“Pari” - Dariush Mehrjui (1995)

In the mid 1990s Dariush Mehrjui made three successive films (Sara, 1993, Pari 1995, and Leila, 1997), each focusing on an Iranian woman trying to find fulfillment in a society not normally attentive to a woman’s efforts towards self-realization. The first two films of this trilogy, Sara and Pari, were based on well-known works of Western literature and adapted to Iranian circumstances. In the case of Sara, which was based on Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, the adaptation was straightforward, since the Iranian social context matched well with the 19th century social environment described by Ibsen. But Pari, which was based on works by J. D. Salinger, was a more difficult stretch, and I would say not so successful. Even so, Pari stands (as does Salinger’s work in general) as an interesting attempt to deal with philosophical/spiritual struggles, and it deserves more than passing consideration.

Normally, I concentrate on a film’s own narrative, as it stands, and pay little attention to its original sources from other media.  However, in this case I will make some explicit comparisons with Salinger’s relevant stories – “Franny” (1955) [1], “Zooey” (1957) [2], and “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” (1948) [3].  Although there are necessary changes to fit Salinger’s stories into an appropriate Iranian context, it is surprising just how closely Mehrjui’s film matches up with Salinger’s work and in some places is almost a literal transcription.  Since Iran had no copyright relations with the United States, there were no contractual agreements made at the time of production.  Nevertheless, Salinger, who was always litigious about his intellectual property privileges, managed to have his lawyers block a planned screening of Pari  in the New York in 1998.

As useful background information for this work, it is worth pointing out that across the relatively sparse literary output over the course of Salinger’s life, many of his stories concern various experiences of the fictional Glass family over a period of years in mid-20th century New York City [4]. In particular, the family focus is on the Glass family’s seven precociously intellectual children, particularly (in descending orders of age) Seymour, Buddy, Zooey and Franny, all of whom appear in altered form in the film Pari.  The 1948 suicide of Seymour Glass, the oldest and most charismatically brilliant of the Glass children, is described in Salinger’s “A Perfect Day for Bananafish”, the story that launched Salinger to literary stardom.  Parts of this story, though in altered form and set later in time, are depicted in Pari.  But for the most part, Pari reflects the two stories, “Franny” and “Zooey”, which Salinger set close together in time in 1955.  Together, those two stories relate the development of Franny’s spiritual crisis, which was occasioned by her reading a 19th century book, The Way of a Pilgrim, which she found on  Seymour’s long unattended bookshelf.  The Way of a Pilgrim and its sequel, The Pilgrim Continues his Way, describe the spiritual journey of a wandering mendicant monk in Russia who finds spiritual bliss by ceaselessly repeating the Jesus Prayer ("Lord Jesus Christ have mercy on me") as a mantra.  Franny, who is about 21 years old, then has long discussions in this connection with her brother Zooey, who is four years older.  Although Seymour had died seven years earlier, considerable reference is made to his strong intellectual influence on both Zooey and Franny in those two stories.

Transferring a written fictional story into film often presents problems to the filmmaker, particularly in connection with how to present cinematically the thoughts of the characters that were described in prose in the original text.  In this respect Salinger’s prose would seem to offer  some advantages, since overt conversations dominate over internal monologues in his stories. But with Salinger, the long conversations are taken to the limit, and in his stories occupy almost the entire story space; there is very little depiction in the way of physical action or movement. Mehrjui does his best to depict as much of this conversational material as possible in cinematic action, but there are limits to what can be accomplished in this respect.  Another issue that had to be dealt with was that Salinger’s stories are anchored in the intellectual New York cultural milieu heavily influenced by its Jewish population [5]. Translating the wise-cracking New York social culture banter into an Iranian Islamic context was a real challenge, which turned out to be only partially met successfully.  Despite these difficulties, though, it is surprising to me to see just how faithful many of the scenes in Pari are to the Salinger’s original text.

In Pari, the principal characters are

• Pari (Salinger’s Franny) – played by Niki Karimi, who had the lead role of Sara in Mehrjui’s previous outing
• Dadashi (Salinger’s Zooey) – played by Ali Mosaffa
• Safa (Salinger’s Buddy) – played by Khosro Shakibai
• Assad (Salinger’s Seymour) – played by Khosro Shakibai

And the film narrative goes through four stages:

1. Pari’s Story (essentially Salinger’s “Franny”)
2. Dadashi’s Story (essentially the first part of Salinger’s “Zooey”)
3. Assad’s Story (a modified portion of Salinger’s “A Perfect Day for Bananafish”)
4. Pari and Dadashi

1.  Pari’s Story
The film begins with two scenes that are drawn from the story “Zooey” and can be understood within the conversational context in that story but appear to be quite mysterious and without explanation in Mehrjui’s film.  In the first such scene, Pari is shown in a swimming pool and being pushed down under the water by her companions (this was a dream that Franny relates in Salinger’s story).  In the second mysterious scene, Pari is shown entering an empty college classroom and obsessively filling the blackboard with philosophical epigrams, after which she erases the entire blackboard. This is also described in context in “Zooey”, but is totally unmotivated here in the film. 

Pari is then shown in her college, expressing intense dissatisfaction with the arrogance and pedantry of her college philosophy professor, who is lecturing the class on Khayyam and Rumi.  She seems to feel that her teachers are merely posturing and not penetrating to the ultimate truths of these great thinkers.  Fed up with what is going on around her in Tehran, she decides to take a bus to Isfahan and visit some family members and her fiancé there. Her fiancé meets her at the bus station and starts talking about his own intellectual endeavors at his university, which account Pari also finds boring and self-serving. They then go to a restaurant, and Pari tells her fiancé about the Sufi book she has been reading (this book is like The Way of the Pilgrim, but here it describes a wandering monk in Khorasan and his repetitive prayer makes reference to God, not Jesus).

The Sufi book that Pari has discovered has pointed her to a new way of conscious engagement with her surroundings that is entirely different from the academic detachment that she has found so dissatisfying and pseudointellectual at the university.  In fact the Sufi-inspired mantra-prayer technique is entirely distinct from any intellectual contemplation of God.  You don’t even have to believe in what you are doing; you are simply instructed to endlessly continue the repetitive chanting.  The argument goes that if one continues the practice, whether believing in it or not, one will be transformed into a sublime state of consciousness. The technique has similarities with the Brahmanic “Om”, Zen “No-Mind”, and Tibetan Buddhist chanting, which suggests that it has been rediscovered many times and in many places around the world. 

Pari tries to tell her fiancé how important her mantra-prayer has become to her and how it reflects truths from other religions, such as Buddhism, but her fiancé is dismissive and merely asks her, “do you really believe this stuff?”  Under increasing emotional stress, Pari rushes out to the restroom and eventually faints.  She is taken back home and after witnessing the death of an aged relative, decides to go back to Tehran.

2.  Dadashi’s Story
The film now cuts to Dadashi in Tehran, who is reading a long letter from his brother Safa.  In this scene there is an account from Safa's perspective of Assad’s mysterious suicide by self-immolation. Dadashi’s mother approaches him and asks him to see if he can straighten out Pari, whose spiritual crisis is now taken to be a nervous breakdown.

Dadashi goes ahead and finds Pari sleeping on the couch, and he launches into a long conversation with her about the books she has been reading.  In this sequence, Dadashi comes across as rather dogmatically overconfident, as he insists that Pari should surrender to God (Ali’s teaching), rather than succumbing to the arrogance of selfishly trying to find her salvation on her own and make her own judgments.   Pari is unconvinced by Dadashi’s rants and urges him to leave her alone.

3.  Assad’s Story
Dadashi now enters Assad’s old study and examines some of his brother’s old notebooks. The scene then moves to a depiction of Assad’s suicide some years earlier.  Assad in this sequence is shown to be generally benign and thoughtful, but he has apparently reached some irreversible level of philosophical despair.  He speaks cordially to small child that he meets and then quietly and deliberately arranges his self-immolation.

4.  Pari and Dadashi
Dadashi approaches Pari again, this time by calling her on the phone and pretending that he is Safa.  When Pari sees through that ruse, she runs away.  This sequence of the film then diverges from Salinger’s text, as Dadashi finds Pari and dramatically challenges her to burn herself alive as Assad had done.  The film closes with Pari acceptance of Dadashi’s retelling of Safa’s story that if one is dying on a hillside with his throat cut and a bunch of women walk by carrying jugs on their head, one should still be able to sit up and see how the women carry their jugs safely over the hill.

On the whole, Pari doesn’t manage to capture the charm of Salinger’s Franny and Zooey. For one thing, the Dadashi character is just a bit too pushy and arrogant in this depiction. The New York energy of Zooey fails to translate into an acceptable Iranian equivalent. Similarly, Niki Karimi’s Pari character is bit too intense and strained to gain a sympathetic audience here. And the intellectual repartee of the story doesn’t generally come across.

The first part of the film, though, which essentially shows Salinger’s "Franny” story, is more successful. Here the characteristic Salinger concern about phoniness and authenticity, and the inevitably accompanying awareness that an obsession about other peoples’ phoniness becomes, itself, an affectation, is reasonably well portrayed.

Another thing that I liked was Mehrjui’s ending to the film.  The film's closing story about the women jug bearers actually comes earlier in Salinger’s story “Zooey”, as something of a passing reflection on the part of Buddy (Safa in this film). In the movie, though, Merhjui has elevated this curious metaphor to a final image that stands for acceptance of, and ultimately embracing, life’s eternal mysteries. In this finally enlightening perspective, Pari’s ceaseless prayer is shown to be simply a way to maintain one’s meditative immersion in the immediacy and wonder of life, as it happens right in front of us all the time.

★★½

Notes:

1. J. D. Salinger, “Franny”, The New Yorker, January 1955.
2. J. D. Salinger, “Zooey”, The New Yorker, May 1957.
3. J. D. Salinger, "A Perfect Day for a Bananafish," The New Yorker, January 1948.
4. “Glass Family”, Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass_family (accessed May 17, 2013).
5. “History of Jews in New York City”, Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Jews_in_New_York_City (accessed May 16, 2013).
6. J. D. Salinger, Franny and Zooey, Penguin Books, 1964

“The Cycle” - Dariush Mehrjui (1978)

Dariush Mehrjui began working on The Cycle (Dayereh Mina, aka Mina Circle) in 1973, but he encountered opposition from the Iranian Ministry of Culture which held up production and public release of the film until 1978. In general, films of the social realism genre have always been rare in Iran, both during the Shah’s era before the Islamic Revolution, when this film was made, and afterwards, as well. Mehrjui had previously run into censorship problems for his productions of Gaav (The Cow, 1969) and Postchi (The Postman, 1972) on account of their bleak depictions of lower-class Iranian life. On this occasion, however, the opposition came specifically from the professional medical community, which was given a rather unflattering portrayal in the film, the subject matter of which concerns the corrupt practices surrounding the supply of blood needed for medical operations.

On one hand, The Cycle could be viewed as a specific portrayal of problems with how medical care was delivered in Iran.  But on the other, as I will discuss below, what transpired in the film serves as a metaphor for a generally pervasive cultural crisis that many Iranians feared was ruining their society.  The cast of the film featured Mehrjui regulars, Ezzatollah Entezami and Ali Nassirian, as well as Fourouzan, who was the reigning queen of the Iranian cinema at the time.  Together, they present a nuanced depiction of how the people lived together in a society simultaneously characterized by courtesy, dishonesty, and compromise.

• Ali (Saeed Kantarani) is a handsome, but impoverished, teenage boy who has brought his gravely ill father to Tehran in search of medical care.
• Ali’s father (Esmail Mohammadi) is suffering from some severe intestinal ailment.
• Dr. Sameri (Ezzatollah Entezami) runs for profit a blood bank that serves local hospitals.
• Esmail (Ali Nassirian) works in the maintenance and supplies section of the main hospital.
• Zahra (Fourouzan) is a nurse in the main hospital.
• Dr. Davoudzadeh (Bahman Fersi) is a principled doctor concerned about the tainted blood Sameri supplies to the hospital.

The ‘circle’ or ‘cycle’ suggested in the title is said to derive from a line of Sufi poet Hafiz, but it seems to me that it relates to the circles of deception that reinforce each other and draw people deeper and deeper into a corrupted social realm.  Invoking an analogy to the circles of Hell in Dante's Inferno, Ali progressively passes through roughly four levels of corruption as he “comes of age” with modern society.

1.  The Blood Bank
Ali and his father come to the big hospital in search of medical care, but it is after hours and they are not admitted.  However, outside on the street they meet Dr. Sameri, who tells them they can make some needed money by coming to his lab.  When they arrive there the next morning, they see that the lab pays anyone a small fee for donating their blood. The chaotic waiting room of the clinic is filled with peasants, drifters, and drug addicts who live off these payments. It is immediately evident that health safety is being compromised for the money – the donors, who giving their blood far too often, appear variously ill, drunk, and addicted to drugs.  But Ali sees that this is a way that he can make some money.  At this point Ali is still relatively innocent and getting paid for an honest transaction on his part at least.

2.  Ali Meets Zahra at the Hospital

The next day Ali and his father go to the hospital.  While his father is consulting a doctor, Ali wanders the halls and meets Zahra, a nurse who appears to be in her twenties but who takes a liking to the naive country boy, Ali.  In order to expedite the father’s prescribed “electrical” treatment, Zahra lies and tells the medical staff that the father is her relative.  Then she arranges for Ali to get a job in the hospital’s maintenance section by telling the managers that Ali is her relative.  Zahra also sneaks food from the hospital and passes it to Ali and his father camped outside the fence.

Ali now begins working with a maintenance staff member, Esmail, and the two of them are sent out to buy eggs and chickens for the hospital.  Even the experienced Esmail, though, is shocked to see the sight of the chicken factory massively killing little chicks, because, it is claimed, their selling price is fixed by the government and it is too expensive to feed them.  This is one of many small examples in the film depicting a dysfunctional social system.

That evening Ali sneaks over the fence and goes to the hospital looking for Zahra. When he finds her, she enlists his help moving a corpse into the basement. This experience makes Zahra tearful, and when Ali opportunistically makes his move, the vulnerable young woman succumbs to his embraces. This rare (for Iran) scene of amorous passion is very brief, but it is well done.  One could perhaps argue that this is another moment of compromise and corruption, but Zahra’s compromises are invariably humane and well-intentioned – they do not harm others.

3.  Operations at the Hospital
Meanwhile the earnest doctor Dr. Davoudzadeh is frustrated that the hospital is using tainted blood acquired from Sameri’s blood bank.  Sameri uses bribery to secure his contracts, and the only person with integrity and backbone to do something about it is Davoudzadeh.  He proposes that the hospital launch its own blood bank that would operate according to higher standards, and he presents his plan to hospital management.  But bureaucracy and inefficiency are rife throughout the system, and he has difficulty progressing with his plan.

Ali is now sent out with Esmail to sell hospital food to squatters and tramps hanging out in the city outskirts. This is not a charitable operation on the part of the hospital, but is instead an illegal operation on the part of the maintenance staff to pocket some extra money at the government-supported hospital’s expense. Nevertheless the operation serves a useful purpose. The hungry customers are destitute and only charged a pittance for a bowl or rice. By this time, though, Ali is becoming a hardened entrepreneur. When penniless peasants can’t come up with the 2-rial fee for the rice serving, he refuses to feed them.

4.  Ali’s Business
Although Ali is young, it is clear that he is becoming a hustler.  He now realizes that he can recruit the peasants he feeds and deliver them to Sameri’s blood bank.  So he sets himself in his own business.  Of course, many of the recruited peasants are drug addicts and unsuited for donating blood, but that doesn’t stand in Ali’s way.

Meanwhile Esmail sets up Ali’s father with a “borrowed” samovar from the hospital and gets him to operate a tea kiosk (with tea from the hospital) just outside the hospital fence.

Sameri now has more confidence in Ali and starts relying on him for more jobs. In fact Ali is so brash as to suggest a plot to sabotage Dr. Davoudzadeh’s rival blood bank by injecting it with corrupted blood that will kill some patients and thereby destroy his business.  Sameri is so impressed with such cold-blooded thinking that he offers Ali opportunities to join him in further black market operations.

Ali’s preoccupation with Sameri’s tasks is now keeping him away from his ill father’s side. When he returns to the hospital one time with an urgent delivery, he is informed of his father’s death, but seemingly unperturbed, he goes ahead and completes the delivery to the appropriate ward – he is all business these days.  Finally, when he arrives late for his father’s burial, Esmail gives Ali a beating for having neglected his filial duties.  But Ali stands back up and looks set to continue along the path he has chosen.

Although, as I mentioned above, the issues around profiteering off blood bank operations are undoubtedly common to many parts of the world, but the theme of The Cycle is more specifically focused on the perceived deterioration of Iranian society.  At this time of the mid-1970s, money was flowing into Iran from rising oil prices, and many concerned Iranians, like Mehrjui, felt that the import of modernism and money was leading to a rising tide of materialism.  Traditional values and the revered Iranian culture were being discarded as everyone scrambled to cash in.  The government had money, but people felt that it was not being distributed fairly and equitably.  Ali and the people around him were  symbols of the temptations associated with this moral decline.

The hospital doctors are not evil schemers, but they are shown as rather frivolous and somewhat irresponsible.  The hospital administrators are corrupt and have no real mind for the public welfare.  As with so many bureaucracies, each functionary did the least possible within the specified rules of the organization. 

Ali, himself, was not so much malicious as much as he was simply an amoral opportunist.  He learned quickly to take advantage of situations in order to serve his own needs.  This is how one got ahead in the modern world. 

But “The Cycle” is not a simple moral tirade demanding strict honesty.  It interestingly shows more subtle shades of how compromises are made.  Esmail and Zahra were involved in petty corruption, too, but it was only nominal.  In fact in many ways their rule-breaking actions provided useful services to those around them and represented contributions.  But they knew where to draw the line on truly immoral behaviour and were operating in accordance with an ethical compass that was unknown to Ali.

Many educated and concerned Iranians in the 1970s were worried about this apparent deterioration in Iranian cultural values, as symbolized in The Cycle, and they were optimistic that a political revolution would bring changes for the better.  Much like the social participants in the recent “Arab Spring”, they hoped that political change would bring about a more inclusive and socially civil society.  They are still waiting for that transformation.

★★★

“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 Tenants” - Dariush Mehrjui (1986)

Dariush Mehrjui, the dean of the Iranian New Wave, has long been popular with both critics and the wider Iranian public, with films that often touch on social issues (always a tricky topic area for Iranian filmmakers).  Although most of his films have been serious dramas, Mehrjui has also tried his hand at other genres, even comedies, as with The Tenants (Ejareh-Nesheenha, 1986) and Hamoun (1990).  It is often the case, however, that comedies can be culture-specific and don’t translate so easily across international boundaries.  Nevertheless, it must be acknowledged that inside Iran both of these Mehrjui films were wildly popular.  The Tenants, in particular, was a big hit and featured well-known Iranian actors, Akbi Abdi and Ezzatolah Entezami, who had earlier starred in Mehrjui’s Gaav (1969) and The Cycle (Dayereh Mina, 1978).

This film, I should point out, is not what I would call a clever satire, but more along the lines of a lowbrow burlesque, with lots of yelling, pratfalls, and general slapstick tomfoolery – the kind of material that would usually be aimed at the relatively unreflective portion of the filmgoing public and not the kind of output you would normally expect from the cinematically sophisticated likes of Mehrjui.  At any rate the kind of fare displayed in The Tenants is not for all tastes, and, in particular, it wasn’t for mine. Nevertheless despite the ridiculous shenanigans showcased here, there is, even in this case, some social commentary that may be of wider interest. 

The story of the film concerns the problems many people have in finding adequate housing in the big city.  Tehran, in particular, has long had an influx of people moving in from the provinces, which has created an endless housing problem – and along with it, an unscrupulous collection of swindlers seeking to take advantage.

The setting is a four-storey apartment building located on the outskirts of Tehran that was built in such a shabby way that it is already falling apart after only several years.  At the beginning of the film, the poor residents of this building have been hit with eviction notices, because the building is in such a need of major repairs.  It looks like they will all have to move out straightaway, but then things quickly get more complicated.  The issue turns out to be: who has title to the building?  Indeed the issue of ownership and the corrupting influence of private property and general material acquisitiveness is a subtext to the entire film.

The main figures in this tale are

• Abbas (played by Ezzatolah Entezami).  He is a middle-aged widower who occupies the ground-floor apartment with his mother and his younger brother and his wife.  Abbas works in a city meat shop, but he is also the manager of the apartment building on behalf of the offshore owners.  He wants to make money off the building by evicting the tenants and selling it.
• The Other Tenants.  There are three sets of tenants who occupy the apartments on the upper floors of the dilapidated building.  They learn that the owners and all their heirs have recently died in a disastrous accident overseas, meaning that the building has no legal heirs.  They are informed by some shady business advisors that they can consequently claim ownership of the building if the building is officially deemed to be “heir uncertain”.
• The Swindlers.  There are two competing, semi-gangster business operators who deal with real estate, but they are also engaged in all sorts of corrupt practices.  One of gangsters is Qolaam, who advises Abbas, and the other swindler is Baaqery, who advises the tenants.
• The Workers.  These are lower-class construction workers who are engaged at times to work on the building and try to fix it – or, it seems, to destroy it, depending on who employs them.

When the tenants learn that they can gain title to the building if they are judged to have made substantial improvements, they hire the workers to come in and hastily work on the building.  The tenants are not particularly interested in improving the building – they just want the building to show evidence of major modifications.  This is one of the main comedic elements, because the workers are essentially asked to partially wreck the place so that it appears to have been modified.

Abbas gets wind of the tenants plan and tries to stop them.  There are subsequently all sorts of back-and-forth operations in this regard, and I won’t recount them.  The major idea is that Abbas, the tenants, and the swindlers are all recklessly greedy in their efforts to out-maneuver each other and make money.

But here is where we can start to think of the film as something of a mad-cap allegory on greed, with the various groups in the film deemed to be representing five short-sighted sectors of Iranian society in general:

1. Abbas, the local boss here, would represent the ruling class – perhaps the ancien regime ruling class of Iranian society.  The fault here is their greed and lack of concern for the common good.

2. The "Engineer", Abbas’s brother and the original designer of the building, represents the technical elite.  He is not corrupt, but he washes his hands of responsibility and says he was just doing what he was told to do.

3. The tenants on the three floors of the building:

• Qandy (played by Akbar Abdi) represents the corrupt business class. His disabled brother, Saalek, represents the neglected needy sector of society who require more support.
• The Tavassoli family represents the educated middle class. Note that at one point in the film, Mr. Tavassoli is seen picking up a copy of Soren Kierkegaard’s double volume, Fear and Trembling and The Sickness Unto Death – the same book that would also be held momentarily by the title character in Hamoun.  Since Mehrjui was a philosophy major at UCLA in the US, this again would suggest some sort of self reference.
• The top-floor resident is a would-be opera singer and is shown to be something of an artistic buffoon.  His pretentious impracticality and generally irrelevant preoccupations suggest that he satirically presents the Iranian intellectual class.

4. The swindlers, the gangs of Baaqery and Qolaam, represent the corrupt but unavoidable insiders in society who undermine the activities of honest citizens.

5. The construction workers represent the working class and are generally portrayed in a sympathetic light.

All of these groups are narrowly focused on their own gains and are only out for themselves. Abbas's mother is something like a Greek chorus and represents a social conscience, as she frequently urges the others to be more honorable. So you can get the metaphorical idea: the edifice of Iranian society is seen to be falling apart because of the short-term, selfish perspectives of all participants. What is really needed is a change of heart – a common cause to support the social community in a cooperative spirit.

But at one point in the story there does appear to be a change of heart on the part of Abbas, which infects everyone else, too.  He invites everyone (all the other tenants and the workers, but not the swindlers) to his apartment for a feast.  Suddenly everyone forgets his or her selfish motivations and pitches in to make a traditional Iranian banquet, and there are several minutes devoted to the joyous and cooperative effort to produce tasty Iranian food.  (Showing the preparation of savory Iranian food is common to several Iranian films, including Sara (1992) and The Fish Fall in Love (2006)).  This moment of joyous cooperation is relatively short-lived, though, because soon the various parties are again greedily contesting for control of the rapidly disintegrating apartment building.

At the end of the film, some government officials show up and put a stop to the rambunctious contest among the tenants. The officials announce that since the building has been legally declared to be “heir uncertain”, the government is taking over title of the building. It will be put on auction and presumably be acquired by business interests that are looking to build a shopping center in the area. So it appears that all the efforts of all the tenants have been in vain.  But there is no evidence at the end that anything has been learned from this experience – in the closing shots, the tenants make remarks suggesting that their greedy instincts are unabated.  The vision of cooperation and a communal environment where selfish, private ownership is not the only focus was fleetingly felt, but it did not endure.
★★

“Sara” - Dariush Mehrjui (1992)

Sara (1992) is Dariush Mehrjui’s film based on Henrik Ibsen’s famous play, A Doll’s House (1879), but transferred into a contemporary Iranian setting.  There were two striking aspects to this film when I saw it.  The first is just how closely Mehrjui follows Ibsen’s story.  Usually when theatrical plays are transferred to film, there are considerable alterations made in order to accommodate the presumed requirements of the cinematic medium.  But here, and despite the transfer to Iranian surroundings, Mehrjui’s story is almost a literal transcription of Ibsen’s work.  (Although a peripheral character from Ibsen’s original play, Dr. Rank, has been removed from Mehrjui’s treatment,  this role is incidental to the events of the story, and the removal is, if anything, a slight improvement on the original.)  The second thing that immediately struck me about the film was just how well a virtually unaltered transcription of Ibsen’s story sits in and applies to its modern Iranian context.

Ibsen’s play relies more on verbosity than action, but it is nevertheless regarded as a landmark in helping to change European cultural attitudes concerning both women’s rights and the role of women in the family.  Mehrjui’s Sara transfers those concerns to the Iranian setting.  The story concerns a young married couple’s legal crisis and its ensuing implications.  Ibsen’s play, but not Merhuui’s film, is structured in three acts, and I will partition the following narrative description accordingly.

Act 1
Sara is a beautiful, attentive, and practical young wife whose husband, Hessam, has a life-threatening illness and needs immediate, costly overseas treatment to survive.  Sara manages to find the money for this treatment, and the action shifts forward three years, with the happily married couple celebrating Hessam’s promotion to vice president of his bank.

Sara then meets an old school friend, Sima, who is now a young widow and looking for a job at Hessam’s bank.  Sara confides to Sima that she secretly borrowed the money to pay for Hessam’s life-saving treatment and has been working slavishly ever since as a seamstress to pay off the loan.  We soon learn that Sara borrowed the money from a shifty bank employee, Goshtab, who just happens to have been a past suitor of Sima.  For a woman to have arranged a loan behind her husband’s bank, particularly a husband as financially fastidious as Hessam, it would be a scandal if it were revealed in any society, not to mention Iran.  So it’s important that this be kept a secret.  Anyway, when Sara goes to Goshtab to make her final loan repayment, Goshtab refuses to accept it and return her IOUs.  He has his own problem – he’s worried about losing his job, and he threatens to reveal her loan to Hessam unless she uses her influence to preserve his job status.  He further points out that Sara had forged her father’s signature to endorse the loan and that this is a criminal act that he could also reveal.  So the stage is set: Sara has a big problem and the future of her marriage is at stake.

Act 2
Sara is clearly frightened by Goshtab’s possible exposures and urges Hessam to save Goshtab’s job, but to no avail.  So after Goshtab is fired, he informs Sara that he has written a blackmailing letter to Hessam implicating not only his wife, but also Hessam, as bank manager, in a criminal activity.  The letter demands that Goshtab be not only rehired, but promoted, to boot. 

Now even more distressed than ever, Sara confesses everything to Sima and seeks her help.  Sima says she knows how to manipulate her old boyfriend and will try to turn him around.

Act 3
Though Sima does have influence over Goshtab, she decides to let things play out by themselves, and Sara is left alone at home to face the music. When Hessam does come home and doesn’t mention anything, Sara mistakenly believes that he is so generous that he has forgiven her for any transgressions.  But it turns out that Hessam was just too busy to read his mail that day.  The next evening, after now having read Goshtab’s threatening letter to blackmail him, Hessam confronts Sara with rage, saying,

“All my life the woman of my life, my love, was a liar and fake.  You never thought about me.  My dignity.”

He goes on to accuse her of adultery and telling her she is unfit to raise their child.  Sara is shattered by these accusations, but continues to cook and keep house like a good wife.

Now Sima comes over to Sara’s house with Goshtab in tow and with the news that she has indeed gotten Goshtab to withdraw his threats.  Hessam immediately forgives Sara for everything, but it’s too late.  She tells Hessam that her love for him is gone:

 “You’re right.  I’m not fit to raise a child.  I must first raise myself.  And that’s why I’m leaving you.” 

When Hessam protests that no man would sacrifice his honor just for the sake of love, Sara responds, “and yet women do it all the time.”  With that she takes her daughter and departs in a taxi to a new and unknown future.

As mentioned above, this story isn’t just another take on a conventional perspective on women’s rights (that is, the freedom to participate in public activities, which of course can be an issue in traditional socially conservative societies), but is instead more focused on a woman’s role inside a marriage relationship.  Is she really being treated as a partner?  And that question is as relevant today as it was in Ibsen's time.

The acting performances in Sara are all excellent, especially Niki Karimi, as Sara, and Khosrow Shakibai, as Goshtab. In such a talky film with almost exclusive dramatic focalization on the title role, Niki Karimi’s sensitive and energetic performance manages to sustain the viewer’s interest all the way along.  And for his part Khosra Shakibai, who had earlier starred in Mehrjui’s Hamoun (1990), has just the right anxious countenance and body language to portray the Goshtab character.

The narrative pace of the film is further supported by Mehrjui’s cinematography and editing. To break up the potential monotony of extended dialogues, Merhjui employs numerous point-of-view closeups and situates a number of these scenes on the street or in domestic courtyards.  He also intersperses among those sequences various tracking shots of Sara running about in the city streets and domestic scenes of Sara preparing dinners and looking after her home.  There are a couple of technical oddities, though.  On a number of occasions, a scene closes with a fade-out to red, rather than black.  This didn’t work for me here, but you may have a different reaction.  In addition, Merhjui has a number of on-axis camera dissolves within a scene.  This effect avoids the jar of a jump-cut, but it is still noticeable, and perhaps Merhjui felt this was necessary to connect his best takes. In any case, whether you are interested in Ibsen’s play or contemporary Iranian society, this film treatment is a success and worth seeing.
★★★

"Leila" - Dariush Mehrjui (1998)

Dariush Mehrjui, one of the great Iranian filmmakers, was among the first to draw international attention to Iranian cinema with his groundbreaking Gaav (1969). Leila (1998), perhaps his finest work, tells the story of the tensions that are brought to bear on a young newly married woman who discovers that she is infertile. This may not sound like a subject with universal dramatic appeal, but in fact the film is an extremely well-crafted exploration of the human psyche that goes beyond those particular circumstances.

In all of Mehrjui’s films there is a subtle tension between the outlook of the individual and the cultural norms of society – a tension which goes beyond the simple black-and-white dichotomy of a heroic individual struggling against selfish and materialistic social forces. Mehrjui’s skill in exploring the nuances of these tensions is what makes him a leading exponent of Existentialism in Film, and certainly Leila stands as one of his best. Note that for various social and psychological reasons that I won’t delve into here, the Existentialist film protagonist is usually a man (a notable exceptions is Antonioni's Red Desert), but in Leila it’s the feminine perspective that takes centre stage, with the script based on a story by a woman, Mahnaz Ansarian.

The entire story of Leila is depicted from her individual perspective, and it is presented as a subjective recollection of past events. There are no scenes from any objective narrator’s point of view. In the beginning of the film, Leila recounts her upper-class family's gathering involving the preparation of a shol-e-zard (a form of Persian pudding) in connection with a Shi’ite Moslem religious day commemorating the martyrdom of Imam Hussein. This five-minute opening scene can serve as a reminder to Westerners that the extended family is a dominant factor in all Iranian social life. It is at this feast that Leila captures a distant glimpse of a young man, Reza, that her brother has brought to the gathering. In voice-over Leila then quickly reveals she and Reza were married two months later – a jump in the narration that gives one the feeling of just how abrupt and business-like their courtship must have been. But in a series of brief scenes that follow, we soon see that this particular match was a stunning success – they are blissfully happy with each other and share a vital and caring relationship. It is also clear early on that both Leila and Reza are highly educated and live in a modern big-city milieu furnished with the latest electronic technology. They represent modern Iran.

But not long later, the central problem of the film is presented. For many Iranian marriages, it is expected that the wife will very soon become pregnant after the honeymoon. This doesn’t happen for Leila and Reza, and after visiting some medical clinics, they learn that Leila is infertile. Knowing how important it is in Iranian society for the wife to be a mother to the husband’s children, the self-effacing Leila humbly offers Reza the chance of divorcing her so that he can find someone to bear his children. Reza, a modern, educated Iranian, scoffs at such an idea, and tells Leila that he married her for herself, not for baby-making. They then set about exploring various medical options that might lead to successful childbirth. When those options are exhausted, they then consider adopting an orphan; but nothing works out. Throughout this period, Reza and Leila are seen as a loving couple, but from Leila’s voice-over narrative one can feel the increasing pressure that is being placed on her. The problem is her problem, and the entire extended family on Reza’s side wants to know every detail of their clinical and orphanage visits. This absence of privacy is typical in Iranian families and is part of the life there: everyone knows all your personal details.

At another outdoor family gathering, Reza’s mother takes Leila aside and tells her that she must consent to Reza’s having a second wife (permissible in Iran) in order to produce a male heir. The mother has four children, but only one son, Reza, and she feels that it is mandatory that Reza produce a son in order to continue the line. Although some reviewers have seen Reza’s mother as an evil witch, she is not presented in an unrealistic manner. True, she is insistent and conniving, but in a society where women have no overt power, one needs to learn other kinds of behaviour in order to get one’s way. Her weapon, which is sometimes all that an aging parent has left, is guilt, and she alternately scolds and wheedles Leila not to be selfish and to allow her husband, whom Leila claims to love, to gain what she claims he really wants: fatherhood of a son.

Later, Leila tells Reza about what his mother has said and wonders whether maybe she is right. But, again, Reza dismisses such an idea as ridiculous. He is a modern, educated man who loves his wife, and he will not have anything to do with backward polygamous practices. Nevertheless, Leila, who strives to be a good, loving Moslem, is affected by her mother-in-law's insistence and guiltily wonders if she, herself, is a selfish woman. She tells Reza that she will not stand in the way if he want to have a second wife.

As the story progresses, Leila’s mother-in-law continues to push her case, almost like Iago whispering into Othello’s ear, and tells her that Reza really does long for a son, but is afraid of offending Leila. Reza, for his part, insists that his mother is crazy and that he has defiantly rejected her proposals. But since we are only seeing the world through Leila’s eyes, we never see him stand up to his mother, Leila is only told about such things second-hand. But Reza’s mother is also telling Leila, second-hand, that Reza really does desperately want a son and wishes Leila would consent to his having a second wife. Whom is Leila to believe? She wants to believe Reza, but the increasing doubts about her self-worth and her desire to follow the path of righteousness pushes her in the mother-in-law’s direction.

Eventually the guilt-ridden Leila is convinced by her mother-in-law that if she really does love her husband, then she must insist that he go ahead and attend interviews with candidate second wives his mother has found for him. Of course, she is horrified by the thought of a second wife coming into her household, but she sees the entire process as something of a test of their love. She belives that she should make everything possible for Reza so that he can follow the path of his true happiness. If they are truly in love and they are willing to give up all for love, then everything should come out all right. This is the crux of the struggle in the film. Both Leila and Reza are striving to come to terms with both modern Western liberal thinking and traditional Iranian cultural practice that are frequently in conflict. When in doubt, Leila falls back on the conviction that she loves her husband, totally, and that she should be absolutely unselfish. As more and more pressure is placed on her, she is many times seen praying to God and asking for forgiveness. Reza, too, tries to accommodate the people around him in order to avoid stirring up trouble. In fact, this is what many modern people have to do in traditional societies -- after all, they cannot transform an entire society over night, can they? And, anyway, these moderns still usually have a strong feeling for the positive values that are part of their traditional culture. They do not want to reject their traditional culture entirely, but instead are looking for some sort of middle way.

So Reza, trying to follow the path of least resistance, agrees to see the candidate women, but he also tries to incorporate Leila into the process. He states that he will only marry a second woman if Leila approves the choice. Again the pressure is placed back on Leila, and it’s beginning to take its toll. Reza wants Leila to accompany him to the fiancé interview rendezvous, but Leila has to be dropped off nearby and must endure a humiliating and stressful wait while the interviews takes place without her. By now Leila’s only means of support come from her inner conviction that the must act selflessly and align herself with the will of God. Even when Reza’s sisters rally to her support and tell her to put an end to this second-wife operation, it is too late, and Leila is already too far down the track of her own obsession with selflessness. The sister-in-laws' supporting arguments are only directed towards Leila's selfish interests, and, anyway, Leila has become increasingly alienated from the idea of salvaging her diminished position in the family.

Finally, a suitable bride is found, and Leila cannot find it in her heart to disapprove. On the wedding night, Leila realises that she must sleep in the spare bedroom, and she finally breaks down and flees to her parents’ home. The next day Reza comes to Leila’s parental home and begs her to return. He informs them all that he was so distressed by her anguish that “he couldn’t do anything” that night (a fairly bold statement to appear in an Iranian film). He insists that he only took the second wife because that was what he thought Leila wanted: she had pushed him into it. But Leila is unmovable; the loving relationship they had is now gone forever.

In the final scenes, Leila recounts how Reza soon had a child, a daughter, by the second wife, but since there was no love in that relationship, Reza granted that women a divorce. At the end, he comes with his little two-year-old daughter to another family shol-e-zard feast for the martyrdom of Imam Hussein, hoping to somehow get Leila to come back to him. But for Leila, whose feeling for Reza is now mostly pity, their relationship is dead.

There are three themes that can be discerned in Leila, but most critics have only focussed on the first one. The other two themes, however, are what give the film its potency and artistic expression:

1. The first theme is the issue of the role of women in Iranian society. Women have no rights and are browbeaten over the course of their upbringing to see themselves as servants to their husbands. To a Western observer, the entire story seems outrageous. How could Reza consent to a second wife, if he claims to be a modern? Indeed, most Iranians also see the plot as bordering on the absurd. In fact, many Iranians reject the story as being so outlandish that they cannot engage with it. But I think this theme is merely a metaphor for the other two themes below.
2. The second theme is more general and concerns the difficulty that young people inevitably have (and this can apply anywhere) accommodating to the demands of society. In this sense, we can compare Leila to Elia Kazan’s Splendour in the Grass (1961), in which two young teenage lovers are almost driven mad by the conflicting pressures they feel in their Midwestern US society. In Leila, both Reza and Leila are trying to walk a tightrope that will enable them to have their own personal, romantic relationship and still live within the demanding and pervasive social context of Iranian society.
3. But it’s the third theme that I find most interesting and what ultimately makes the film profound: the theme of self-destructiveness, here on Leila’s part. Iranians have a word in Farsi, “ghahr”, which is difficult to translate precisely but refers to the tendency of psychological withdrawal from an associate who has committed some offense. Rather than becoming hostile when one is offended, the Iranian who is “ghahr” with someone withdraws from any further interaction. This withdrawal is not just the external manifestation of silence; it is an inner psychological withdrawal from the person who has offended – one shuts the door. People from all cultures have this tendency, but Iranians have developed and refined this kind of response more than others. In a sense, one might say that being ghahr may have some useful qualities, because it eliminates the chance of further abrasive interactions: fistfights are less likely to break out. But being ghahr is an act, not only of destroying a relationship with someone, but also of self-destruction. We withdraw to a privileged inner sanctum and are no longer able to engage in an unguarded, loving relationship with the other. In this film, we watch Leila’s relentless withdrawal, despite her sincere efforts to act in a loving way. This is the great tragedy.

Donato Totaro has remarked on the scenes in both Leila and Josef von Sternberg’s Morocco, in which the principal characters ripped off pearl necklaces that had been given to them. In both cases the rejection of these attractive ornaments signify a breaking away from roles that have been set out for them in order to pursue the lonely path of self-realisation. However, their two paths are not the same. In Morroco, Amy Jolly recklessly abandons everything else for true love. Leila, on the other hand, has abandoned even that.

A story like this cannot be told effectively without considerable artistic investment. The acting in the film is superb throughout. In particular, the luminous Leila Hatami, daughter of well-known Iranian film director, Ali Hatami, gives an outstanding performance in the title role. A hauntingly beautiful woman, she conveys vulnerability, tenderness, and emerging anxiety through the subtlest facial expressions. More generally, the fact that all the characters are realistically presented is what keeps this film, whose plot always teeters on the edge of unbelievability, absorbing all the way.

Because this story is entirely Leila’a narrative account, there are camera effects used to portray the psychological stress she is under. For example there are a great many close-up shots of Leila occupied with ordinary household activities. These include handling traditional artifacts, such as samovars, as well as more modern devices, such as cordless phones. These all give a focus and tempo for the world of practical activities in which she lives. Telephones are a metaphor for the relentless intrusive acts of her mother-in-law, who is constantly calling and demanding an update concerning the couple’s private life. Mehrjui frequently has red-tinted shots and fade-outs to red, instead of black, to convey the emotional distress (more effectively used here than in Sara, Mehrjui's 1992 film that is worth comparing to Leila). To present some of the most intrusive and jarring statements from her family members, as well as some of Leila’s own telling reflections, Merhjui breaks the “fourth wall” and has people speaking directly to the camera. This serves to remind us that what we are seeing is not documentary reality, but Leila’s heartbreaking story.
★★★½