"Chungking Express” - Wong Kar Wai (1994)

Hong Kong film director Wong Kar Wai (Wáng Jia-wèi) first attracted attention in the West with the release of his third film, Chungking Express (Cantonese: Chung Hing Sam Lam, which means “Chungking Jungle”; Mandarin: Chongqing Senlin) in 1994. It was actually made during a pause in the postproduction work of Ashes of Time (Dung Che Xai Duk), an elaborate Chinese Wuxia (martial-arts) costume film that had been started much earlier and was being made along somewhat more mainstream lines. Chungking Express, by contrast, represented a continuation and further development of Wong Kar Wai’s now-celebrated personal style of filmmaking, which had been evolving through his first two features, As Tears Go By (Wong Gok Ka Moon, 1988) and Days of Being Wild (A Fei Zheng Chuan, 1990). With each successive step in this progression, Wong’s narratives appear to be more aimless, more unstructured. The focus is more and more strictly on the psychological mood of the characters.

In Chungking Express, the narrative comprises two separate stories, told in sequence, about policemen working the beat in the vicinity of the Chungking Mansions, a famously seedy Hong Kong locale and gathering place for night people of all ethnicities. (Wong Kar Wai originally planned to have three stories, but wisely expanded the second and more compelling story of Chungking Express”, deferring presentation of the third story to his next film, Fallen Angels.) In some films, the backstory is minimal – we jump straight into the action without knowing much about the backgrounds of the principal characters. Here, it is just the opposite: the backstories of the two narratives are most significant foci of attention, and a considerable portion of each of the two stories is spent on melancholy reflections concerning the recent offscreen romantic breakups of the two cops.

In the first story, Takeshi Kaneshiro, who would later appear in Wong’s Fallen Angels (Duo Luo Tian Shi, 1995) and Zhang Yimou’s House of Flying Daggers (Shi Mian Mai Fu, 2004), is plainclothes cop He Zhiwu and is also known as “Cop 223". He hangs around a late night fast food stand, “The Midnight Express”, from where he calls up his answering service hoping that his girlfriend, May, who has just dumped him, has left a message. To provide some sort of structure to his now empty existence, he sets himself arbitrary tasks, such as strenuous jogging and eating daily doses of canned pineapple (May’s favourite). What we see are the outer manifestations of the man’s inner emotional wasteland. He figures that if she doesn’t come back to him in one month, by the time of his birthday, then it’s all over, and he will have to give up. Meanwhile Cop 223's melancholic reflections are interspersed with a separate and parallel set of noirish underworld scenes tracing the activities of a mysterious woman in a blonde wig, sunglasses, and wearing a trenchcoat (played by Taiwanese film star Brigitte Lin), who is organizing a big-time drug smuggling operation with some local Indians. Eventually, Cop 223's self-imposed time limit on his girlfriend elapses, and he resolves to fall in love with the next woman that he runs into. This turns out to be the mysterious blonde-bewigged drug smuggler, who has just been double-crossed by her co-conspirators and is running away from a deadly shootout. As it happens, 223 had already accidentally run into this women by accident 57 hours earlier (in story time) at the beginning of the film. This is one of Wong Kar Wai’s recurring themes: that of missed opportunities and connections. In many stories and films there is a fascination with the chance, lucky encounter, because we observe only the real encounters in our experience, not the missed ones. But in our imagination we ponder all the missed encounters and connections that might have taken place but did not. This is where Wong Kar Wai stories live – not in the physical world of action, but in the dreams and imaginations of his characters.

Thanks to 223’s self-absorbed persistence and the blonde woman’s weariness, the second chance encounter does make a connection, and they do go home together. But this is hardly a perfect match and nothing romantic ensues (although a final message left at his answering service makes us wonder). Both of these characters have their own particular problems and are lost in their own internal dreamworlds. The blonde woman passes out on the bed, and Cop 223 heads back to the fast-food “Midnight Express” counter, barely noticing a new employee there, Faye (who offers another one of those chance encounters and missed opportunities) who will figure prominently in the second story of the film.

Once Faye appears, the camera follows her narrative thread, and the second story begins. Faye, played by Cantonese pop singer Faye Wong, loves pop music, particularly “California Dreaming” by the Mommas and the Poppas. She becomes secretly attracted to another customer of the counter, not Cop 223, but the uniformed Cop 663, played by Tony Leung Chiu Wai, who had already appeared in the inscrutable coda of Days of Living Wild and who would become a Wong Kar Wai regular. Faye quietly eyes Cop 663 as he stops by the food counter every evening to pick up food for his airline stewardess girlfriend. But soon 663 is dumped by the girlfriend, just like Cop 223 had been. We then follow Cop 663 as he falls into his own externalizing of his romantic grieving, in this case talking by himself to various objects in his apartment that had somehow been associated with the departed girlfriend. Again, there is focus on loss and inconsolable loneliness. Just as with Cop 223, 663's life (and the screen we are watching) is now “filled” with absence and emptiness.

When a “good-bye” letter from 663's ex-girlfriend is later dropped off at the food counter, Faye discovers a key to his apartment inside. She pockets the key and begins taking afternoon sojourns while 663 is away on duty to this apartment, where she dreamily imagines what life would be like in that apartment with her secret love. But she needs to put her own feminine stamp on these living quarters and erase that of his former girlfriend. Soon she is piece-by-piece redesigning the whole apartment. Despite the obvious alterations, the grieving 663 is completely oblivious and goes on talking to new objects, such as a big Garfield doll that Faye has substituted for the ex-girlfriend’s teddy bear, as if they were simply altered forms of the old familiar objects. For him the objects, themselves, don’t matter; they are simply sounding boards for his interior monologues. Though ridiculous, these whimsical scenes have their peculiar charm and lighten the mood of the sometimes dolorous film.

There is one moment in the apartment that brings Faye to tears. While cleaning 663's bed one day during one of her secret visits, she discovers under his pillow a long hair from the ex-girlfriend. For the short-haired Faye this reminder of the “absent” presence in 663's emotional life is too much for her. For the most part Faye avoids expressing herself in words – in fact, she likes to fill her surroundings with loud rock music so that words are driven from her mind. But she does express herself by other gestures. By the end of the film, she has become an airline stewardess, herself, and is growing out her hair. A year later there is one final chance for an encounter between 663 and Faye, and this time, unusual for Wong Kar Wai, there is finally a real connection. The film ends on a note of promise, not of despair.

Wong Kar Wai’s cinematic style has increasingly fascinated cineastes, gathered industry awards, and attracted a loyal following, but it has also just as increasingly alienated casual filmgoers and has had diminishing success at the box office. Not surprisingly, there are several different critical takes (which are not mutually exclusive) on what Wong Kar Wai’s style amounts to.

1. Some critics see Wong Kar Wai as an Asian version of French “New-Wave” director Jean-Luc Godard, whose casual cinematic pastiches of the 1960s displayed an off-the-cuff attitude that also attracted a cult following.
2. Still other critics, influenced by postmodernist thinkers, see Wong Kar Wai as the natural evolutionary result of postmodernist developments.
3. Others feel that Wong’s work reflected the political anxieties at that time in connection with the Hong Kong handover to the Chinese government.
4. And, of course, many critics complain that his films have no plot whatsoever, just aimless mood-pieces that have been strung together without any plan. Indeed, although Wong’s background was in screenplay writing, Chungking Express was a further step in the direction of extemporaneous filmmaking.

But none of these perspectives really capture the essence of Wong Kar Wai. Though Godard and Wong are both frustrated romantics, their styles are quite different. Godard began creating films in the 1960s that were seat-of-the-pants cinematic essays on contemporary society. They were like visual magazine articles, filled with sly innuendo and cultural wisecracks. But these works had an emotional distance to them, too. They were visualized forms of text. Wong Kar Wai, on the other hand, has a much more consistent, expressionistic style. It is lushly romantic and captures the tensions and moods of nocturnal life in the big city, filled as it often is with existential loneliness. Superbly employing Chris Doyle’s adroit cinematography, Wong Kar Wai captures an essential aspect of big-city life: despite the crowded conditions and numerous encounters with people on the street, there are few opportunities for truly authentic, meaningful encounters. The presence of the crowds offer a constant reminder of the feelings of being cut-off from true human interaction. Wong Kar Wai captures this feeling perfectly in expressionistic fashion by visually exaggerating the crowded conditions and the feeling of close quarters – an effect that would become even more emphatic in his next film, Fallen Angels (1995). In addition, he visually explores the nature of human temporality, itself. With various stop-action sequences and smudge pixilations, including superposed multiple-speed action sequences, Wong Kar Wai hints at deeper and more direct temporal experiences than does Godard. As for both postmodernist cultural and political influences on Wong Kar Wai, I feel these are indirect, at best. Wong’s Existentialist style is simply a response to and a reflection on the modern urban life that is becoming almost universal, and this is not directly traceable to specific political and intellectual issues. His films, in fact, will endure longer than the postmodernist cultural critiques that have been applied to them.

Perhaps the most significant point to make concerns Wong Kar Wai’s unusual narrative structure, or lack thereof. In fact Wong’s films do have a narrative progression and are not simply aimless meanderings. They are internal journeys of the imagination and not so much identified by landmarks in the physical world. This is what makes his films fascinating cinematic experiences and takes them to a level closer to music than to text (which connects with the fact that theme music is essential to Wong’s films).

It’s interesting to compare the men versus the women in Chungking Express. There are four focalizations in the film: the woman in the blond wig, Cop 223, Faye, and Cop 663. We peer inside the thinking and feeling of the men, thanks to the interior monologues, but not similarly into the insides of the women. The women are only viewed from the outside and remain opaque and fascinatingly unpredictable. Apparently for Wong Kar Wai, women are eternally mysterious characters: enchanting, but perhaps ultimately unknowable. The only option for men, it seems is to surrender (as Cop 663 does at the end) to their unfathomable allure. The men, 223 and 663, on the other hand, are shown revealing their internal suffering and vulnerability. They are comprehensible, while the women are not. When 663 meets up with his ex-girlfriend again near the end of the film, he stoically presents a friendly, sympathetic smile. The girlfriend, though, seems cruelly unfeeling and invisible behind her disinterested smile. The difference in how we see the two is striking. Note that the two men are so obsessive about their own romantic misfortunes that they are strikingly unobservant of things happening around them. This is ironic, since the two oblivious and self-absorbed cops are supposed to be “watchers" and constantly on the lookout for threats to human safety. The two principal women, by contrast, are acutely observant of the smallest details around them. Faye, for example, notices a single feminine hair on the pillow, while 663 notices almost nothing. And we, the viewers, are observant watchers, too – of both the mysterious charm of the women and the existential loneliness of the men.
★★★½

“Café Transit” - Kambuzia Partovi (2005)

The Iranian film, Café Transit (also known as Border Café, 2005) describes the struggles of a recently widowed mother of two small children in her efforts to live on her own in a traditional male-dominated society. The write and director of the film, Kambuzia Partovi, had earlier written the screenplay for Jafar Panahi’s superb The Circle (Dayereh, 2000), which also covered the theme of women who cannot find a place for themselves within Iranian society. The collaborative association with Panahi continues with this film, because Panahi was the film editor for Café Transit.

The story begins with the young widow, Reyhan, attending to the shutting down of her deceased husband’s roadside “truck stop” café, which is located in western Iran near the Turkish border. According to traditional customs of the local society, she is now expected to marry and move in with her already-married brother-in-law, Nasser, but this is something she doesn’t want to do. Her own background (she comes from another region) does not follow this custom, and, besides, she doesn’t feel any love for Nasser. She prefers to remain an unmarried widow and carry on operating the café on her own. Nasser, however, sees it as his duty to look after his bereft sister-in-law. Gradually it becomes evident, though, that the issue for him is only secondarily a matter a compassion and more a matter of personal honor: he is concerned about losing face in the eyes of the other villagers.

Reyhan is polite and respectful at all times, but she is also determined. She decides to retain the services of her husband’s café assistant, Oujan, and redecorates the place to make it more attractive. The Farsi title of the film is Ghahveh Khaneh, which in English means simply “coffee house”, but here it refers to a kind of café that usually serves relatively simple food to an almost exclusively male patronage. The clientele for such cafés in this area are mostly truckers, many of them European, who are making the long run across Iran and Turkey to deliver goods to and from Europe. Many of these men live away from home for years doing this job, and when they learn that there is now a roadside café with the food and flavour of a “woman’s touch”, they soon flock to be her customers. Such a booming success comes as a further shock to the humiliated Nasser, who operates his own roadside café that is now losing customer’s to that of his sister-in-law.

Nasser increases the pressure on Reyhan to give in to his face-preserving demands, and he eventually turns to the local authorities in an effort to have her place shut down. Throughout all the pressure placed on her, Reyhan remains polite and respectful, but quietly resistant to his demands. Mindful of social restrictions about unaccompanied women appearing before men in public, she remains in the kitchen cooking, hidden from the view of the appreciative drivers who are not even aware that a woman is cooking their meals.

Two additional characters appear as the story proceeds, and they contribute to an external perspective on the events. One is a Greek truck driver, Zakario, who accidentally discovers that the cook of his tasty café meals is a woman, and he gradually becomes romantically attracted to her (despite very few face-to-face meetings). The other outsider is a homeless teenage Russian girl, Svieta, who has fled a war-torn area and is now hitching rides with drivers in hopes of reaching safety in a Western European country. After the penniless Svieta is dumped by a driver at Reyhan’s café, Reyhan offers her shelter and food, and then even employment as an assistant at the café.

Towards the end of the story, Nasser manages to get the authorities to shut down Reyhan’s café and force her in to his own home. But this is not the real end. At the close of the film, Reyhan leaves Nasser’s home, acquires another café directly across the road from Nasser’s café, and opens up for business. The woman has not been beaten.

Although most of the actors and actresses are not professionals and have been drawn from the local area, the two major characters are played by top Iranian performers. Nasser is played sympathetically by Parviz Parastui, one of the most distinguished Iranian actors. Reyhan is played by Fereshteh Sadre Orafaiy, who is the wife of director-writer Kambuzia Partovi. Her previous appearances in Jafar Panahi’s The White Balloon (Badkonake Sefid, 1995) and The Circle (Dayereh, 2000) had already displayed her considerable talents of projecting an inner tension. In all these films, she acts in a restrained and respectful manner, never displaying the pyrotechnical emotions that one might feel is justified on the basis of the depicted circumstances. And yet her expressive, compassionate face and gaze suggest her true feelings, and this has a powerful emotional effect.

The cinematography in Café Transit is generally effective in what must have been low-budget filming circumstances. On the other hand the narrative scheme of suggestively encapsulating the entire story as a set of flashbacks doesn’t work so well. The film actually begins with separate shots of Zachario and Svieta in the “present” recounting their memories of their time with Reyhan. For both of them, Reyhan had an evidently seminal effect on their lives and how they should live. Yet the significance and depth of their later interactions with Reyhan is not brought out effectively in the ensuing scenes. And the focalization does not come exclusively from Zachario and Svieta: there are many scenes which could not have been witnessed by those two. Overall, the viewer’s main focus of attention and interest is on the fate of Reyhan, herself.

It is possible that the always unpredictable Iranian censorship authorities (who, according to Partovi, excised several scenes from the film) played some havoc with the storytelling. We should be thankful, I suppose, that the censorship authorities allowed the film to be released at all. (More surprisingly, Café Transit turned out to be Iran’s official entry for the US Academy Awards.) Iranian filmmakers generally have to walk a delicate line when discussing the condition of women in their society. They are forbidden from explicitly criticizing the system, but they still often manage to get their points across implicitly. For example, in The Circle, which was banned in Iran, the women in focus are actually criminalized and excluded from society by an essentially corrupt social system. Café Transit, on the other hand, is more mild – the principal character, Reyhan, is severely constrained by society, but is not cast out of it, and she is presented as a favorable moral model in comparison to the “immoral” vagabond, Svieta.

But the Partovi story has its underlying theme, just the same. It would have been easy to present Nasser as an evil, corrupt character who was abusing Reyhan. But this is not what has been done. Nasser is presented as an ordinary, essentially moral, man who is trying to live by the codes of society. In the hearts of everyone of us there lies the bestial and the angelic. Social values are supposed to summon up the angelic within us. But here we see the ordinary man, Nasser, encouraged by social rules to follow in the footsteps of his thuggish brother, Karim. Just as in The Circle, the people executing society’s moral code are not depicted as inherently evil – they are not essentially corrupt. What is corrupt is any system that evokes the most bestial instincts of man to (a) reduce women to servitude, (b) harm the innocent, and (c) crush dissent and close off the free exchange of ideas.
★★★

“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

“Kheili Dour, Kheili Nazdik” - Reza Mirkarimi (2005)

Kheili Dour, Kheili Nazdik (So Close, So Far, also known as Too Close, Too Far Away, 2005) is an award-winning Iranian film directed by Reza Mirkarimi, who also produced and co-authored the work. It tells the story of a prominent neurosurgeon, played by Masoud Rayegany, whose life is suddenly jolted when he learns that his son is terminally ill.

The film begins a few days before the Iranian New Year’s (“Nowruz”) celebration with a depiction of various activities and involvements of Dr. Mahmoud Alem, an upper-class neurosurgeon in Tehran who is high enough up in his profession to be interviewed on television talk shows. In these episodes the viewer gradually gets a picture of Dr. Alem’s life through the process of slow disclosure. He drives a Mercedes-Benz, lodges thousand-dollar wagers over the Internet on horse races, and engages in dodgy, ethically-questionable schemes to charge exorbitant fees. In fact he is so absorbed in his own activities that he doesn’t have time to attend a party for his eighteen-year-old son, Saman. We also learn that he and wife are separated and that she lives in some other, apparently Western, country.

The Iranian Nowrouz is the major holiday of the year, and most Iranians go off on vacation during that time. Since his son is an enthusiastic amateur astronomer, Dr. Alem is planning to give Saman an expensive telescope. But Saman wants to use the holiday period to go off into the Iranian desert with a group of fellow astronomy enthusiasts in order to better observe the stars, and he departs on the trip before his father, preoccupied with his own activities, can give him the telescope. Just at this time, though, Dr. Alem is sent a clinical magnetic resonance imaging report about his son’s health, which indicates that his son is terminally ill with brain cancer. Though Saman is only experiencing occasional headaches and nausea now, it is evident to the doctor that his son has only weeks to live. As the crushing news weighs in on him, the doctor realizes that he has essentially neglected his son over the years. Though they have been living in the same house, they have for some time been far away from each other.

At this point, the day before Nowrouz, the doctor, wanting to be at his son’s side, sets off in his car and heads to the desert village of Mesr. Quickly, from the urban hustle and bustle of Iran – crowded with traffic jams, cell phones, digital cameras, and the Internet – the action now shifts to the road and the pace of life in the desolate and sparsely-populated desert. The journey is, of course, metaphorical, as the doctor seeks not only to find his son, but to find an authentic and meaningful connection with his son -- and perhaps to find himself, too.

The doctor meets a number of people along the way, but the key encounter is with the young woman doctor who attends to the village of Mesr. This woman, played by the soulfully beautiful Elham Hamidi, immediately recognizes and virtually idolizes the famous Dr. Alem, and then proceeds to describe the circumstances of life in the town. She informs him that his son has already left for a further remote location in the desert, which is an old mine that is almost a day’s drive away, and she convinces him to spend the night in the town and set out for the mine location the next morning. In the meantime Dr. Alem, steeped in Western science and technology, pensively observes the tradition-bound ways and beliefs of the country people. They seem to be happy, but the scope of their lives seems so limited, and he mentally scoffs at their superstitions and their blind faith in God’s will. The only thing that can save people, according to his compass, is science and skill, not fate or luck. But even that has its limits, and he realizes that he, himself, with all his technical training, can do nothing to save his own son.

Curiously, the film implies that cell phone towers seem to be set up in the remote regions of the eastern-central Iranian desert, because Dr. Alem manages to contact his son and girlfriend by using his mobile phone. Learning that his son has had a further seizure, he urgently sets out alone in his Mercedes early in the morning. But the Iranian desert is treacherous and subject to sudden, overwhelming sandstorms. The doctor eventually runs out of gas and is then trapped in his car as a sandstorm sweeps across the plain. Very early in the film, Alm had once coolly explained to a distressed mother that her terminally comatose son was better off dead and should be taken off life-support. He explained to her that it was like being trapped at the bottom of an abandoned well in the middle of the desert, with noone there to help you or communicate with you. Now Alem finds himself in the same intractable situation.

Dr. Alemhad originally rushed to the desert to be at his son’s side, even knowing that he could not save him; but now he is powerless even to save himself. What finally happens at the end of the film offers a narrative resolution, but is open to interpretation. Breathing his last breaths of oxygen-diminished air, Alem sees the overhead door of his Mercedes being opened by rescuers. Then he hears his son’s voice and sees his hand extended towards him. This could be interpreted in three different ways:

• It is a wishful dream, a hallucination. It is a final moment before his death when he realizes the lost opportunity of being a nurturing father to his son.
• His son and companions have found and saved him. He is restored to life in this physical world.
• He is joining his son, but in the next world, not in this world. The extended hand is the agency of the God that Alem doesn’t believe in.

According to all three interpretations, Alem has surrendered, but this surrender, to me, does not appear to coincide with enlightenment and spiritual fulfilment.

The title of the film, "Kheili Dour, Kheili Nazdik”, means “very far, very close” in English, but it also suggests the phrase, “so near and yet so far”. This theme is reflected in numerous circumstances in the film. Saman refers to it explicitly when describing over the phone to the woman doctor in Mesr the relative distances of various stars from Earth. But there are other symbolic references, as well. Alem is physically close to a number of people, including his son and the people of eastern Iran, and yet he is far away from them in spirit. The closing shot further evokes this theme.

The themes and issues of Kheili Dour, Kheili Nazdik suggest affinities with Majid Majidi’s work – particularly, Father (Pedar, 1996), The Color of Paradise (Rang-e Khoda, 1999), and The Willow Tree (Beed-e Majnoon, 2005) – as well as with Kieslowski’s Dekalog 1: ‘I am the Lord, thou shalt have no other gods before Me’ (1989). But I do not feel that Kheili Dour, Kheili Nazdik has matched the high standards of those works. Although it won the first prize at the 2005 Fajr Film Festival (the national Iranian film awards), it doesn’t quite resonate across the spiritual dimensions as those other films do.

The cinematography also took top honors at that festival, but it, too, has some limitations. While many of the shots, especially in the desert, are stunning and atmospheric, one gets the feeling that some of the framing and compositions were done merely for decorative purposes, rather than for narrative continuity. And the number and length of straight-on camera shots of Dr. Alem facing the camera seem more to interrupt the flow, rather than to evoke effectively the mental and emotional state of the character.

Nevertheless, there are many interesting images and moments in this film, which is a worthy continuation of the Iranian focus on “what it is all about”.
★★★

“His Girl Friday” - Howard Hawks (1940)

Director Howard Hawks was notable for his popular successes over a long career and across almost all film genres. Though he was championed by both French New Wave critics and by Andrew Sarris, Hawks’s so-called “no-nonsense” style often seems merely conventional, and in fact many of his lesser films are distinctly run-of-the-mill. So his status as one of the preeminent film auteurs remains somewhat enigmatic. One of his most enduringly popular films, the comedy His Girl Friday (1940), is exemplary of some of these contradictions.

The story of His Girl Friday was based on the popular Broadway play, The Front Page (1928), by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur, which had been successfully filmed in 1931 by Lewis Milestone and was reprised in 1974 by Billy Wilder. The single set for that original play was the Press Room near Chicago’s Criminal Courts building and jail. The plot describes how a Chicago newspaper reporter, Hildy Johnson, enters the pressroom announcing to his colleagues his intended retirement from journalism but is immediately lured back into the exciting world of journalistic scooping by an improbable series of events involving murder, a jailbreak, and corrupt politics.

Hawks’s film version, which starred Cary Grant, Rosalind Russell and Ralph Bellamy, suffers from a number of immediately apparent deficiencies, and yet it clearly surpasses the Milestone and Wilder versions and ranks among the most popular movies ever. The reasons for that may be due to Hawks, or perhaps simply to some good fortune of alternate casting.

The principal deficiencies of His Girl Friday are straightforward to enumerate:

• The film is very stagy, focused as it is on basically two locations, the newsroom of the Chicago Morning Star newspaper and the Chicago courthouse pressroom.
• The camera setups are conventional and relatively flat, with mostly constant-distance shots.
• The plot features ridiculously improbable events that go beyond all limits of plausibility.
• The acting is so tongue-in-cheek and smirky that one feels that many of the players are not taking their roles seriously. It all appears to be something of put-on. Cary Grant is particularly guilty here, but he manages to pull it off, because, well, he’s Cary Grant.

And yet despite these drawbacks, the film succeeds. Why?

• One of the attractions can be associated with Hawks’s characteristic focus on male “gang” camaraderie and bonding that underpins the action. This always played to good effect in his war films and gangster films. Here, it is the group-loyalty of the Chicago press corps that Hawks accentuates. And after all, that is the key seduction that lures both Hildy Johnson (Rosalind Russell) and her editor boss, Walter Burns (Cary Grant).
• A second positive feature of this film is the accentuated overlapping dialogue that intensifies the pace of the excited journalists chasing down the story. This broke with conventions in the sound era that tried to ensure that dialogue was distinct and clearly heard. In this case, some of the repartee involves people talking over each other, with one person starting up before another is finished. Hawks ensured that the dialogue was written so that even when the beginnings and endings of sentences might be lost in the noise, the dialogue could still be understood.
• A third, essentially crucial, feature of His Girl Friday, was Hawks’s decision to cast the role of Hildy Johnson as a woman, instead of the male casting for that role in the original play. This added an interesting gender-conflict feature to the journalism story, as well as contributing an underlying and parallel romantic element.
• But the most crucial feature of all to what makes the film a success is not due to Hawks; it is in spite of him. It is Rosalind Russell’s magnetic performance as Hildy Johnson that is the driving force behind the film’s success. Yet she was at least Hawsks’s ninth-choice for that role, after a number of leading actresses had all turned Hawks down for the part. But Russell proved to the key ingredient. Since Hawks allowed some ad-libbing on the set, Russell took advantage and filled out her role during the shooting. She later confessed that she even hired a writer to provide lines that could help her beef up her role.

Ultimately, this is Rosalind Russell’s film. She had the electricity, charm, and feminine magic to make the audience overlook all the cracks and corny inadequacies of the story and staging. And Hawks, at least, deserves the credit for finally giving her the space to do it.
★★★½