. As a consequence, most of the film is devoted to the telling of the four stories, which are:

1. Bab’Aziz’s tale: “The Prince Who Contemplated His Soul”.
2. Osman’s tale about his visions when he fell into a well.
3. Zaid’s tale about the psalmody contest.
4. Hassan’s tale about his twin brother.

Although each tale is beautifully photographed, and the viewer is enticed to follow along and piece the story fragments together, none of them really lives up to its promise as the visually poetic allegory that seems to have been suggested and that one hopes for.

Bab’Aziz’s tale.
The story that Bab’Aziz tells to Ishtar occupies a fair amount of screen time to tell, but there is not really much to the story. The handsome young prince is distracted from watching a performance of a dancing girl at his desert camp by the sight of a gazelle in the distance. Fascinated, the prince wanders out in search of the gazelle and does not return. After a lengthy search the prince is discovered sitting by a small pool and gazing as if in a trance at his reflection in the water. We are told that he is not admiring his image, but is in a meditative state, contemplating his own soul. At the end of this tale, the prince eventually wakes up from his revery and decides to abandon his royal estate and become a wandering dervish (leading some to speculate that this tale is really about Bab’Aziz’s own past).

Osman’s tale.
Osman, who is said to work as a “sand carrier”, is first encountered when he is rescued from having fallen into a public well. Afterwards, he tells how he came to fall into the well (he was fleeing a jealous husband) and what he saw at the bottom of the well (a palace full of beautiful women, including his beloved). His story if the oft-told tale of the man who cannot regain his lost paradise.

Zaid’s tale.
Zaid is an educated young man wearing a baseball cap whom Bab’Aziz and Ishtar encounter along the way, too. He tells his story about his participation in a master psalmody, or poetry-singing, competition. Zaid and the other contestants take turns singing out beautiful poetic phrases, and they are judged by a mysterious young woman, Nour (played by the mesmerisingly beautiful Golshifteh Farahani, who has also appeared in Boutique (2003), Half Moon (Niwemang, 2006), and Ali Santouri (Santoori, 2007). Zaid’s poetic rendering wins both the competition and the heart of Nour. But after a passionate encounter, she ultimately steals his clothing and disappears so she can go out in disguise and search for her lost father. This story seems like Osman’s tale of loss, but it has a happier conclusion.

Hassan’s tale.
Hassan’s story is the most mysterious and is even more fragmented than the others. He is first seen searching for a red dervish who, he says, murdered his twin brother, Hussein. Hassan is also seen briefly in Osman’s tale, where he is revealed to be a drunken libertine, the very opposite of his authentic and serious-minded brother. After some misadventures, Hassan eventually does happen onto the red dervish, and we even get a brief glimpse of the red dervish’s role in Hussein’s mysterious entry into the nether world of death. There is much (actually too much) left unsaid here, and Hassan’s own conversion into the dervish way of life is equally unmotivated.

Overall, I might say that Bab’Aziz - The Prince Who Contemplated His Soul is a film marked by pronounced strengths and weaknesses. On the positive side, one must acknowledge that the cinematography and some of the production values of the film are extraordinarily good. Veteran cinematographer Mahmoud Kalari, who has worked with many top Iranian filmmakers, presents a string of fantastic (and phantasmagoric) images of a dreamlike desert setting. It is my understanding that the filming in the desert was extremely difficult and that most of those desert camera setups could only be used once because of the unerasable tracks made by the actors in the pristine desert sand [1]. (This difficulty probably accounts for some of the awkward editing sequences, where visual continuity and orientation are sometimes not maintained.) Another visual treat, near the of the film, is the view of the appointed place for the Sufi gathering, which was shot in the historic Iranian city of Bam. Bam has a 2,000-year-old history dating back to the Parthian Empire, but many of its historic monuments were damaged by an earthquake in 2003, which occurred shortly after the Bab’Aziz filming was undertaken there.

Unfortunately, the virtues of the cinematography cannot make up for the serious narrative deficiencies in Bab’Aziz. None of the four told tales has a narrative aim or motivation. One could, I suppose, make the counterargument that these stories are supposed to be somewhat mysterious, but the fundamental problem is they are not sufficiently engaging. As a consequence, the viewer’s mind might wander, even in the midst of all that visual splendour.

There is one further positive aspect, though, that it worth mentioning. Although the film is mostly of men and about men, the women who appear in the film (very modestly attired) are memorably graceful and sonorous (yes, there is some singing). Of particular note are the enchanting Golshifteh Farahani, as Nour, and the namaki Maryam Hamid, as Ishtar.
★★½

Notes:

1. Chale Nafus, “Bab’aziz – the Prince Who Contemplated His Soul”, Austin Film Society, Austin, TX, USA, 2009, http://www.austinfilm.org/Page.aspx?pid=929.