"The Salesman" - Asghar Farhadi (2016)

Asghar Farhadi’s The Salesman (Forushande, 2016) is another dramatic tale of evolving marital disharmony that has almost become this Iranian writer-director’s trademark.  Similar to his previous films – such as Fireworks Wednesday (2006), About Elly (2009), A Separation (2011), and The Past (2013) – Farhadi presents in The Salesman a young middle-class couple whose relationship is subjected to a tragic, disruptive event.  What makes all those films particularly interesting is the way Farhadi presents multiple perspectives with respect to what is going on.   So what may seem to be clear-cut from one point of view may look entirely different when seen through a different contextual lens.  Although it takes awhile to get there, this multiple-viewpoint tableau comes to the fore in The Salesman, too.

In addition to, and related to, this multiple-viewpoint issue are social themes that often show up in Farhad’s films.  Some of them are particularly significant for the Iranian social context, but they can be appreciated by everyone.  Here are a few of them:

• Establishing and declaring what is "true".  When there are multiple perspectives, there are likely to be multiple interpretations concerning what is factually true.  In the physical world of nature, there are often statements that are either true or false.  But in the world of human sociality, there are overlapping social layers, each with its normative context, and we are all accustomed to seeing things from multiple vantage points.  Getting along in larger society, then, often means making some pretenses or obscuring some private information in order to obscure ethical conflicts that arise.  Thus we selectively offer some “edited” information to others in order to make things go smoothly.  Iranians, in particular, are often inclined to obligingly tell people what they think their audience wants to hear.  This issue is notably important in About Elly and A Separation, but it comes up in The Salesman, too.
   
• The importance of a private living space.  We are all aware of the distinction between public space and private space, which are governed by differing norms. In Iran this is very important.  Many Iranians greatly value the sanctity of their privates spaces, where they can act relatively freely and not be subjected to oppressive societal restrictions [1].  A violation of one’s private space can be felt as a personal and distressful affront.
   
• Maintaining face.  Although people treasure their private lives, they also want to be respected in the public space.  This can mean engaging in some form of social salesmanship in order to maintain their public image and not be subject to social ridicule. (It can also mean that people are deterred from going to the police when criminalized in order to avoid having their lives opened up to public inspection.)
   
• Revenge.  Vengeance is often a big issue with men, and losing face is one of the primary motivations for it.  Often the desired revenge is to humiliate and emasculate the offending party, thereby making that person suffer the horror of losing face.
   
• Forgiveness.  An alternative, but seldom seen, response to an offense is forgiveness. All religions commend acts of forgiveness, but how often do we see it unless the offending party humiliates himself by begging for forgiveness? 

The story of The Salesman concerns the events surrounding a young married couple, Emad (played by Shahab Hosseini) and Rana (Taraneh Alidoosti).  By day, Emad is a charismatic teacher of literature at a senior secondary school.  In the evenings, both Emad and Rana are actors in a theatrical company, which is currently engaged in rehearsing and performing Arthur Miller’s prize-winning play, Death of a Salesman (1949).  In the play, Emad plays the role of the ill-fated main character, Willy Loman, while Rana plays the role of Willy’s wife, Linda.  Throughout the film, Emad and Rana are sometimes shown engaged in their theatrical stage performances.  In the course of these presentations, we see how their dramatic personae give both of them masks that serve two seemingly conflicting purposes: 

1. to hide their true selves and present their public faces
2. to partially shield themselves so that they can express their true emotions as if  they were coming from someone else. 

The film’s narrative passes through four somewhat disjointed acts.

1.  Emad and Rana 
The film opens disturbingly with Emad and Rana in their apartment, which starts shaking violently.  What seems like an earthquake turns out to be a destabilized foundation caused by nearby construction equipment, but the results are no less ominous.  Their building nearly collapses, and Emad and Rana are forced to evacuate and look immediately for new living quarters.  All of this is presented very realistically by Farhadi, and it sets a tone about how one’s comfortable home can be suddenly disrupted by an external event.

Also shown are Emad and Rana’s activities, including their work on the locally-produced staging of Death of a Salesman.  One of the issues of staging such a play, by the way, is getting it past the restrictive government censors, who are always demanding scene cuts, and this is briefly depicted. 

One of their fellow actors in the play, Babak (Babak Karimi), arranges for Emad and Rana to get a newly available apartment, no easy task on short notice in Tehran.  The apartment’s previous tenant has left some of her personal belongings in a locked room, the inconvenience of which irritates Rana.  Emad, however, is more respectful of the woman’s private items and tries to mollify his wife. 

2.  An Intruder Comes
One day while waiting for Emad to come home, Rana hears the downstairs entry buzzer go off, and assuming it is Emad, she pushes the button allowing entry and unlocks the apartment front door.  Then she goes to take a shower.  What happens next is unclear, but we know that an intruder entered the apartment and assaulted Rana.  It will later be revealed that the previous tenant of the apartment they are now occupying was a prostitute who had many male clients.  When Emad comes home shortly thereafter he sees bloody footprints on the apartment staircase and learns that Rana was discovered by neighbors after the attack and taken to the hospital.

Rana is soon released, but it is clear that the attack has shattered her.  She doesn’t want to talk about it to Emad (Farhadi was probably limited in what he could portray anyway), and she seems dazed and confused.  Although Emad is solicitous, he seems more concerned about his own impotence in this matter than willing to attend to Rana’s agony.  In short order he begins to lose patience with her silent suffering.

3.  The Hunt for the Perpetrator
Now the focus of the narrative shifts over squarely on Emad. They are not going to go the police about the matter, assuming this would only bring more trouble upon themselves, so Emad sets about trying to find the culprit.  Rana says she cannot remember what happened or even what the assailant looked like, so Emad doesn’t have much to go on.  But he does discover some money, some keys, and a mobile phone that were left in haste by the assailant, and with these he starts trying to hunt him down.

This part of the film evolves more like a conventional detective story, with Emad bumbling away but gradually uncovering some clues.  He also appears to be becoming more obsessed with taking revenge as he starts get closer to catching someone.

4.  The Perpetrator Found
Eventually and after a number of improbable events, Emad does discover and trap Rana’s assailant.  He turns out not to be the person Emad originally suspected, but instead a very unexceptional and vulnerable individual (well portrayed by Farid Sajjadi Hosseini).  It is at this point that the viewer starts seeing the vengeance story line from multiple perspectives.  This is also the most interesting and moving part of the film.  Emad is unsure of what he wants at this point, but since he feels he, himself, was humiliated, he wants to subject the assailant to maximal humiliation.  This is the revenge mentality.  If a man loses face, he wants his enemy to lose even more face.

The final events are disturbing, and you are left at the end to reflect on the states of mind of Emad and Rana, as well as on the fate of their relationship and whether any forgiveness will be forthcoming.


In some ways The Salesman is more like Fireworks Wednesday than Farhadi’s subsequent films, and this is unfortunate [2].  About Elly, A Separation, and The Past had social fabrics that were more sophisticated and multilayered than what appears in The Salesman.  What we witness in this film is a decent man with respectable, civilized values who gradually and unwillingly, debases himself.  It can be painful to watch.

There are also some weaknesses to the film.  Babak appears to be a significant character over the first part of the film, and the viewer is given some information about him that seems likely to be important later.  But in the final parts of the film, Babak more or less disappears from sight, and that seems to leave a hole in the story.  In addition Rana is gradually overlooked as the film progresses.  Whether or not Emad sees her as “damaged goods”, he doesn’t seem to be much of a sympathetic partner.  Although some reviewers seem to empathize fully with Emad’s frustrations over Rana [3], I find Emad to be ultimately too self-obsessed, and this reduces my engagement with the film.  This is another aspect of The Salesman that harkens back to Fireworks Wednesday – focalized characters from whom we disengage.

Another problem is shaky hand-held camera work, particularly in the first half of the film, that is more than just bothersome. There seems to be little motivation to these movements, as if the camera operator were just wandering randomly about the set and trying to keep the principals in frame.  Presumably this jittery movement is supposed to induce emotional agitation, and it can be justified in some circumstances, such as when a building is collapsing.  But unfortunately the jerky camera is used in far too many situations in this film.  The camera movements here are not comparable to those of people like Antonioni and Mizoguchi, for whose films the camera movements actually enhance the psychological immersion of the viewer.  There are also fixed-frame closeups that should be filmed with a fixed camera, but are instead evidently hand-held.  All of these things call unnecessary attention to the camera work and reduce the viewer’s psychological involvement in the narrative. 

Farhadi’s earlier films also suffered from an over-use of jittery hand-held camera techniques, but this was significantly reduced in his preceding film, The Past.  That film had a different cinematographer, Mahmoud Kalari (he was also the cinematographer for A Separation).  For The Salesman Farhdi’s cinematographer was Hossein Jafarian, who had been the cinematographer for Fireworks Wednesday and About Elly. Whomever Farhadi uses as his cinematographer in his next film, I hope that he attends to more controlled and fluid camera usage.

Despite these shortcomings, Farhadi’s The Salesman is worth seeing, though no match for his sublime About Elly.  The Salesman does come together as it approaches the end, and the pacing and acting performances are first-rate. Especially effective is the use of Taraneh Alidoosti’s silent but expressive countenance in reaction shots to convey a mood, echoing a visual technique Farhadi used with her in Fireworks Wednesday and About Elly.  They all contribute to the film’s presentation of a gradual unraveling of a man we can understand and to whom we can relate. 

At Emad’s school where he taught literature, he was a respected role model who seemed to know what is right.  And at one point earlier in the film, Emad is traveling somewhere in a taxi cab with one of his students, and Emad is insulted by a self-righteous woman sitting next to him (taxis in Tehran usually take multiple fares and have them all sit together).  Afterwards, the student expresses his angry sympathy for his esteemed teacher in the face of the woman’s rude behavior.  But Emad takes the high road on this occasion and tells the student that we should forgive the woman – she probably had suffered from some earlier incident in a taxi that had ruined her civility.  This was the high-principled Emad talking, before he himself lost face and began to lose his bearings.  At the end he has become a salesman (of himself) who doesn’t believe in what he is selling.
★★★

Notes:

1. Hooman Majd, The Ayatollah Begs to Differ: The Paradox of Modern Iran, (2009), Anchor. 
2. Peter Bradshaw, “The Salesman review: Asghar Farhadi offers layers of Willy Loman”,  The Guardian, (21 May 2016).
3. Owen Gleiberman, “Cannes Film Review: ‘The Salesman’”, Variety, (20 May 2016).

“Through the Olive Trees” - Abbas Kiarostami (1994)

Abbas Kiarostami’s Through the Olive Trees (Zire Darakhatan Zeyton, 1994) was one of the veteran director’s films that first attracted international attention and elevated him to star status.  It was his third film – coming after Where Is the Friend's Home? (Khane-ye Doust Kodjast, 1987) and Life, and Nothing More... (Zendegi va Digar Hich, 1992) – that was shot in and around a rural village in northwestern Iran, Koker, that was the site of a devastating earthquake in 1990.  It was undoubtedly the earthquake, which killed 35,000-50,000 people and injured more than 100,000, that led Kiarostami to revisit Koker and to fashion films that considered what matters in life. These three films set in Koker are sometimes referred to as the “Koker Trilogy”, although Kiarostami, himself, apparently doesn’t consider them to be a trilogy [1].  In fact, though, the three Koker films are definitely linked, and Through the Olive Trees is a story associated with the making of Life, and Nothing More....

Kiarostami is famous for his distinctive cinematic style, which features static long takes, often lasting several minutes, as well as reflective, semi-documentary styled stories that sometimes explicitly self-reference the making of the film that is shown. This has attracted the fascination of some intellectually-oriented international film critics who see his work as examining or questioning the reality of what can be told [2].  But in my view Through the Olive Trees is not so much about the nature of reality as it is about personal engagement.  And that is where its charm lies.  I will try to elaborate on that below.

The story concerns the making of a film (evidently Life, and Nothing More...) in Koker after the earthquake disaster, and it opens with the actor who plays the director of the film to be shot  speaking directly to the camera about the open-call casting interviews he is conducting. Note that the role of the film director, whose name is never given but who presumably represents Kiarostami, is played by the only professional actor in this film, Mohamad Ali Keshavarz.  All the other roles are performed by nonprofessionals, as is customary in Kiarostami films. This includes not only the locals, who simply play themselves, but also members of Kiarostami’s own film crew, such as cinematographer Hossein Jafarian (Crimson Gold, 2003; Fireworks Wednesday 2006; About Elly, 2009; Gold and Copper, 2011) and assistant director Jafar Panahi. 

Following this opening statement to the film’s viewers, the film director turns around and begins scanning the faces of the assembled young ladies hoping to be chosen for a small role in the film.  He clearly has a picture in his mind of what he is looking for, as he briefly queries a few girls before ultimately choosing a young woman named  Tahereh Landanian. We soon learn, though, that Tahereh is somewhat stubborn and self-centered and thus not necessarily the kind of cooperative person who will take direction when the camera is running.  But the film director has his own intuition and has made his choice.

So the beginning of the film establishes the primary narrative thread: the director’s task of making a film in the earthquake-ravaged village, where most of survivors are now living in tents because their homes were destroyed.  For example the task of just creating the right setting of a normal home means having to gather potted plants from neighboring areas, and the director’s rigorously and energetic production manager, Mrs. Shiva, takes care of such details by getting some help from two local boys, Babek and Ahmed Ahmed-Poor (who we might recognize as the principal characters of Where Is the Friend's Home?). 

Getting the locals to act naturally is another problem, and the film director patiently persists through numerous retakes of a simple shot because his local actor stammers in front of women and so cannot utter his few simple lines to Tahereh. (The tediousness of watching these many retakes unconsciously highlights in the viewer’s mind the differences between spontaneous reality and  the artificiality of narrative retelling.)  The film director is finally persuaded to replace the actor with a backup local, Hossein, and so Mrs. Shiva drives away to fetch him.  As she drives back to the filming setup with Hossein in tow, she chats with the man, and this is the beginning of a fundamental shift in the story.  From now on the narrative focalization will primarily be on Hossein.

When they go ahead and reshoot the earlier scene now with Hossein, still another problem emerges to block progress.  It seems that Tahereh is familiar with Hossein and refuses to speak to him.  Hossein explains to the director that just before the earthquake he had proposed to Tahereh’s parents for her hand in marriage, but he had been refused because he was illiterate and didn’t own a house. Tahereh’s parents had perished in the earthquake, but Hossein's reissued proposal to the girl’s grandmother after the quake was also rejected.

But Hossein doesn’t give up.  He is patient and courteous but almost maniacally persistent in his attempts to win his beloved.  Hossein fell passionately in love with Tahereh just because he saw her reading a book one day and thereby knew that she was a well-groomed, literate young woman.  With absolutely no encouragement from the girl – she refuses to speak to him or look at him – the young man stubbornly perseveres in what seems like a hopeless quest.

We now start to get a feeling of what this film is ultimately about and how the two narrative threads, that of the director and that of Hossein, are linked.  The director, who is an observant and reflective sort of person, came to Koker to see how the earthquake had affected the people who lived there.  What he sees and encounters in his various conversations with the locals is that the people remain composed, kindly, and civilized, but the horrors of what has happened seem to have left them withdrawn and resigned to their fate.  They seem almost shell-shocked when they matter-of-factly mention to the director that their spouses and parents perished in the event. 

For example when the director talks to an elderly man named Bagheri who almost offhandedly remarks that his wife was killed in the event, he asks him if he intends to find another companion. No, that wouldn’t be right, Bagheri passively tells the director.  But the director urges him to embrace the life-world in front of him and to reconsider his position.
 

The film director sees that the bulk of the people he meets have stoically survived the quake, but they have become so withdrawn that they will likely miss out on what life further has to offer.  And this is where Hossein offers a contrast to this withdrawn passivity.  The young man is passionately committed to his romantic quest, almost irrationally so. But his passion for engagement is what seems to be lacking among the people around him.  It is this passion for life that the director sees in him and wants somehow to encourage.

Mrs. Shiva’s coercive persuasion manages to get Tahereh to recite her few lines to Hossein, and the filming of their scene is resumed. During the setup when Hossein and Tahereh are momentarily out of sight from the crew, Hossein continues to beseech the young woman to consider his proposal.  But she still refuses to speak to him or even look at him when she is not required to do so by the film script.  Hossein tells her that even though the grandmother has rejected him, he wants to know what she, herself, thinks.  Is it ‘yes’ or ‘no’?  But the girl doesn’t respond.

In some sense we might compare Tahereh’s non-responsiveness to Hossein’s entreaties to the perceived non-responsiveness of God to our prayers.  Just like Hossein, many of us have fashioned a love for God based on very little evidence.  We beg Him (or Her) to love us, or even to give us a sign, any sign, that He hears our pleas.  And when we don’t get any response, we still go on believing and loving Him.  We know He must be the perfect loving Being that we feel within our hearts has to be out there somewhere.  So, like Hossein, we don’t give up.
                   

After the first shot of the scene, Hossein, who also works for the film crew as a servant serves tea to everyone on the film set.  This is presented in a long and memorable 60-second moving-camera shot, with the tea tray always in closeup as Hossein moves about the set.  This was my favorite of the many well-executed long-take shots in this film.

Finally they get setup for the second shot of this sequence [3].  In the take Tahereh refuses to address Hossein as “Hossein Agha” (“Mr. Hossein") as the script required.  But Hossein, ever the gallant gentleman despite his lower-class status, sticks up for her reading, and the film director accepts the shots as a successful “wrap”. 

Now with their parts of the film finished, Hossein and Tahereh get ready with others to be driven back to their homes in a pickup truck.  There is some delay, though, and the impatient Tahereh sets off on foot, using a shortcut she knows about through the olive groves, to catch a minibus.  The film director, noticing her departure and the opportunity to encourage the one passionate local he has seen, suggests to Hossein that he also take that path home.

Hossein sets out in hot pursuit.  This is his last chance to be around the girl.  After he almost catches up with here, there is a four-minute sequence of alternating medium shots of the two of them – Tahereh silently walking ahead and Hossein respectfully following – showing him making his last desperate pleas. Also interested to see if she will ever respond, the film director watches them from a safe distance.  Finally Hossein despondently gives up and appears headed back to the pickup truck. But then he has a last-second, impulsive change of heart and again runs after her.

The final shot, which is the signal moment of the film and lingers in one’s memory long afterwards, lasts four minutes and shows Tahereh walking far away in the distance with Hossein in pursuit.  We finally only see the two of them as little more than little dots in the distance that have almost merged with the arboreal countryside landscape. It is difficult for the viewer to make it out because the principals are such tiny images, but it appears that Hossein catches up with her and perhaps there is some kind of engagement.  Hossein comes rushing back through the meadow toward the camera as the film ends.

There has been considerable commentary about that last shot and what it means.  Did Hossein finally make contact with his god(dess)?  Can we?  All we can be sure about is that the full, soulful engagement between two people is what the film director, Hossein, and we, are always looking for. 

★★★½

Notes:

1. Godfrey Cheshire, “Taste of Cherry”, The Criterion Collection, (31 May 1999).
2. Acquarello, “Through the Olive Trees: Life as Art…as Life”, Senses of Cinema,   (September 2000).
3. Interestingly, if, as indicated by the film clapperboard that is shown, this second shot is to come directly after the previous shot, then it suggests a jump cut will be needed.

"Gold and Copper" - Homayoun Assadian (2011)

Gold and Copper (Tala va Mes, 2011) is an Iranian film directed by Homayoun Assadian about a young married couple that must come to terms with a devastating personal tragedy. What distinguishes this particular work above others of its kind is the modern religious setting and perspective in which the story is told.  However, depending on your interpretations in this area, some of you may have different reactions to the film.

The film is well made, with excellent camera work, editing, and fine performances. The story proceeds through four phases, with the last act reaching a kind of problematic mental resolution that I will discuss below.

1.  Seyyed Reza Comes to Study in Tehran
The beginning of the film shows Seyyed Reza (played by Behrouz Shaibi), a young seminarian from Nishapur who has come to Tehran with his family to pursue advanced studies in theology under an eminent scholar.  He is accompanied by his wife, Zahra Sadat Moein (Negar Javaherian), and two young children – Atefeh, who is about seven years old, and Amir Ali, who is about one year old.

His title/name of “Seyyed” indicates that he is a descendent of the Prophet Muhammad, which gives him special distinction and allows him to wear a black amameh (turban), while all other mullahs and seminarians must wear white amamehs.  At the Tehran seminary he is welcomed as a promising scholar who has been a high achiever at his earlier schools.  When he is offered the opportunity to teach lower-level classes, he declines, saying that he wants to devote all his time to his studies.

When the family moves into their small apartment, Seyyed is troubled to observe that his hoped-for serene study environment may not be so quiet.  His elderly next door neighbour, Ms Azam, lives with her grownup grandchild, Aida, who has Down’s Syndrome and has the habit of playing loud music on her “boombox” portable audio player.

He commutes each day to the seminary with his friend and fellow seminary student, Hamid, who owns a pickup truck and supports himself by working as a free-lance “taxi trucker” (a common pursuit in Iranian big cities).  The contrast between the two is marked: Hamid is earthy and jocular while Seyyed is introverted and sensitive.  When they are driving in his truck, Hamid pleads with Seyyed to remove his amameh, because his clerical appearance will presumably scare away potential customers  – thereby alluding to the common apprehension that the mullahs interfere with the normal lives of the citizenry.

2.  A Tragic Situation Arises

Seyyed Reza’s home life is idyllic.  His wife Zahra is attractive, attentive, and totally devoted to her family. She also supports the family by spending time hand-weaving carpets at a loom in their apartment.  However, she starts suffering from episodes of double-vision, and then she finally collapses at home.  She is rushed to the hospital and held their for tests to be undertaken.  At the hospital a nurse named Sepideh looks scornfully at Seyyed’s clerical garments and ridicules him for probably having neglected his wife and not even having the guts to look her in the eye when they converse.  She derisively refers to him as an “akhund”, an old term for a mullah that modernists now often use to describe meddlesome, backward-thinking clergy.

The next day Seyyed learns from a rather detached, almost unfeeling, doctor that Zahra is probably suffering from multiple sclerosis (MS) a terminal degenerative disease that can lead to total paralysis. 

Seyyed is stunned by this news of his wife’s incurable condition and says to himself, “what will become of us?”  He now has to look after the two kids at home, a task for which he is totally unprepared.  He also has to take up the carpet-weaving work that Zahra had done.  Periodically he looks out of his window at the next door apartment and wonders what Ms. Azam’s life is like looking after her care-needy granddaughter. 

Still, he tries to attend his lectures.  Since he can’t find a babysitter for Amir, he has to take him to the seminary and listen from outside the classroom while holding the infant in his arms.   At one of these lectures, he hears the speaker say,

A kid was falling from the roof, and noone could do anything. One simple rural man who was there raised his head to the sky and said: “God, please save him by Yourself.” The kid stopped in the middle of the air.  People surrounded him and asked, “who are you?’ and “what miracle or power is it?” The old man was shocked.  He said,

“isn’t it normal? To whatever God told me, I said, ‘alright’. And whatever I tell God, God doesn’t say ‘no’”. 

He was just a simple rural man with no studies in philosophy. No knowledge of esoterism, nor a dervish of extreme austerity.  He just had done honestly everything he knew.

This is an example of some of the religious philosophy that underpins the story, and I will call this Sermon #1.  Here the lesson is for people not to engage in deep philosophical speculation; just do as you are told.

3.  Zahra at Home

Zahra is brought home, but she is crippled and miserable.  Crying out, she asks God to kill her so that she die with dignity.  Seyyed merely cautions her not to speak like that, because she will anger God.  After more of Zahra’s crying, Seyyed finally blows up at her.  He complains that her illness has interfered with his precious studies, “and you just whine”, he says. 

“You want to go [back] to Nishapur?  I take you tomorrow and leave you there.”

They do later make up, after Zahra apologises.  Gradually, though, Seyyed seems to be becoming more down-to-earth in connection with his interactions with Aida and others around him.

Later while Zahra is out walking on crutches, the haughty nurse Sepideh pays a personal visit to Seyyed. She had had some personal conversations with Zahra in the hospital and was emotionally affected by Zahra’s deteriorating condition. In particular, Sepideh was moved by Zahra’s belief that “there is happiness in appreciating the small things”. Before departing, Sepideh somewhat presumptiously instructs Seyyed to tell his wife that he loves her.

Back home, Zahra bravely suggests to Seyyed that the two kids will need a new mother to look after them. To her surprise and alarm, Seyyed answers that he has been thinking along the same lines.  When he detects her misgivings, Seyyed accuses her of being willing to leave him all alone to look after things.  Zahra acquiesces and can only glumly hope that the new wife will not be too glamorous.

4.  Conclusion
Seyyed has been diligently working on a hand-woven carpet that he has been contracted to supply. But he has trouble completing the task because of a worsening blurring condition in his own eyes. He delivers the carpet, but tells his contractor that he cannot continue with this kind of work for awhile.  He now has his own seriously deteriorating health problem to deal with.  So he decides to get away from it all for a bit and enlists Hamid to take his family to the countryside for a picnic.

On the outing Zahra invites Seyyed to read to her from the Quran like he used to. He obligingly picks up the Quran and, pretending to read what he cannot see because of his now blurred vision, apparently recites some lines from memory.  Then he tells her what Sepideh had instructed him to say: that he loves her.

In the final scene, Seyyed goes back to the seminary and listens from outside the classroom to another lecture (Sermon #2):

For a long time everyone has been looking for a key to heaven, a treasure or elixir.  They are searching for the secret to happiness in the wrong place. . . . The whole story can be summed up in one word [phrase]: call it a “key” or a “code”. . . . The Great God told Moses this code in one word.: Love for My sake, Hate for My sake.

When saying that the code for acceptance of all works is Velayat [the authority invested in the Prophet and the Ahl al-Bayt (his ordained representatives, such as the Imams)], it means that this loving is for God’s sake. It means whoever God loves, you love them, too. It means loving because of God, growing affection for God’s sake.  Not for superficial beauties, not even for your own heart. Just for God! . . . The more hardship you take for God, the higher your spiritual rank. 

“From the alchemy of love for Thee, my dusty face became glittering gold.  Yes, by the happiness of Thy grace, dust ought be gold.” (from poetry by Hafez)

With these words, the film ends, and we may take them as a final message for Seyyed Reza.  They are presumably presented to help Seyyed, and us, face life’s unfathomable mysteries.  In this connection I will offer three thematic lines of thought for your consideration:  

■ Love

One might first think that the overall message of the film is just to love no matter what.  But I will argue here that love (at least the way I think of it [1]) is not the focus. Assadian may have intended to have the film's principal message be love, but that is not what comes across.  Seyyed is an honest, well-meaning, and gentle soul, but he is not filled with love. He is benign and dutiful, but detached. We never get the feeling that he truly loves Zahra and deeply feels for her. He is more concerned with how things affect himself.  Even at the end of the film when he tells Zahra that he loves her, he seems to be saying this because he should say it, not because it comes from his heart.  Further evidence that the film's answer and main theme is not just love is given in Sermon #2, when the lecturer intones that the special code is “Love for My Sake, Hate for My Sake”.  Hate has equal place with love in that phrase.  

■ Submission to Authority

No, the real message of the film seems to be that one should act according to how one has been instructed to act by the religious authorities.  Follow the basic rules, and don't try to make your own interpretations of the sacred texts. Don’t engage in abstract philosophical speculation (Sermon #1), and also don’t consult your own heart (Sermon #2: “not even for your own heart.”). Just do as you are told.  Thus “Love for My Sake, Hate for My Sake” does not mean to embrace all with love; it means to love and hate according to instructions. The more you do that, the more points will be added to your score and the higher will be your "spiritual rank". Admittedly, this idea of submission to religious authority is common to many religions and has its attractions for many people around the world [2,3]. At the end of the film, Seyyed is shown to be servilely arranging the sandals that have been left outside the lecture room. He is showing his submission.

■ Copper and Gold

The film’s title refers to the medieval notion that alchemy could be used to magically transform copper into gold if one used the proper elixir.  In Sermon #2 reference is made to the idea that the code is like a magical elixir that can metaphorically transform a dusty face into gold.  But how in the larger human context should we take the idea of gold and copper?  Gold is all glitter and decorative; but because it is a "noble metal" that doesn't interact with other materials, it stands apart. Copper is the opposite – its properties make it usefully part of our human engagement with the world.  Seyyed was seen by everyone to be headed in the direction of gold, a treasure. He is striving for his own spiritual perfection, but he is detached. On the other hand, Zahra (brilliantly portrayed by Negar Javaherian) was compassionately engaged with her family and the world.  She was evidently seen as copper.  She served and loved with all her heart in whatever she did.  Gold and copper: which one do you prefer?

★★

Notes:

1. One might invoke the abstract love notion of agape, but I will not go into that here.
2. See the article by Mark Lilla about Michel Houellebecq’s recent novel, Soumission, that concerns this attractiveness in a modern context:
• Mark Lilla, “Slouching Towards Mecca”, The New York Review of Books, 1 April 2015.
3. Michel Houellebecq, Soumission, (2015), Paris: Flammarion.

"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.
    

“Chaharshanbe Suri” - Asghar Farhadi (2006)

Chaharshanbe Suri (Fireworks Wednesday, 2006) is an Iranian domestic drama directed by Asghar Farhadi that outlines the strains and emotional agonies of an urban couple in the course of a single day. It won the prize for best feature at the 42nd Chicago Film Festival in 2006. The title refers to the evening before the last Wednesday of the Iranian year, which traditionally sets off the Iranian New Year (“Nowrouz”) festivities that last for a few weeks. The activities on this night are part of the traditional Persian culture and predate the advent of Islam by at least two thousand years. Every year on that evening, Iranians set up fires on the streets all over the city, with boys eager to leap over them for the traditional good luck that it may bring. It is an evening full of brightly lit fires and firecrackers that boys tend to look forward to, and so it might compare a bit to the American Halloween.

On the morning of this day at the beginning of the film, an innocent young woman, Rouhi, who is engaged to be married later that week, gets a ride on the back of her fiance’s motorcycle to the cleaning agency where she works. Her assignment that day is to clean the apartment of a middle class couple, Morteza and Mojdeh, and it doesn’t taker her long to see that the couple are seriously quarreling. The rest of the film traces the marital struggles that this couple undergoes, as seen primarily from the eyes of Rouhi. The focalization is not exclusively on Rouhi, though, and the viewer sometimes views separate scenes from the perspectives of Morteza and Mojdeh.

The details of what lies behind the couple’s problems are revealed only gradually, through slow disclosure, and after awhile it becomes more clear that Mojdeh is jealous of her husband’s suspected infidelity with an unmarried beautician, Mrs. Simi, who lives and works in the next-door apartment. Rouhi, enthralled as she is with romantic dreams about her upcoming marital bliss, is appalled to see how Morteza and Mojdeh treat each other. Mojdeh is temperamental and obsessively bad-tempered towards her husband. Morteza, in turn, is abrupt, rude, and insensitive towards his wife’s worries, which he views as obsessive jealousy. It is not simply a case of bickering, but one of seething mutual hostility. Little by little, Rouhi finds herself getting involved in the machinations of this argument. She is lured by Mojdeh into visiting and spying on Mrs. Simi for an eyebrow trim. Subsequently she repeatedly and inadvertently makes innocent comments concerning what she has heard in separate conversations with Mrs. Simi, Morteza, and Mojdeh, and those comments are leapt upon by each of her interlocutors as suspicious evidence of potential malfeasance by someone else.

The basic problem, as it is in all societies East and West, is due to, or at least exacerbated by, the relatively restrictive stereotypical roles that are assigned to everyone in adult society. Husbands often expect their wives to play the role of the perfect self-sacrificing homemaker, while wives expect their husbands to attend to all of their wives' whims and perpetually to place their wives at the center of their attention. Because of the commonality of such situations everywhere, the basic social issues of role expectations and marital infidelity are virtually universal and apprehensible to everyone. But despite this universality, the film does not take on the fundamental and even more universal philosophical issues that have underlain some of the most profound Iranian cinematic works. After awhile, in fact, the viewer might begin to get a little impatient with the overwrought histrionics of the sparring married couple in this film. So it is something of a relief when Rouhi sometimes spends time in the company of the more benign and understanding Mrs. Simi. Mrs. Simi, we later learn, has her own personal difficulties, but she is able to see the positive side of all situations. The viewers’ sympathies are thus much more likely to lie with Rouhi and Mrs. Simi than with the discordant Morteza and Mojdeh. In the end there is a resolution of sorts to the problem, although the viewer may have his or her doubts.

The acting in Chaharshanbe Suri is good, though it occasionally borders on the theatrical. Taraneh Alidoosti, as the ingenue Rouhi, has a winning smile, but any character development on her part during the film is obscure, and she may be playing more for the camera than for the story. She does make a dramatic intervention that affects the relationship between Morteza and Mojdeh, but her motivations are not entirely clear. Hedye Tehrani, in the difficult role of Mojdeh and who also played in Ghobadi's Half Moon, manages to maintain a believably restrained intensity throughout. The mostly hand-held cinematography is reasonably smooth and exhibits the kind of visual creativity often required to make a film in urban Iran, with all the various restrictions that such a setting can entail. Peyman Yazdanian's music contributes to the melancholy mood of the story.

The significance of the title, “Chaharshanbe Suri”, to the thematic content is not very evident, other than to suggest the pyrotechnics on display between the married couple. But an interesting culture-specific detail is displayed on the occasion when Mojdeh steals Rouhi’s chador (full veil) in order to go spying on her husband in “disguise”. As a middle-class woman, Mojdeh normally wears “rusari” (modest clothing with head scarf) and apparently doesn’t even own a chador.

My only quarrel with the film is that while it lays bare the problems of marital life, it does not seem to come to a satisfying narrative resolution. There are suggestions at the close of the film that Rouhi may have to face her own difficulties in connection with what her husband will expect from her in the future, even though he is infatuated with her now. So what has Rouhi learned after the day’s experiences, and how might they prepare her for the future? At the end of the film, Rouhi is almost about to meddle one more time and spill the beans, thereby erasing her earlier benevolent intervention. What does that tell us? And what is the future of Morteza and Mojdeh? The seas are relatively calmed at the close of the film, but troubled waters probably lie ahead for everyone.
★★½

"Crimson Gold" - Jafar Panahi (2003)

Jafar Panahi, direct from the triumph of his brilliant The Circle (Dayereh, 2000) , next came up with Crimson Gold (Talaye Sorkh, 2003), which attracted considerable attention from its presentation at overseas film festivals. Although most films are ultimately collaborations on the part of many creators that should be judged collectively, in this case I see the film from two distinct perspectives. Panahi’s cinematography and mise-en-scène is extraordinarily inventive and fluid, an outstanding achievement, and by itself merits a rating of ★★★★. But Abbas Kiarostami’s screenplay is fundamentally defective and deserves a BOMB rating. So these two perspectives will be examined separately.

The story is based on a real incident and concerns a pizza delivery man, Hossain Emadeddin, who finds himself delivering pizza to swank customers in the upper-class north end of Tehran. After a few of these encounters, Hossain attempts an armed robbery of a ritzy jewelry store. But the attempt fails immediately, and Hossain kills the shop owner and them himself. The film begins with the botched robbery and suicide, and the rest of the film depicts an extended flashback of events that lead up to the fatal ending. Since we know immediately where the events subsequently shown are heading, we watch much of the film looking for clues concerning what were the causes that led to this tragedy.

We don’t really know much about the character Hossain, but it is notable that the non-professional actor who plays this role is also named Hossain Emadeddin, is also a real-life pizza delivery man, and is said to suffer from paranoid schizophrenia. As the film progresses, though, we learn that the character Hossain is about 43 years old, fought in the Iran-Iraq war, and, perhaps as a result of that experience, must take cortisone medication, which slows him down to a lethargic crawl and has caused him to undergo massive weight gain. The Hossain we see in the film, an overweight slug, is apparently not the man that he had once been. The flashback sequences that make up the film cover a few lengthy encounters, almost completely in real time, that are apparently supposed to provide us with the crucial events that led Hossain to his destruction.

1. Initially, Hossain’s buddy delivery man and intendant brother-in-law, Ali, shows Hossain a purse that he “found”, which contains a ring and a purchase receipt for a necklace costing about $75,000. They are so astounded by the price tag that they ride up to the elegant uptown jewelry store where the necklace was purchased in order to find out what the ring is worth. Upon arrival, though, the two scruffily dressed characters are denied admission to the posh interior, and Hossain seethes with indignation.
2. Hossain then delivers some pizzas to a wealthy person who turns out to be a former war comrade. It is painfully evident to both of them how comparatively inferior Hossain’s current circumstances are, and the customer awkwardly offers Hossain a big tip.
3. Hossain delivers pizzas to another north Tehran building where a dance party is in the process of being raided by the Iranian morality police. Clearly, you’re not allowed to have that kind of fun in modern day Iran. The rude and abusive manner in which the police manhandle everyone they see present a grim picture of a malignant social order. (In fact, we later see the same kind of oppressive police action applied even in Hossain's humble neighborhood.) In this instance of the party, Hossain is held in custody at the site during the all-night police raid. While he is waiting, he chats with a teenage policeman and finally offers everyone, police and those arrested alike, to share his now undeliverable pizzas.
4. Hossain, his fiancé, and Ali go back to the uptown jewelry store, this time with Hossain dressed in a Europan suit, which enables them to gain admission to the store. Hossain tries to play the role of the big spender, but actually anything costing more than a few hundred dollars is out of his price range. The sales people eventually suggest that the customers look for something downtown, and again Hossain quietly fumes with rage as they depart.
5. Hossain delivers pizza to a lavish uptown penthouse and gets invited inside by the agitated young resident who has just been dumped by his new girlfriend. The self-absorbed host, a recently returned expatriate from the US, confides to Hossain his alienation from the society he has rejoined, which he says is now unrecognizable and crazy. When the host gets interrupted by a phone call from the girl, Hossain wanders around the huge penthouse and surveys the luxury.

The final scene shows the very beginning of the botched jewelry store holdup, with the identical interior camera setup that was seen at the start of the film.

The problem with all this is that the five main scenes that come before the attempted heist do not lead anywhere, and they do not provide a basis on which to justify the culmination. There is no denouement, just some random slice-of-life scenes involving a poor, unfortunate man wandering around Tehran, followed by a violent and suicidal finale. True, we see a materially poor man observing people with wealth, but this kind of thing happens all the time -- there needs to be more motivation for the ultimate violence. Critics have praised the film for showing the wide gulf between rich and poor in Iran, which presumably provides the motivation, but this is a false reading. In fact, it is more instructive to compare Crimson Gold with Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Warum Läuft Herr R. Amok? (Why Does Mr. R. Run Amok?, 1970). In that German film a somewhat harassed and nagged householder drifts quietly through his unsatisfactory married life, until he finally bludgeons his wife to death with a candlestick holder at the end of the movie. In Fassbinder’s film, in contrast to Crimson Gold, there is a slow, admittedly boring, narrative build-up to the final violence. But there is indeed a progression. That progression does more or less help us understand what has happened to Herr R. Unfortunately, this is not the case with Crimson Gold. Yes, male pride and "face" are overemphasized in many cultures, but the events depicted in Crimson Gold are not sufficiently emasculating for most viewers to empathise with the final actions. Yes, Hossain is an unfortunate character, but he is too opaque. Western critics apparently project into his psyche their own demands and programs for social justice and human dignity.

But now let’s consider the positive side. We have seen outstanding handheld and moving vehicle camera work in Panahi’s earlier The Mirror and The Circle, but here he outdoes himself. In Crimson Gold, the long, fluid camera movements, always maintaining appropriate pictorial compositions and with very few cuts, make each scene come alive with dynamism and intimacy. There is one long conversation between Hossain and his fiancé while riding on his motorcycle that is exquisitely done. The long opening shot from inside the jewelry store seems to echo the camera work of Hou Hsiao-hsien. This is not like the static camera shots of Kiarostami, but instead features carefully orchestrated actions coming into and out of the frame during the course of the shot. All the while, the camera is engaged in a barely perceptible zoom-in movement.

In fact, each of the five slice-of-life scenes are so well laid-out, performed, and filmed, that they are interesting in their own right and provide their own justification for seeing the film. They each provide a little interaction in modern-day Tehran that holds the viewer’s interest as it plays out. But those scenes don’t collectively add up to anything. In fact, I might have accepted those five scenes on their own, if they had just been presented for what they are, or as individual observations of a dysfunctional society. One could possibly infer that the various scenes show an Iranian society whose various inequities may somehow lead eventually to an explosion. But in Crimson Gold, they are encapsulated as flashbacks to explain a murder-suicide. That’s what doesn’t work.

Even so, Panahi's talents are evident and bear watching in future releases.
★★½