Reza Karimi, director of the Iranian film A Thousand Women Like Me, wrote:
A Thousand Women Like Me was a personal assertion. Cinema is basically the product of experience, and A Thousand Women Like Me is the product of thought, experience and an index of my capabilities up to this moment. Maybe there are flaws in the film, but I have decidedly overcome the shortcomings of the previous film. If I were to make a film one day that did not represent a step forward, that day would surely signal the end of my career.
Starring Niki Karimi, an international star from Iran (and a director herself), A Thousand Women Like Me tells the story of Sharzad (Karimi), a divorce attorney in Tehran who loses custody of her son following her divorce. The film is an indictment of the patriarchal custody laws in Iran, and ups the ante by having the main female character be a divorce attorney herself. She spends her days in court, fighting for her women clients to get access to their children. She now finds herself in the same situation, and experiences, first-hand, the unfairness, the helplessness, the absurdity of what her clients go through. Her son is 8 years old and is a diabetic. The father (played by the wonderful fox-faced Fariburz Arabnia) is lackadaisical about giving their son insulin shots, and refuses to admit that he is ever at fault, even when the son collapses in the schoolyard. Sharzad is allowed to see her son once a week, and her relationship with her ex-husband is still prickly and full of resentment. She shows up at his house, and ends up doing laundry for him, as he follows her around, giving her a hard time.
Sharzad, familiar with the loopholes in the law, starts to fight her own case before judges and intermediaries. If a father can be declared "incompetent", then, and only then, will custody be granted to the mother. She documents her son's illness, the hospital visits, the emergency room runs ... to no avail. The court remains immovable. She becomes desperate. She fears for her son's well-being. Her ex-husband is angry that she divorced him in the first place. He wants her to come home. Her family puts the pressure on her. She starts to see no way out. She kidnaps her son. They then are on the run. Police are looking for them. They sleep in her car. They hang out aimlessly in playgrounds. Her son cries that he misses his father. There are no villains here. Or, perhaps the villain is the culture itself, that devalues women to such a degree that it leaves them no recourse but to take the law into their own hands.
This is serious business. This is a movie about people's lives. Sharzad is an angry woman, even more angry as she gets nowhere with the legal system, and she refuses to play by rules that she thinks are unfair or dangerous. Her family freak out. They cannot get behind her latest choice. She ends up crashing with a friend, while she is on the run, and there are long scenes of the two of them talking, trying to figure out what she should do. These are quiet human scenes, well-written and well-played.
Was she right to take her son? Probably not. Not really. She pays for that choice. Maybe she was right, in an idealistic way, but we cannot live our ideals, at least not without consequences. She is not alone in the world. She has an ex-husband, she has sisters and a mother, all of whom are worried about her. She has abandoned her lucrative and important business. Her son is traumatized by being kidnapped. He loves his mother, but he is the real victim here. He loves his father, too. Director Reza Karimi does not make the mistake of painting everyone with a black-and-white brush. Besides, when you're talking about cultural and social issues with Iran, there really is no such thing as melodrama. Even in a simple film about adultery like Hemlock (my review here - another movie with Fariburz Arabnia as the male lead), the pressures of the culture at large elevate the sometimes shlocky material with true horror. It is difficult to not try to imagine yourself in such a situation, and how you would handle it. The best of Iran's films show the price paid by all members of society living under such an authoritarian regime. The husband is baffled by the course his life has taken. He is not a bad man, although careless with his son. He punishes his ex-wife by refusing access to their son. And perhaps he has some resentment that their son is a bit high-maintenance, being diabetic. All of that is in the script and in the performances.
Karimi is riveting. She has a face the camera loves, with big glimmering eyes, but her performance goes deeper than that. She operates at an increasing fever pitch of desperation and fear throughout the film, and it is to Karimi's credit that none of it goes "over the top". Instead, it is harrowing. You ache for her, for what she has lost, and what she is willing to give up.
Arabnia, the husband, also manages to portray levels of subtlety here that a lesser actor would have missed. Watch the scene where the two make their son's bed together. Filmed with cut-away shots of their hands, tucking in corners of the sheets, it calls to mind all of the everyday domesticity that both of them have forfeited and perhaps now miss. He is a cold man, kind of uncaring, but when push comes to shove, he does not want to harm anyone. Not for good, anyway. Divorce sucks, in any culture. She left HIM. He is pissed off and ashamed. But watch the scenes where he plays with his son, or chats with him on the phone. His situation is heartbreaking as well.
It's a ruthless film, willing to follow events to their logical conclusions to put the final nail in the coffin to the conversation about divorce and custody in Iran. The fantastic 1998 documentary Divorce, Iranian Style was groundbreaking in that regard. Divorce is very easy to receive in Iran, if you are a man. Islamic law declares that a man can divorce his wife at any time, merely by declaring it. She has no equivalent rights. She cannot do the same. The burden of proof is all on the woman, should she want a divorce, and custody is almost never granted to the woman. A Thousand Women Like Me, from 2000, is a good companion piece to Divorce, Iranian Style, with its intimate look at what goes on in Iranian divorce courts.
The subtitles in A Thousand Women Like Me are extremely annoying and very poorly done. White subtitles against white background, completely unreadable. It gets a bit better as the film goes on, but the first 20 minutes are terrible. You have to pick up on what is going on from the behavior alone, because the subtitles are invisible. It actually was a little bit interesting, once I realized the subtitles were a lost cause. Yes, it was annoying, but I accepted the situation and stuck with it, thinking, "Okay. Let me see how much I can 'get' just from watching behavior and body language."
The acting is good enough, the story clear enough, with or without subtitles. I reiterate that the subtitle situation does improve about 20 minutes in, but you have to put up with that first 20 minutes.
A Thousand Women Like Me is worth it.
Crimson Gold opens with a stick-up at a jewelry store. The camera is placed inside the dark store, and through its point of view we can see out onto the sunny street beyond. We see the little old jeweler come to unlock the door from the outside, we see the dark figure running up behind him, we see the flash of the gun as the jeweler is shoved inside, and then follows the stick-up, where the camera doesn't move once. The jeweler is pleading and fighting, the thief telling him to shut up and get the jewels, but half the time they are out of frame. They crash around, things fall down, we hear their dialogue, and occasionally they pass by the camera, but most often, they are not seen. As the theft plays out, a group of curious people gather outside on the sidewalk. A chic woman in a blue headscarf had tried to get into the jewelry store, found it locked, and, peeking in, saw what was going on and began to freak out, calling for help. People gather. A shot is fired from within. Chaos erupts on the street. Everyone knows the jeweler, they start to call out for him by name. The thief never says a word. He remains a dark lumbering presence, and it isn't until the final shot of the opening sequence when he, trapped in a situation he has started, stands with his back against the gate, his back against the crowd on the sidewalk, and holds the gun up to his temple.
It's an outstanding opening, and one of the best parts of it is that it sets up an expectation of what kind of movie we are about to see (jewelry heists, down-on-his-luck guy trying to make one big score, all the cliches), and while some of those cliches are in place, because it's Jafar Panahi directing (and the script is by Abbas Kiarostami) things don't quite look or feel the way they are "supposed" to. I love a movie that can do that, without being too clever or pleased with itself. Criminson Gold is not messing with convention. It has no opinion about the conventions of jewelry-heist movies. Or if it does, it's certainly not front and center.
One of the dangers in talking about Jafar Panahi's films is that you (the writer) can make it sound too earnest, missing entirely the feel and energy of the film. He's serious, sure, but not too serious. He's interested in other things entirely. So if I said: Crimson Gold is about the gap between the haves and have-nots in Tehran, you would be forgiven for suppressing a yawn and deciding to see another movie instead. But Panahi and Kiarostami, film geeks essentially, understand that cinema is a language, it is visual, and it is what one does with the pictures that tells the story.
And Crimson Gold is full of beautiful and strange pictures.
Hussein (the thief) is played by Hossain Emadeddin, a non-actor (this is his only credit), and Ebert mentions in his review that Emadeddin, in real life, is a paranoid schizophrenic. He doesn't play one here, but there is something dead and abstract about his face that is compelling, making you wonder all along if something might be wrong with this guy. He is mainly wordless. He rides around Tehran on his motorbike. He lives in a dingy one-room apartment. He delivers pizzas. And, on the side, he is a pickpocket with his friend Ali (played by Kamyar Sheisi), and they strategize on how to pick women who clearly have money in their purses. There is a whole psychology behind it. Not that Hussein seems interested in psychology. He is engaged to be married to Ali's sister. Ali is relieved. He was worried about his sister's chances of finding a husband.
All of this information is revealed in the early stages of the film, when it becomes clear that we are working backwards, to find out how it is that Hussein would end up with a gun to his head in a jewelry store. The two sit in a cafe talking, and an old man comes up to them and joins them. He gives them advice on thievery, a line he runs in too, and says that the best thiefs are the most honest. Don't knock someone over for pocket change, or the thrill of it. The motivation behind your robbery is what separates the men from the boys.
My expectations were still that we were about to see a movie about robbery. Maybe the old man will become a mentor ... maybe we will see the trial runs of big robberies ... maybe one will be busted ...
Crimson Gold doesn't go any of these predictable ways, and as the film meanders on, we submit to its pace, we submit to its journey. We give up our own. So much of life is about giving up your idea of what it should be, and accepting the reality before you. This is true of the characters in Crimson Gold (everyone: from the girlfriend, to the old guy in the cafe, to the people Hussein meets along the way) and it is true of the audience as well.
There are two standout scenes. They are long. They are complex, with many elements, many characters. Kiarostami's wicked wit and intelligence is here in spades. Throw out the rule-book. The opening jewelry-heist becomes a distant memory, and instead, we follow Hussein around on his delivery route, meeting different people along the way, and getting sucked into their various dramas.
The first standout scene takes place at a big fancy apartment building, and Hussein pulls up, with three pizzas to be delivered to the third floor. He is stopped at the front door by a cop, who tells him to go no further. Hussein lumpily argues. He is stubborn. "But I have pizzas to deliver." "That's none of your business. Just stand over there." It turns out there is a stakeout on the street, with plainclothes policemen and soldiers hanging out in all the bushes, and waiting in parked cars. There is a party going on on the third floor, you can hear the music pounding from above, and the cops are waiting for the partygoers to emerge, so they can haul them off to jail one by one. The cops won't let Hussein leave. He is now a witness, and may be important later. He is forced to stand against a wall and wait.
The scene unfolds, and each time you think it might be over, it unfolds some more. It takes surprising dips and alleys, it arrives at dead-ends, and then backs up and tried another way. The street is dark and shadowed, and the buildings have a greenish tinge from the streetlamps. It is beautifully shot, with Panahi's detailed eye for urban settings and strange beauty found in ordinary things. Kiarostami's script is incredible, too. A veiled woman drives up and tries to enter the building. The police stop her. She says that her daughter had called for her to come pick her up. The police try to make her phone up there on her cell phone and tell her daughter to come down. She refuses. She is told to sit in her car and wait. A couple drive up and get out, and the cops swarm around them. They haven't even said where they are going, perhaps they live on a different floor of the building, but the cops pull on them, demanding to know what they are doing. The couple fights back. (Everyone in the movie fights back, a little nod to the resilience of the Iranian people in the face of such nonsense.) "We haven't even gone in yet ..." The woman exclaims, "We're married!" A cop snorts, "What kind of a man goes out with his wife?" This is not said ironically, or as a joke. This is a serious sentiment, and opens up worlds of understanding of the sexual and moral culture of the place (explored in other Iranian films about marriage, like Hemlock, and Fireworks Wednesday, and The Day I Became a Woman.) These two HAVE to be up to no good, because what kind of a man goes out with his wife to a party? Kiarostami doesn't linger on this, though. All of this is shot from Hussein's point of view, waiting across the street, and looking on. Two young girls, chattering on their cell phones, emerge from the party and are hauled off to the waiting police van. The scene has to be about 20 minutes long.
Hussein doesn't have much to say during all of this, but he does strike up a conversation with a young soldier standing nearby. The soldier barely looks like he shaves yet. Hussein notices this and asks him how old he is. The soldier confesses he is 15. His brother died in "the war" (there's only one war to this generation of Iranians). We already know that Hussein is a veteran of that war, and he takes some kind of medication, it is never said what, but it has made him heavy and sluggish. The war hangs over this scene, its long memory, its reach. Hussein looks up at the window where the party is going on. The curtains are drawn, but you can see people dancing and whooping it up behind. The music is techno-pop with an Iranian flair. One woman who emerges and is immediately hauled off, protests: "There was a wedding - this is a family gathering." No matter. Men, women, dancing together? Alcohol probably? Hussein and the young soldier stare up at the gyrating silhouettes. Hussein asks the young boy, "Have you ever danced with a girl?" The young boy shakes his head no.
The streets are in shadow, long and green and murky, with one blinding red neon sign at the end of the alley. It is startlingly beautiful, yet disturbing as well. It has the feel of a hospital, or a prison, those institutional colors. Hussein knows he is going to be in trouble with his job, but he has three pizzas on the back of his motorbike, and it would be a shame to let them go to waste, so he offers a piece to the young soldier. The soldier refuses. Hussein thinks a bit, silently, and then walks over to the parked car where the police sergeant, walkie-talkie in hand, sits, and he offers him a piece of pizza. The sergeant tells him to go back against the wall like he is told. Hussein insists. "The pizza will go to waste. If you have a piece, then the others won't be afraid to have a piece. Come on." It is the most he has said in the entire film.
The sergeant gives in, he's hungry, and grabs some slices of pizza, which then embolden the others, who will probably be on this stakeout until dawn. Even the waiting veiled mother in the car takes a slice.
I have just described the action of the scene, but that can't begin to convey the slow creeping effectiveness of it, the dark colors, the sudden spurts of alarmed dialogue as the cops arrest yet another person, and above it all, the throbbing pounding Western music, seen as so threatening and yet so enticing.
The second standout scene is when Hussein delivers pizza to a penthouse apartment. A young slick guy in a tie answers the door. He is played by Pourang Nakhael, and it's rather amazing to me that this is his only credit, another testament to Jafar Panahi's well-known gift of working with non-actors. The slick guy is annoyed. He had ordered the pizzas because he had a girl over, he informed Hussein, but now the girl (and her tagalong friend) is gone, and he has no use for the pizzas anymore. He's more annoyed that he has been blown off by this girl. Hussein is impervious to such sophisticated problems. His character reminded me a lot of Victor, played by Pruitt Taylor Vince, in James Mangold's underrated film Heavy. Dominated and underestimated by others, mainly because of his weight, he has learned to suppress his desires, and his more unsavory feelings, like rage or insecurity. He seems passive. As Victor seems passive, overrun by his unbearable mother (played awesomely by Shelley Winters), and hopelessly in love with the beautiful new girl at the pizza place where he works (another interesting parallel with Crimson Gold). Both characters, Victor and Hussein, are in service jobs. They have to bite down their pride and their feeling that they deserve more ... because, perhaps, they have been mocked their whole lives. For being ugly, for being weird, whatever. And nobody wants to know that their pizza delivery guy has feelings, or a life.
Again, Kiarostami messes with our expectations of what the scene will be. We are led to think that it will be a short scene, a quick glimpse into an unheard-of world of echoey penthouses and guys with money to burn and girls who come over to ... do what, exactly? The slick rich guy doesn't want to pay for the pizzas, because it was the girls' idea anyway, but Hussein remains immovable, a dark stolid force, and so the rich guy goes to get the money. Hussein slowly peeks through the door. We see a wide white staircase, like the one in Notorious. We see gold leaf. We see Greek statues in little niches in the walls. Up until this point in the film, we are obviously aware that rich people exist, but since we are only in Hussein's small circle, we don't actually see how the better half lives. So the short glimpse we get, the wide black windows high high up, staring out at the glittering vast sprawl of Tehran, has a deep impact. It's devastating, actually.
One of the most boring things to do in life is to bitch and complain about not having enough money. It is not rich people's fault that they are fortunate. As a matter of fact, more often than not, their wealth comes from hard work and commitment. They have earned it. However, we are all only human, and by that point in the story of Crimson Gold, we feel that Hussein has perhaps earned the right to at least have a moment of thinking, "Dang. It's so unfair."
But that's just a projection. We don't know what Hussein thinks. We don't need to. Panahi, with the slow pan across that astounding room, tells us all we need to know.
Then: the scene takes a turn. The rich guy invites Hussein to come in and share the pizzas with him. Why not? The whole evening was a bust anyway. He had obviously hoped to get laid, or at least get something, and now what was he going to do? Hussein resists at first, but the rich guy is insistent, and finally, Hussein enters. What follows, a long scene between the two men, is not at all what you would imagine or conceive of - only Kiarostami could do it - and as they eat and talk, and the rich guy (who is about Hussein's age) complains about how "crazy" the country is (he grew up in the States and then got homesick, coming back to inhabit his parents' insanely palatial apartment), and offers Hussein liquor, and complains about the girl who came over, and complains about a lot of things, actually. There are many indictments of Iranian culture here, but since it is put into the mouth of this vaguely unsavory poor-little-rich-boy, the edge is taken off. Maybe he's complaining too much, I thought. But the knife of criticism is there, and yet another reason why Panahi so often gets into trouble.
The penthouse apartment that Panahi found is one of the most incredible sets I've ever seen in an Iranian film. It's three or four floors, with a huge roof-deck, a crazy swimming pool with posing black Greek statues, a grand piano, a strange empty room filled with red-and-white striped plush chairs (it looks like a conference room in a hotel), a full gym with weight machines and treadmills, a stainless steel giant refrigerator filled to the gills with liquor, a huge empty room containing only a Persian rug and a flat-screen TV as large as a cineplex movie screen ... It is a creepy empty house, screaming "nouveau riche", with no taste, no personality, just an accumulation of objects, unused, there for show.
It is alienating to the extreme. Hussein and the rich guy sit at the table, eating pizza, and smoking. The girl who had just left had apparently gotten her period in the rich guy's bathroom, leaving some blood splattered on the floor (calling to mind the horrifying scene from Neal Labute's Your Friends and Neighbors, with Jason Patrick freaking out on this girl because she dared to bleed on his sheets - awful. Awful.), and the rich guy is incensed at the blood on his pristine floor. It seems to him indicative of how "insane" Iran is. "You people don't know how to deal with a simple biological problem..." he fumes as he cleans it up.
Part of the joy of this film is, as I mentioned, succumbing to where IT wants to go, and letting go of the feeling that "shouldn't we be moving on now?" Sometimes, yes, it is good to "move on", but Crimson Gold is not about its plot. It is about the lonely people you meet in the night, the sudden moments of connection (or disconnection), and the vast abyss between what you want and what you have. The rich guy, naturally, has no respect for his wealth, although he uses it for all its worth. But he thinks Iran is crazy, and all the men there are crazy, and the women even crazier, and why can't people just relax and have a nice glass of wine without all this ... this ... craziness?
It reminded me of the section in Marjane Satrapi's graphic autobiographical novel Persepolis, when she returns to Iran in her late teens, after having lived abroad for a bit, and how strange it was, how alienating ... to have been free (even unsafely so, with sex and drugs and all of the "freedoms" of the West), and then to come back to a place that is obsessed with sex, to an unhealthy degree, OBSESSED ... which creates a warped culture where relationship and "ambiance" (as the rich guy says to Hussein) are impossible. "I don't drink to get drunk, like all you Iranian lunatics," says the rich guy - "I need ambiance, a sense of occasion ..."
Kiarostami is quite pointed here. It gives the scene real bite.
Hussein wanders through the house, touching things, staring at the excess, and even jumps in the pool at one point, fully clothed.
So how is it then that Hussein, lumpy pizza delivery guy, ends up in the jewelry store holding a gun to his own head?
The strange sneaking power of Crimson Gold is that its structure moves you quickly away from that violent opening, so that you are lulled into forgetting it. Panahi's signature shots of cars zipping through the freeways around Tehran, Hussein and Ali on his motorbike, careening in and out of traffic, carry us far far away, immediately, from what we know the outcome of the picture will be.
Context is key. By the end of the film, it is not that we know why he did it. We can guess why. The reasons and motivations are all there. It is that we have spent enough time with this man that we feel the loss. The loss of this good man. 3/4 of the way through, I remembered where we were going in Crimson Gold, I remembered that opener, and because the pace of the film, after that fevered beginning, is so slow and deliberate, we have time to mourn. We have time to realize a loss. This is Panahi's true gift. None of this is accidental.
I don't even know why I love Hussein, he is not a particularly lovable character, although I suspect it has something to do with the fact that he made the sergeant eat the piece of pizza first.
Geoffrey Cheshire, expert in Iranian cinema, writes a great piece about the release of Jafar Panahi.
It just so happens that Panahi's imprisonment coincided with the Cannes Film Festival (although there may be more than coincidence at work here). If the regime in Iran was hoping to send a hard-edged message to the international film community about their willingness to imprison one of their country's biggest stars, it certainly backfired. What with Abbas Kiarostami's already high profile (he, who was Panahi's mentor and collaborator on Panahi's first international success), and Kiarostami's closeness with Juliette Binoche (she who was featured on the Cannes 2010 poster), not to mention his own film, Certified Copy, premiering at Cannes, and starring, among other actresses, Binoche - Panahi's imprisonment was bound to take center stage at the Festival. Panahi had been invited to sit on the Jury, and when he could not attend, a chair was left open for him, throughout the proceedings with his name on it, a potent and constant reminder of what was going on in Iran. Panahi's presence haunted Cannes. Kiarostami made statements. Binoche made statements. Everyone made statements. Binoche won Best Actress at Cannes for her role in Kiarostami's film, and held up a sign saying "JAFAR PANAHI" when she won, stating that she hoped he would be able to attend next year.
This is one of those instances when the "klieg-light" response to injustice, especially towards a fellow artist, has paid off in spades. Panahi's imprisonment back in March received publicity, yes, but having the entire worldwide artistic community come into one place, at one time, during the Cannes Film Festival, helped galvanize and solidify the voices of protest. An unintended consequence of the Iranian regime's timing.
There is much we still don't know, and much that will still be revealed. Being released on bail obviously means that there is some expectation that there will be a trial, but that is far from a done deal. As always, I wonder about the conversations in the halls of power in Tehran over the last month or so. Their public comments have been impenetrable and yet also defensive (as in: we in the West have initiated a "propaganda" campaign against Iran, and somehow it is our fault, like we have somehow misunderstood the situation, and etc.) All typical stuff, not surprising in the slightest. That's how they have been playing the game for decades.
As I mentioned in, I think, my first post on Panahi's imprisonment, injustice of this kind requires secrecy, which no longer exists in our global world of international communication. So there's THAT, first of all, and the Iranian regime has tried to stem the tide of information, but they can't. If you follow any Iranian Twitter feeds (as I do), then you know that these people are screaming, on a minute-to-minute basis, about what is going on. They use pseudonyms and block their locations, and do all of this at great personal risk. And then there is the international community, all gathered in one place, at Cannes, and there wasn't one important piece published about Cannes during the festival that did not somehow mention Panahi. This stuff is really important. The drumbeats soon become deafening. The Panahi conversation became dominant, which is what anyone focusing on injustice anywhere hopes for.
Panahi's decision to go on hunger strike, and then make sure it became public knowledge by getting the word out to people who could spread the word further, was a gamble that should be recognized. He was (is) willing to die for the cause of freedom and artistic integrity. The Iranian regime did not call his "bluff". Not this time, anyway. They caved.
Their attempts to save face in the last two days are laughable, but also understandable, from a political standpoint. Whatever, Mr. Panahi is out of jail now, and hopefully recuperating at home with his wife and family.
The fight will go on. To quote Jamsheed Akrami, film professor in New Jersey, quoted in the article by Geoffrey Cheshire, this is "a moral victory", but triumphalism will not do here, when the situation is still so serious for so many others who are not celebrities.
But Panahi is a symbol. And symbols are important. They are not everything. Only totalitarian governments and fascist-minded people think symbols are everything. But Panahi's release is an important concession of moral ground (ground I don't believe Iran held in the first place, but I'm trying to see it from their perspective). This was a huge and public concession. The regime blinked.
And so, as always, we have to see what will happen next.
First photo of Jafar Panahi after release from prison.
Panahi's first message on his Facebook page came this morning, about an hour ago:
I'm freed and beside my family and I believe more and more that : Cinema is Cinema.
Welcome home.
I'm so happy to hear this.
More here. Apparently he is going to be released today.
This is a re-post of a review I wrote a couple years ago. I post it today again to show my support of Mr. Jafar Panahi, currently in prison and on hunger strike in Tehran.
Jafar Panahi's 2000 film The Circle is a shattering piece of work portraying the restrictions on the lives of women in Iran. It won Best Picture at the Venice Film Festival that year. Panahi's most recent project was 2006's Offside, a comedic film about a group of tomboys in Tehran dressing up as boys and trying to get into a soccer game (my review here). In Offside, Panahi treats the restrictions (women not being allowed to go into a soccer stadium) with humor, pointing out how unbelievably absurd it all is, even laughable. The tone of Offside is light, frantic, and hilarious. Sometimes the best resistance to a stupid rule is to laugh at it. It may not change the rule, but it certainly takes the edge off.
In The Circle, that hilarious atmosphere is gone. Panahi pulls no punches, from the first devastating scene to the last devastating image. But, in true Panahi fashion, the issues are not presented in a maudlin manner. They don't need to be. The tendency to be "maudlin" is for the privileged, those who have space and freedom to feel self-pity. In Iran, there is no need for such indulgences. Panahi launches us into the chaotic loud streets of Tehran, using handheld cameras, which circle the participants in the drama (there are very few hard edges in the film, very few angles, something to take note of when you're watching it: look for all of the circles and curves in the camera movements and set-ups). It appears that the film crew is just grabbing shots, filming their actors in the midst of a real-life busy street, and indeed, as always, Panahi uses mostly non-professional actors for most of the roles. Panahi is not interested in detailed character analysis, he says as much himself. He is more interested in "types". Characters are drawn in bold primary color strokes, and we can recognize them within moments: the crybaby, the bitter one, the sassy one ... Panahi casts based on looks alone, a bold and courageous move, because often people who look right can't act for shit.
Panahi has great confidence in himself as a director. He does exhaustive casting sessions, casting a wide net, and he also has been known to just approach a woman he sees in the park, who has the perfect look - and asks if she would be willing to do a screen test. (This was how he found the wonderful Nargess Mamizadeh, one of the main characters in The Circle. She's the one in the poster. She's not an actress - at least not professionally, but her looks - her scrunched-up beautiful face, with thick eyebrows, was just what he was looking for for that character). She has a black eye throughout the entire film, and it is never explained. It gives an unspoken backstory to the character, and makes us wonder from the get-go: Where did she get that? What is she running from?) Panahi only used two professional actors in The Circle, the rest were people he found who had the right "look". It's quite amazing, because everyone is great in the film. There are no weak links. There isn't a huge gap between the non-professionals and the professionals. Granted, Panahi is not looking for big cathartic scenes or delicate character development - something that is best in the hands of professionals. He's going for the message, and for the hyper-realistic atmosphere. And also, the pace. As with most Panahi films, the pace is breakneck.
The women of The Circle tear their way through the streets of Tehran, hurtling up against obstacles, hiding in alleys, crouching behind cars: the sense of being hunted is palpable. The women are right to be afraid.
There is not just one narrative in The Circle, we get many. Sometimes they intersect: we're following one group, and then suddenly another woman walks by and we find ourselves following her, and she takes up the storyline. Panahi's points are clear: this is not just about one individual woman. It's about Women(TM) and the circle of restrictions that make up all of their lives.
The film opens starkly. The screen is black, credits rolling. Throughout, we hear the sounds of a woman in labor. She's screaming and grunting and howling, and the nurse and doctor say encouraging things. In the last moment of the credits, there's a pause, and we then hear what we have been waiting to hear: the indignant yowls of a newborn baby.
Next thing we see is a blinding white wall, with the back of a woman's head standing there, she's draped in the full black chador. You can hear the screaming newborns behind the wall. There's a tiny slot in the door that can be opened by the nurses and our chador-ed figure knocks on the slot. A nurse's head peeks out. The black chador asks for the status of Solmaz's baby. The nurse says, "It's an adorable little girl!" Black chador has no response. Says again, "A girl?" Nurse says, "Yes!" and closes the slot. Black chador doesn't move. She stands there, still, a domed black figure.
She knocks on the window again. A different nurse opens it. "Yes?" Black chador says, "I'm here for Solmaz ... I know she had her baby but I don't know what kind ... could you check?"
A chill went through me at that moment. If you ask enough times eventually you'll get a different answer? Suddenly a girl will become a boy if you ask a different nurse?Apparently the ultrasound said it would be a boy, and everyone had heaved a sigh of relief in the family. Phew! A boy!! (I won't go into how despicable I find that attitude, in any culture.) But now, with the baby being a girl, it is valid grounds for divorce, the in-laws will be furious, the black chadored lady is the woman's mother, and for her, there is no joy at being a grandmother.
In one simple moment, Panahi indicts his entire culture. De-valuing women is a national concern.
As Panahi's film goes on, fast and furious, with girls in chadors running through bus stations, yearning for a smoke, huddled in doorways peeking out, hiding, terrified, trapped, you begin to see another side to the "Oh no, it's a girl" phenomenon. It is quite subversive, and really comes to fruition in the heartbreaking story of the single mother planning to abandon her 3-year-old daughter on the streets of Tehran. She says she hopes that her daughter will be adopted by a rich family who might take her away from Iran: "How can she have a future here? What is there for her in this life?" The woman had tried to abandon her child 3 times before getting up the guts. It rips her heart out. Watching her scenes made me go back in my mind to that first scene, with the open dismay at the baby being a girl. The critique is circular, as well as the structure of the film. With the world welcoming your birth with disappointment, what chance does a girl have? A baby absorbs love. Why wouldn't a baby absorb that other unwelcoming attitude as well? We may be horrified and pissed at the attitude, but by the time we get to the woman abandoning her daughter, we have to admit: we see her point.
The Circle is not a soap opera-ish litany of complaints, and the fact that I even have to make that clear is just evidence of how privileged I am. 5 or 6 women skulk through the streets of Tehran. They are unconnected (or so we think). It becomes clear that all of them have one thing in common: they have spent time in prison. The repercussions of such a stain on your life are long-lasting (in this country and in others!) Only in the world of The Circle, you can't be sure that these women didn't do hard time for, you know, hitchhiking, or letting their scarves fall off their heads, or driving in a car with a man who is not a relative. These aren't people who've murdered someone.
A couple of them have just got out. A couple of them broke out of prison with a larger group and are now on the run. One was in prison, but she is now a nurse, and married to a Pakistani man who has no idea of her past, and he can never know. He doesn't know why she won't go to Pakistan to visit his family, but she knows she will be stopped at the border.
These are women who are on their own, even when they are married, and the restrictions of their society makes it nearly impossible for them to survive and be self-sufficient. They need to travel with IDs at all times. They cannot travel alone. They cannot board a bus without a male companion who is also a relative. They cannot check into a hotel by themselves. It is outrageous. The Circle is titanically angry. The pace of the film is frantic. Nobody has time to reflect, or cry tears for themselves. Things are urgent. The police are everywhere.
One of the women comes home once she gets out of prison and it is clear that her brother means to do her harm because of the shame she has brought upon her family. She flees. But where can she go? She has no money. She can't check into a hotel. She can't jump on a bus and move to another town. To make matters worse, she is pregnant, and not married. She wants to have an abortion. This is presented with no euphemism, no judgment. Her lover was executed. What is this now-homeless woman supposed to do? Her family members are just as dangerous as the authorities. She has nowhere to turn. The baby must be gotten rid of.
One woman spent 2 years in prison and when she got out found that her husband had taken a second wife. She is grateful to the second wife, because the second wife took care of her kids while she was inside, and we meet the second wife, and she seems like a nice woman. But the betrayal is clear. NOWHERE is safe.
Meanwhile, it appears that everyone in Tehran is getting married on that particular day (Panahi's ironic sense of humor coming into play). Cars decorated with flowers and streamers meander by, in a long happy parade, we see a nervous groom spilling water on his nice shirt, we get a brief glimpse of a veiled bride in the back seat.
What is there in marriage that can offer sanctuary? This question is not asked overtly in the film, but it doesn't need to be asked. All we need to see is the procession of blushing veiled brides in the backseats of cars, viewed by women on the sidelines who have nowhere to turn. Even when they are married. Marriage is no protection.
One of the things that Panahi is so good at, (and I noticed this in Offisde as well), is that on an individual level - person to person - things aren't so bad all the time. Man and woman can greet one another without all of those restrictions between them. The sales guy in the shop in the bus station, who helps Nargessa with her purchase, teasing her about her boyfriend, and doesn't she know what size he is? The bantering is good-natured, easy, friendly. In Offside we had the characters of the guys hired to guard the girls, and we watch as the girls slowly break down the guards' authority, and finally the guys just succumb to the fact that this is a stupid rule, and we're all soccer fans, and Iran just won, hooray!! The girls did not cower in fear at the sight of the males. They basically thumbed their noses at them. Even the spectre of the morality police and their scary van doesn't dim the girls' spirits. Or if it does, it is just because now they can't hear what's happening in the game in the stadium.
So tyranny - and a "regime" - can never so atomize a population that human beings cannot connect. The regime may try, and boy, they do - and perhaps in extreme cases like North Korea, the totalitarian atmosphere has gone down into a cellular level, hard to know, but Panahi, in his subtle way, shows how the restrictions are not just bad for women, but bad for men, too. Because aren't we all just human beings? And aren't women our sisters, mothers, wives, sweethearts? Don't we, as men, love some women? How can we let them be treated like this? Women aren't a scary "other" - not face to face. They're just people we either like, want sexually, love, or are indifferent to. But the regime cannot let this freedom of thought stand, and so morality itself is policed. And of course morality means (in Iran, and elsewhere, like here and everywhere): "How Women Behave". That's it. That's all morality is when you get right down to it. If women would just act like LADIES, and keep their LEGS CLOSED, and did what they were TOLD, so that no man would ever EVER be confronted with his own animal instincts and have to actually negotiate them, and NAVIGATE them responsibly, as opposed to denying them outright, we wouldn't have such problems in our society! Because sex is at the heart of the morality issue, women are the focal point. It's been true since Eve took the fall. The "morality" of women is a national concern in Iran. Women can't be allowed to drive in cars with men they aren't related to. What would happen next? Open anarchy!
But like I said, Panahi is not a black and white kind of guy. He messes with our assumptions and preconceived notions. In this wonderful interview with Panahi (highly recommended), Stephen Teo writes:
Like the best Iranian directors who have won acclaim on the world stage, Panahi evokes humanitarianism in an unsentimental, realistic fashion, without necessarily overriding political and social messages. In essence, this has come to define the particular aesthetic of Iranian cinema. So powerful is this sensibility that we seem to have no other mode of looking at Iranian cinema other than to equate it with a universal concept of humanitarianism.
When a woman's hair tumbling out of her headscarf becomes a national problem, it concerns all of us. And so while the men in The Circle are few and far between, they also are omnipresent. The women are either running from men who want to trap them and punish them, or mourning men who have also been persecuted by the regime. The circle continues.
The evolution of the film's journey is clear. We begin with a black and white image: black chador against white wall. Quiet and still. No movement. But soon we are out on the streets, and then we have nothing but movement, for most of the film. People running and waiting anxiously and hiding and whispering and hugging. At the end of the film, we meet a girl who has been arrested for prostitution (probably), although it is made to sound like she was just hitchhiking. We have never seen her before. She's a brand-new character. She's been hauled out of the car and is made to wait for the morality van to show up. She's kind of a hottie, truth be told, with sassy red lipstick. She calls the cop "honey", in a contemptuous way.
The van arrives, and she takes a seat. She goes to light a cigarette and she is told there is no smoking in the van. The issue of smoking is an ongoing theme throughout the film. Everyone wants to smoke, but nobody can, for this or that reason, and she, at the very end, is the only one who actually gets to the point where she can light up. I saw an interview with Panahi and he was laughing, saying, "In the West, of course, smoking is seen as dangerous - but here, in this film, smoking is seen as the ultimate freedom." The one other prisoner in the van is a man, and he cajoles the guards to let him smoke. They cave, say "Sure". All the men light up. The girl glances around her (oh, so it's okay that they smoke, and it's not okay that I smoke?), and with a "Fuck this" expression, she lights up. For the rest of the drive, the camera is on her. The men all talk to each other, bantering, laughing, whatever, it's unimportant the topic or subject matter. She has a flowered headscarf on, her face is impassive, she stares out the window, and smokes. It's a long scene. It struck me, as I watched it this last time, how quiet and still the film got at the very end. As still as the scene that started it off. She's a statue in profile. Her situation is frozen. Stasis.
What will be next?
Panahi says in that interview:
Coming back to your first question: why is Iranian film so beautiful? When you want to say something like this and then you add an artistic form to it, you can see the circle in everything. Now our girl has become an idealistic person and thinks that she can reach for what she wants, so we open up a wide angle and we see the world through her eyes, wider, we carry the camera with the hand and we are moving just like her. When we get to the other person, the camera lens closes, the light becomes darker and it becomes slower. Then we reach the last person, there's no other movement; it's just still. If there's any movement, it's in the background. This way, the form and whatever you are saying becomes one: a circle both in the form and in the content.
An important film. Banned in Iran (naturally), but "it" got out. The Circle got out and found its audience worldwide. Because of bootleg DVDs and illegal satellite dishes, everyone in Iran has seen The Circle. In reference to one of Panahi's other films, Offside, there were protests outside of soccer stadiums last year, with women holding up signs saying "WE DON'T WANT TO BE OFFSIDE", demanding that they be allowed into the game.
Obviously the authorities are right, in their warped world view, to ban Panahi's films. The films are subversive, in the truest and best sense of the word. Movies like this have the potential to change the world. "How far that little candle throws his beams! So shines a good deed in a naughty world."
So perhaps The Circle is like a message in a bottle. A time-traveler. A flashlight in the darkness (a little candle throwing his beams far!), saying to future generations who hopefully will not have the same struggles, "Here is how we lived back then. Here is how it was for us." Panahi bears witness. He bears witness.
An overview of the Jafar Panahi situation, a very nice opinion piece (and I'm not just saying that because the writer linked to me.)
Great interview from Cannes with Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami about his latest film, Certified Copy, starring, among others, Juliette Binoche.
I loved this part:
My next film is going to be a road movie too. In my film “Ten on 10,” I explain why I have these driving scenes. I feel good in a car. And the car is one of the locations where you feel the least the presence of a camera. Spielberg’s “Duel” is one of the most memorable films for me — it may remind of Hitchcock but I like it even more than Hitchcock’s films. If you locked me in a car with a camera, and maybe an actor too, I wouldn’t protest. I would promise not to come out of the car. So who knows — if I go back to Iran and get into trouble that’s what I can suggest to them: Don’t put me in a cell, put me in a car.
Kiarostami is still based in Iran, although he knows his films never stand a chance on passing the censors there. He has been a huge vocal supporter of Jafar Panahi, calling for Iran to release him.
Update on that front: Panahi is still on hunger strike, but apparently he was allowed to see his wife on Thursday, and there is going to be a bail hearing today. Things are actually looking up. I cannot imagine that the international attention his imprisonment has received is not a factor. Still a frightening situation, but there are glimmers of hope right now for Mr. Panahi - at least getting released on bail. More information here.
Another update: Not too much new information here, except for the opening paragraphs:
Tehran's prosecutor general has asked the Islamic revolutionary court to reconsider the continued detention of the celebrated Iranian film-maker, Jafar Panahi, raising hopes that he may quickly be freed.A high-profile international campaign calling for Panahi's release has drawn the support of leading figures in the arts and politics. According to some reports a bail hearing could take place as early as this weekend and could free Panahi until his trial.
We're all watching.
And thank you, Bruce, for reminding me of another imprisoned Iranian filmmaker Mohammad Nourizad, who was imprisoned last December, and was sentenced in April to over 3 years of prison and 50 lashes, for writing critical letters to the new government. Because the new government is so unbelievably sensitive that they can't bear critiques. Oh boo-hoo mullahs. Nourizad was beaten so badly that his eyes were injured, perhaps permanently. He is also on hunger strike, with others, including Panahi.
Panahi is the symbol. The international star.
The one whose chair was left empty for him at Cannes.
But there are others. Many many others. Let us hold out hope for them as well.
Iranian director Jafar Panahi, who was invited to be on the jury at Cannes, is obviously not present, due to his imprisonment. A chair has been left open for him at Cannes, a clear statement of solidarity and support of the absent director. Abbas Kiarostami made a powerful statement in support of Panahi while at Cannes (to add to the open letter he wrote to the officials in Iran following Panahi's imprisonment). There has been little to no word of Panahi for two months. On May 3, some of the biggest names in Hollywood signed a petition calling on Iran to free Panahi. Iranian opposition leader Mir Hossein Musavi went to visit Panahi's family (photos here), part of a push from opposition leaders to show solidarity with those imprisoned in the roundup.
And then yesterday came the horrible news that Panahi has gone on hunger strike.
He released a statement to Abbas Baktiari, director of Pouya Cultural Center, and it has been posted on the Facebook group Free Jafar Panahi. I am devastated by this news.
Declaration of Jafar Panahi
I hereby declare that I have been subject to ill treatment in Evin prison.
On Saturday May 15, 2010, prison guards suddenly entered our cell, n° 56. They took us away, my cell mates and I, made us strip and kept us in the cold for an hour and a half.
Sunday morning, they brought me to the interrogation room and accused me of having filmed the interior of my cell, which is completely untrue. Then they threatened to imprison my entire family at Evin and to mistreat my daughter in an unsafe prison in the city of Rejayi Shahr.
I have eaten and drunk nothing since Sunday morning, and I declare that if my wishes are not respected, I will continue to abstain from drinking and eating. I do not want to be a rat in a laboratory, victim of their sick games, threatened and psychologically tortured.
My wishes are :
- The possibility to contact and see my family, and the complete assurance that they are safe.
- The right to retain and communicate with an attorney, after 77 days of imprisonment.
- Unconditional liberty until the day of my judgment and the final verdict
- Finally, I swear upon what I believe in, the cinema : I will not cease my hunger strike until my wishes are satisfied.
My final wish is that my remains be returned to my family, so that they may bury me in the place they choose.
Plucky kids in American movies have always rebelled against authority, whether they just want to dance, dammit, or put on a show ("My dad's got a barn!"), or love whoever they want to love. It's a rite of passage, made manifest in film after film. Who knows if we feel it is expected of us because once upon a time we saw Rebel Without a Cause, or if it's something ingrained in the hormonally surged time of adolescence. I know I was influenced by the films I saw. Either they validated my angst, they said, "I know how it is, I know how it is", or they showed me a better way, a way up and out of the muck and mire. Some of those films now seem rather silly to me, self-involved, but I still maintain affection for them because I saw them at that important time in my life when I needed an outside eye.
Rebellion in Iran necessarily takes on giant political consequences, even personal rebellion, as recent events have shown, and even something as innocent as first love is seen as a deep threat to the State (here's my review of The Girl in the Sneakers, an Iranian film that shows just such a situation), and a citizen's personal life is everyone's business. The new wave of Iranian filmmakers have a willingness to put their careers and sometimes their lives on the line to tell the stories they want to tell. These directors know that the chance of their films actually being seen in Iran are nil, and yet they press on regardless. Their reputations are giant worldwide, and yet, due to the regime's suppression of their work and their ability to work at all (not to mention canceling their visas and passports so they cannot attend festivals), they live under conditions that are fascistic and dangerous.
Bahman Ghobadi is a Kurdish director, engaged to Roxana Saberi, the American journalist who was arrested last year on espionage charges, causing worldwide protests (and tepid responses of outrage from so-called enlightened governments). Saberi is listed as a co-writer on Ghobadi's latest film, the wonderful No One Knows About Persian Cats, which received Un Certain Regard's Special Jury prize at the 2009 Cannes Film Festival. There was a terrible irony in the timing: Saberi was imprisoned at the time, and the widely disputed Iranian elections of 2009 followed, bringing into sharp highlights all of the issues touched on in Ghobadi's film. Saberi was released in May of 2009, and now, a year later, No One Knows About Persian Cats has opened in America.
Ghobadi's film Half Moon (my review here) examined questions of Kurdish identity, as seen through the filter of music. Music is very important to Ghobadi, that is obvious, and in Half Moon, with its road trip-slash-requiem story of an old Kurdish singer trying to get back into Iraqi Kurdistan for one last concert, the music weaves through and around the film. It bonds people together. It is the voice of the exile. In No One Knows About Persian Cats, Ghobadi stays in Tehran, going underground (literally, at times), to explore the music scene in Iran. There is a story here, of two young singer-songwriters, Negar Shaghaghi and Ashkan Koshanejad (their real names), who have just been released from prison. Their crime? They play music. Music without the stamp of approval from the Islamic Ministry of Culture. They have booked a gig in London, but now they need to figure out a way to leave Iran, which requires passports, visas, not easy in normal circumstances, but nearly impossible for those who have criminal records. They are hooked up with Nader (played with humor and ferocity by Hamed Behdad), a sort of manager, a guy who can get things done for you, who knows everyone, who constantly says things like, "Don't worry, I'll take care of it ... I'll handle it." He knows everyone in the music scene, and Ashkan and Negar are looking for a couple of musicians to fill out their band, so Nader starts taking them around on his motorcycle (the two of them piled on behind Nader) to visit different musicians.
He also tries to get them passports in a hurry. Nader is a guy with a finger in every pie. He makes his living selling bootleg CDs, and he, with his constant stream of enthusiastic chatter, is a born salesman. But he lives on the edge of the law. Any one of his various exploits could get him thrown into prison. But he maneuvers his way through the system in a wily manner, keeping a sense of humor, and groveling and begging the authorities if necessary (there is one terrific scene that shows just this thing). He, like many Iranians, has kept his soul, his spirit, intact by not internalizing the oppression of the regime. It hasn't "gotten" him. He plays by the rules, it's easier that way, but he is duplicitous, like most populations in totalitarian regimes. You do what you need to do to get by, but when the regime has turned its back, you do whatever the hell you want.
Ashkan and Negar may (or may not) be a couple. There is an easy intimacy between them that suggests romance, the two of them standing on the city rooftop, staring at the smog-glamorous sunset, and at one point, Ashkan moves closer to her, bending his head towards hers, and they rest there, in silent silhouette. They hang out, tooling around the city in her car (she drives), talking and arguing about music, what they are going to do, how they want to give one last show in Tehran ("I would love it if my parents could come," Negar says) before they leave for London. They both know that when they leave Iran, it will be for good. The situation has become unbearable for musicians.
The "underground" music scene in Tehran is often just that: The camera follows Ashkan, Negar and Nader as they descend narrow stairways into this or that basement, where someone has set up an illegal recording studio, or where musicians hang out and jam, soundproofing everything so the authorities won't hear from the street. There is an almost ritualistic feeling to these repetitive sections of handheld descents (and ascents, sometimes - musicians also hide out up on the roofs, creating soundproof sheds where they can rehearse): Music driven underground, you have to know where to seek it out, it is not allowed to flourish in the light of day.
Ghobadi's use of nonprofessional actors, with everyone basically playing themselves (he appears in the film as well, in the music studio in the beginning), makes the film feel like a documentary at times, a whirlwind tour of Tehran's hidden music scene, but the overriding sense of oppression (and the humor with which everyone treats it, everyone's been in jail for playing music, everyone sort of just accepts the situation with a shrug, then they close the door and start banging on the drums, regardless of the terrible consequences should they be caught) is always on the periphery, and there are times when I felt outraged. There is one scene where Ashkan and Negar are driving, and Ashkan is holding his dog. They are pulled over by the cops who demand to know why they have a dog. (Dogs are seen as unclean animals in Islam.) Negar is a fighter, and argues with the cops, "the dog has been vaccinated, he's fine" - but, in a horrifying moment, the cops reach in and yank the dog out of the window, and we are left with Negar's scream of "No" as she leaps out of the car. Cut to the next scene. The dog is never mentioned again. The film is not overtly political (although, as with most films in Iran, everything is political on some level), and it doesn't use a heavy hand, but that one scene tells you how random, how awful, life can be on the streets.
The bands Nader introduces the two leads to show the diversity of the music scene and also how creative artists have to be to just do their thing in Iran. A heavy metal band (I loved these guys) rehearse in a cow shed out in the middle of the country. The cows don't seem too happy about it, and the farm workers are all in cahoots with the band, piling bales of hay around the cow shed to blot out the sound. A rock band has constructed a metal shed on the rooftop of their building, and they have to wait for the neighbor to leave before rehearsing because the neighbor always calls the cops. The band mates, wearing CBGB T shirts and Joy Division T shirts, peer over the edge of the building, keeping an eye out for the telltale neighbor. A Persian rap band rehearse and film a music video on a construction site, in the open air, four stories up. They do not want to go to Europe, like Ashkan and Negar, because, as the lead rapper tells Nader, "We rap for Persia. We rap for Tehran. This is where we need to be." There is an added complication that any band with a female singer that gets a permit to play a show has to have female backup singers, or more females on stage. It is against the law for one woman to be on stage with a bunch of men. So, basically, No Doubt would be illegal in Iran. Ashkan and Negar go to a private house where two sisters are giving a concert, the small audience sitting in the dark, the women banging on the large translucent traditional drums (shown to such powerful effect in the scene of "exiled singers" in Half Moon).
There's a lot of music in No One Knows About Persian Cats, obviously, and each band plays a song for Ashkan, Negar and Nader, with Ghobadi providing what amounts to music videos for each song, with gorgeous caught footage from around Tehran, glimpses, fragments, beautifully realized: a little girl skipping down the sidewalk, two veiled women sitting on a bench eating ice cream and laughing, an old man glancing directly at the camera, people rushing in and out of subways, a montage, ongoing, of the faces of Iran, the populace just going about their lives, the haves and have-nots, with some startlingly beautiful images, things that show Ghobadi's piercing and specific vision. I mentioned in my review for Half Moon that sometimes, sometimes, a director actually gives you a vision of something you have never seen before. So many images in films, while beautiful, are just copycats of either something else, or depictions of something we have all seen a million times: sunsets, rainfall, a dark grey beach, whatever: beauty, yes, but not original. Half Moon was full of things I literally had never seen before. A strange journey through a borderland, filmed beautifully, but with some shots that caught the breath in my chest. He has an amazing eye. For landscapes, yes, he makes Tehran look like a vibrant strange place, but also for faces. Ghobadi captured most of this footage on the fly, with a digital camera, and it's haunting, beautiful, a counterpoint to the music, whether it be rock, rap, heavy metal, or traditional Persian. The full tapestry of artistic expression, going on below ground, as the world walks around above, trying to live their lives.
Ashkan and Negar, a singing duo in real life, are sweet and unselfconscious in their acting roles. You root for them. I wasn't wacky about their music, but that seems immaterial in the world being depicted in Persian Cats. Artists should be allowed to make art. Period. Most of the bands say things like, "We make sure our lyrics are in line with today's social codes - we don't want to offend anyone - we just want to make music." The two leads plan on giving their last show in Tehran (they still don't have passports, but Nader assures him everything will work out fine), in a basement in a private house. They get the word out on the streets. They decorate the room, pulling Persian rugs across the stage floor, and Negar buys 200 small candles to pass out to the crowd. It looks like any underground rock club in any city in the world. I was rooting for these kids. The odds are stacked against them. They work hard at what they do, they argue over lyrics, they discuss their music, and, inadvertently, without even making too fine a point of it, they seem totally innocent. Ghobadi is a master at that kind of subtle portrayal. They are not rebels without a cause, they have a cause, but the kids themselves seem like good kids, with a love for music, and a yearning to just play shows, wherever they can, however it comes about. They are innocent. They are doing nothing wrong.
But the regime, as it shows itself repeatedly, doesn't agree. And, if you think like a mullah, who can blame them. Music is powerful. People gathering together to listen to music is a powerful event. If you let that happen, then where will it stop?
The screws begin to tighten. Nader is arrested for selling bootleg CDs. He pleads his case in a beautiful scene (my favorite in the film), with Ashkan peering through the slightly open door at the police station. The old man who makes passports is also arrested. Another door closes. Interspersed with music, the film works slowly, it meanders, it is not a scream of pain or outrage, not outwardly, and that is part of its power.
Ghobadi has a great eye for detail. Nader lives in a tiny flat, and keeps parrots and finches as pets. The main parrot is named Monica Bellucci. Two finches are named Rhett and Scarlett. He loves them all to death. He speaks in English, occasionally, and everyone makes fun of him for this, but he scoffs at them. "What's wrong with speaking in English? Listen to this!" (then in English) "I see no problem. There is no problem." (back to Farsi) "What is wrong with that?" There's a scene where Negar lies in bed, reading, and jotting things down in her journal. At one point, we see what book she is reading. Metamorphosis, by Franz Kafka. A beautiful example of the soft subtle hand Ghobadi uses when telling this story. A man wakes up transformed into an insect. His destiny is out of his control. It is terrifying. He has transformed into something monstrous, against his will. Ashkan and Negar, who just want to play music, who just want to put on a show, in a barn, a shed, anywhere, who are willing to leave their homeland - for good - in order to pursue music - are faced with a similar nightmarish future. What will they be transformed into if they stay? None of this is said explicitly. We just see the book, Ghobadi making sure we know what it is, and the film moves on.
A couple of years ago, I read this article about a girl group in Saudi Arabia, and was blown away by these young women, trying to do their thing in an unbelievably oppressive atmosphere. Read that article and watch the stereotypes disappear. Their parents support them, although they fear the regime arresting their daughters. The girls, with piercings in lips, ears, noses, are just like any other group of young women who want to be cool, who want to participate in the culture of trends, who just want to make music. Here they are, in a country where they are not allowed to play in public, not allowed to play in public, and that hasn't stopped them. In a global world, with things like MySpace and iTunes, word has gotten out about these girls, and in their own way, they are participating. I wish them the best.
I showed that article to my brother, a huge music fan, and a songwriter himself.
His response? "Right now, those girls are the greatest rock band in the world."
The word "brave" is used so often to describe films that it has become almost meaningless. But here, with No One Knows About Persian Cats, "brave" actually means what it says it means. The act of filming this movie was brave. Every musician who appears in the film is brave. They understand the consequences. They make their art anyway. Watching it yesterday, I thought of my brother's comment, and his words floated through my mind like an echo:
"Right now, at this moment in time, these bands are the greatest bands in the world."
News not looking good on the Jafar Panahi front. He was arrested on March 1, and has been in prison ever since. His wife has been quite vocal about his heart condition, and also that she has been denied access to him. The Iranian regime hopes to bully him into silence, through intimidation and incarceration. It is an outrage. Iranian film-makers and artists have been courageously calling for his release, and now a group of Western filmmakers have added their voices to the mix.
Read the petition here, with signatures.
I have written about Jafar Panahi quite a bit here, my love for his films, and my concern for his welfare since he has been arrested. I won't even get into my rage.
If you're on Facebook, there is a group called Free Jafar Panahi, and it's filled with links and up-to-date information, as well as suggestions of what you might be able to do to help. Publicity is essential. Bullies prefer to operate in private. Spotlights are essential to shaming those involved. Panahi originally was arrested for other "crimes", not having to do with his films (uh-huh, yeah, right - he shoplifted when he was a teenager? He cheated on his taxes? Uh-huh), and now apparently they've gone back and said, "Oh, yeah, we actually DID arrest him for the films he has made, and also the film he was ABOUT to make."
As Panahi did so wonderfully in Offside (my review here), there is a temptation to laugh at the small-minded fascist attitudes of those who have imprisoned him, but the situation really is too serious for that. These people aren't messing around.
A petition like this will not be the "Abracadabra" that Panahi needs, but it certainly doesn't hurt.
So says Negar Shaghaghi, Iranian indie-pop songwriter, one of the stars of Bahman Ghobadi's new film No One Knows About Persian Cats. The film tells the story of two aspiring musicians in Tehran, trying to connect with other musicians, in an atmosphere fraught with danger. Rock music (ie: Western music) is banned in Iran, so the stories of some of these youngsters are harrowing. The article is a great profile of not only the two musicians Ash Koshanejad and Negar Shaghaghi but also of the situation in Iran right now (including the generation gap, the theme of so many Iranian films). The two applied for asylum in England, which is where they now live, but it is still not an ideal situation. I am sure they would rather be home, and be able to make their art, than living in exile and free. The conundrum. Iranian cinema takes issues that may seem commonplace in Western films (teenage romance, rebellion, depression, etc.), and they become emblematic of the tensions within the entire society. Every film becomes political, even when it is not explicit. The filmmakers work under great strain (see Jafar Panahi for an example of what can happen), and have to deal with censorship and also the bleak fact that their films, if not given the stamp of approval, will never be seen in Iran. Imagine working like that. These people are heroes to me.
I can't wait to see the film. Bahman Ghobadi has worked with actual musicians before (Half Moon was full of them - my review here), which gives his work an immediacy and potency that it wouldn't have otherwise. It becomes a snapshot of a culture. As a Kurd, he has a tremendous sense of identity and loss, which reverbs through his work, and I love that the article compares his latest film to Richard Linklater (there was a Linklater-esque feel to Half Moon as well, even with its elegiac requiem storyline.) It's about people who wander. Looking for ... their tribe. People who are like them. Kindred spirits.
From the article:
When Ash and Negar were kids, the only opportunity they had to hear western rock music was when somebody from their community travelled abroad and brought back CDs. "They'd be copied on to a tape over and over again," says Negar. "We used to write the track names in class when the teacher wasn't looking and take it home with such excitement to listen to it." Even so, whatever they got depended on the tastes of the traveller; often hoping for something similar to Nirvana, they'd end up having to make do with ABBA.The advent of the internet changed everything for Iranian teenagers, who were suddenly able to participate in global youth culture, employing their technological nous to stay one step ahead of government censors. The fact that the bands in No One Knows About Persian Cats wear Strokes T-shirts and pass around copies of the NME shouldn't seem that strange. But what is the attraction to Ash and Negar of the kind of fey indie music that even within its countries of origin is often considered a bit insular?
"Well, we are indie!" declares Ash. "We had to do it ourselves in bedrooms because if you step out into the streets, you cannot even tell anyone you've just written a song. We would make our own imaginariums in our rooms."
If they'd grown up in England, Take It Easy Hospital's wan, organ-driven indie-pop, topped with earnest observations about the "human jungle", might stand accused of being a little bit twee. But once you learn how hard Ash and Negar have had to fight just to get their songs heard, they take on a whole new complexion. And despite their ugly experiences in Iran, they are determined not to make rebel rock. "Me, I don't care about politics," says Negar. "The value of art is a lot more than politics. Politics is something that passes, but art stays for years."
It's tremendously moving and just goes to show you that things like Nirvana - or Leonardo DiCaprio - are often far more effective cultural ambassadors than any political or social figure, or any "hearts and minds" campaign. To paraphrase Camille Paglia: "If we ever meet beings from another planet and want to show them who we are, it is by our art that we will want to be known."
No One Knows About Persian Cats opens in the US on April 16, 2010.
I read this dispatch from SXSW with great interest: a review of the new film No One Knows About Persian Cats, and cannot wait to see it. The film premiered at Cannes, winning a Special Jury Prize, and tells the story of two indie rock musicians in Tehran, searching for a way to make their art, without, you know, imprisonment.
Negar and Askan's search for underground musicians through windy roads, basements, secret practice spaces is fascinating. At each stop, these real-life musicians play their music as the pair listen in, studying to see what and who will work with their band. These scenes often incorporate montages of Tehran street life. One of the most interesting segments concerns a rap group meeting on a floor of an unfinished building, and overlooking the city the group raps about class struggle in Tehran.
Awesome. Ghobadi is a definitely someone to watch. I adored his film Half Moon (my review here. Also, if you are interested, I mentioned in one of my posts about Jafar Panahi that you cannot get to my site in Iran, I imagine due to the amount of time I have devoted to Iranian cinema, and the powers-that-be have figured out a way to block certain sites from public viewing. If you look at that post for Half Moon, check out the comment from Hossein, who hacked through the firewall. I get emails quite often from inventive Iranian computer-geeks, who are able to see my site at an Internet cafe, or their computer lab - anyway, it's very moving, in an awful way. Really makes you see the importance of art there, and what it represents.) It seems with this latest Ghobadi is continuing on his exploration of the role of music in Iranian life (Ghobadi is Kurdish, born and raised in Iran, and so his Kurdish identity is even more of a potent issue - since the persecution of the Kurds has been so extreme - the real subject of Half Moon - a must-see).
One of the good things about living where I do is that if a film gets distribution of any kind, I am almost guaranteed that it will be playing in my vicinity. I am REALLY looking forward to this one.
Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi remains in prison, even though he has not been formally charged with anything. His wife (who was also arrested in the original roundup at Panahi's house - and was released a week later) says she has not been allowed to see him, and is being kept in the dark about the whole thing. Story here. 50 Iranian filmmakers have written an open letter calling for Panahi's release.
Abbas Kiarostami, perhaps the most famous of Iranian directors working today, has published an open letter in a Tehran newspaper calling for the release of Jafar Panahi (and also Mahmoud Rasoulof) - two filmmakers incarcerated in the last couple of weeks. Kiarostami is known for his difficult and artistic films, and he is famous round the world (Tarantino is a huge fan - but then, most directors are). In this open letter, he calls out the powers-that-be to let these two artists go - but he also gives a fascinating perspective on how Iranian cinema works (ie: the insiders and the outsiders). Kiarostami has made peace with the fact that he will always be an outsider. His films have been banned in Iran for years. He makes films about things like suicide (Taste of Cherry) - a taboo topic - and that film also intimates that the lead character is gay, and that may be the cause of his yearning for death. (My review here.) According to Kiarostami, Panahi was different - he was trying to work WITHIN the system. This is a heartbreaking situation if you look at in terms of nationalism and HOME. Both of these filmmakers do their country proud. They have helped create a national cinema that is admired the world over. Anyone who watches a film from Iran (even the more schlocky ones) can sense the energy and drive that is in their movie industry - and it is mainly because of filmmakers like Kiarostami and Panahi, the pioneers.
There are those who say, in what I think of as a cavalier manner, "Well, just leave Iran - go make movies elsewhere." People who say such things have no sense of what it means to have a home, or they haven't really thought it through. Perhaps they are biased against Iran, and so think: "Jesus, I wouldn't want to live there - get the hell out." This is a cold-hearted and (in my view) moronic way to think. These people are artists and their country, their HOME, rejects them. How easy would it be for YOU to just get up and leave everything you've ever known, the place you've grown up in, where your family is, support system - even your HEART ... So many of these people are not interested in making blockbuster stupid action flicks in Hollywood. They want to make movies about what concerns THEM, and that is ... Iran and its people. If they cut themselves off from that wellspring, then where would they create from? What would be replaced? These are LOCAL artists, with an international reputation. They want to make films from their own country. They should be allowed to do so.
Read Kiarostami's full letter (in translation) here.
From Iranian film expert Jamsheed Akrami. Akrami says:
Jafar Panahi’s films, The Circle, Crimson Gold, and Offside, have been all banned in Iran and for the past four years he has not been allowed to make a new movie. Now I guess he is also barred from touching a camera in the confines of his own house. As you know he’s been barred from leaving the country as well when his passport was confiscated last fall.
As is obvious, the Iranian people rarely keep quiet about such injustices, even under immense pressure and strain. The regime is losing its grip, and these strong-arm tactics are indicative of how weakened their position is. It's a very touchy regime, and they do not like the sense that the world is watching them. It's uncomfortable, isn't it, when enlightened people don't let you oppress your own people without telling you you basically suck. The situation is quite serious, and I am hopeful as well that Panahi will soon be released (it's too much of a spotlight right now to be endured, the regime is feeling that pressure, which is good), but that does not change Panahi's dilemma as an artist, whose hands have been tied by his own country. He cannot make his art, he cannot travel, he cannot do anything. The election of this past year (the subject of the film he was making illegally, apparently) caused a blow-up in the population of extraordinary power (similar to the student protests a couple years back), and the repression has been strong in the aftermath of those events. Newspapers, journalists, intellectuals, student activists - all have felt the lash of reprisal. Panahi is one of many. But he is an important symbol, a high-profile one, beloved by the hated West, and it's one of those situations where the fact that the one you are trying to repress is so loved and supported elsewhere - becomes intolerable. Vaclav Havel felt a similar strange dynamic - prison time in his own land, fame in the rest of the world. Regimes are RIGHT to be frightened of their writers and artists. But still: it's a tense time. I hope he is released soon.
His wife and daughter have been released - Panahi is still detained. More here. It's hard at times to get a feel for the truth, because official reports (and sometimes personal reports) are unreliable, due to censorship and also the fact that people "talking" are taking their lives into their hands. But it appears that Panahi was at work on a new film that was threatening:
Media reports said Panahi was arrested for making a film about the unrest which rocked the Islamic republic after the June 12 disputed re-election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.Panahi was producing "an anti-regime film with his colleagues but the security apparatus vigilantly discovered their moves and they were arrested," said leading conservative news website Tabnak.
Opposition website Rahesabz echoed the report and said: "Intelligence officials said Panahi and a movie crew were making an unauthorised film about the incidents linked with the election at his home."
But his son, Panah Panahi, has denied the reports.
And on Tuesday, Tehran prosecutor Abbas Jafari Dolatabadi said Panahi was not arrested for political reasons or because he is an artist. He was "accused of some crimes and arrested with another person following an order by a judge."
Well, isn't that convenient. It's not that he's political or an artist, it's because of OTHER crimes. Uh-huh.
Very glad his wife and daughter are out. Fingers crossed for Mr. Panahi. And selfishly, I am thrilled to hear about his new film. It's been a long time since Offside, a long time for us fans to wait. The very fact that the regime is trying to stop him from proceeding means he's hit the sweet spot. Paying a big price, though.
Sad news (and, sadly, not surprising): Iranian director Jafar Panahi has been arrested in Iran, along with his wife and daughter. The arrest went down at his home in Tehran, where he was hosting a dinner party (and all of the other partygoers were arrested as well). Iranian media is not reporting the arrest (small wonder - not to mention the fact that Panahi's films are banned in his homeland - doesn't mean Iranians don't see his films, though - thank you, Internet, thank you, bootleg DVDs), and we only know that Panahi has been detained from a quote from his son on opposition leader's Mir Hossein Moussavi's website. This is not Panahi's first arrest, he has always been in trouble. His films depict life on the streets in Iran with a gritty sense of reality and anger that, naturally, upsets the status quo and the theocratic bullies who watch over the public. His main interest is in the second-class status of women in Iran, something he obviously feels passionate about, since it is the topic of all of his films.
I am a huge fan of Panahi's work - I love its energy, its absurdity (he is mostly dangerous because he LAUGHS at the restrictions placed on women, he LAUGHS at how stupid all of the rules are), its courage - and this news truly saddens me. Panahi has said in interviews that one of the main reasons why all of his films are set, mainly, out in the streets of Tehran (as opposed to quiet domestic dramas), is that because of censorship in Iran, women must be shown veiled at all times in films, even though for the most part when women are in their private homes, with their husbands and children, off come the veils. And Panahi does not like LYING, or HAVING to lie, when he makes a film - he refuses to compromise. If a woman comes home to her own home, and takes off her veil as she hangs out with her family, then you should be able to show that. Since it is not allowed, Panahi makes all of his films take place outdoors, in the gritty blinding light of Tehran - and he mainly shoots on the fly, using non-actors, and real-life settings. He flies under the radar as much as possible, at least during filming, using guerrilla tactics and deception to get the shots he needs, without having to involve the appropriate authorities, who always feel he is up to no good. His films are world-famous and highly decorated, yet no Iranian can go into a movie theatre in their own country and see one of his films. Due to a rule from the Motion Picture Academy that no film can receive an Oscar nomination that hasn't been screened for at least a week in its country of origin, Panahi's powerful awesome films have not received the nominations they so justly deserve, despite the pleading letters written by movie execs here in the States to the various Ministry of Culture bozos in Iran to please give the film at least a short screening, so that it can be considered for an Oscar.
Panahi is someone I obviously am very fond of (he comes off beautifully in interviews, he's a true artist), and love all of his work dearly. It means a lot to me. This is not about me - but I do want to mention that my site, because of its large section on Iran and Iranian cinema in general - is blocked from being seen in Iran. That shows you how terrified the regime is. My site? Like I have any influence? My traffic is okay, but minimal. But still: I review as many Iranian films as I can get my hands on, and so Iranians are blocked from seeing my measly little site. But I have gotten emails from film students and film buffs and teenagers from Iran who have the the ingenuity to hack through firewalls or whatever the hell is the technical issue, to be able to read the reviews I have written of the films from their country. One kid sat at his computer lab and tried to call up my URL, but got a "forbidden" message, and somehow got around it. Look out for the nerds and techno-geeks, mullahs. They are way smarter than you. I have received emails from these Iranians who get through to my site to tell me that Panahi does not exaggerate, this is what it is like for them, please get the message out. These are voices that touch me to my very core. Panahi speaks FOR THEM, and in this day and age of technology, his films literally cannot be held back and "disappeared". EVERYONE in Iran has seen "Offside" - so much so that the year after it came out around the world, to rave reviews, and not seen ONCE in Iran - groups of women in Iran showed up at soccer stadiums around the country - which they are not allowed to enter (the theme of Offside) - and stood beside the front gates, holding up signs saying "We don't want to be OFFSIDE". Incredibly moving.
His message does get through and therefore he is intensely threatening to the powers-that-be.
COINCIDENTALLY: New Yorkers, listen up:
At the end of March, BAM is running a short series called Muslim Voices: The Female Perspective. Panahi's 2006 film Offside (my favorite film of that year, bar none) is playing on March 29. It is a perfect opportunity to show your support for this jailed artist, a man whose films will live long after the theocratic regime in Iran has, hopefully, passed. Panahi has said that he wants his films to live on, that hopefully the message to future generations will be: "This is how we lived once."
I've only reviewed two of his movies here on my site - but take a look at his list of titles, and check them out (Offside, The Circle, Crimson Gold, The White Balloon). Go to Netflix, order them. He's not just an important voice (although he is that), and beloved to Iranians - but an innovative exciting filmmaker, with the courage of his convictions.
My review of Jafar Panahi's The Circle.
My review of Jafar Panahi's Offside
And if you're in New York, consider going to see Offside at BAM on March 29. I will certainly be there.
Various Panahi clips (films, interviews, award ceremonies) below the jump:
The Iran-Iraq War was the longest "conventional" war of the 20th century, dragging on for almost a decade. The slaughter was immense. An entire generation was wiped out. Children volunteered to be martyrs, cannon fodder. The Martyrs Cemetery (perhaps the largest graveyard in the world), south of Tehran, has a fountain that (to this day) runs with red water to show the blood that was shed. Every town has a cemetery like that one, except on a smaller scale. The war touched everyone. The war lasted from 1980 - 1988, and the younger generation - those born in the 80s - have no memory of it, yet it impacts their lives on every level. Everyone has lost a family member, or three or four. The revolution in 1979 was solidified, in terms of bonding the nation together, by the hostage crisis and then the war with Iraq. But imagine if you were a kid born in, say, 1987 ... you have no memory of the revolution, the sacrifices of your parents may seem rather meaningless, especially in light of the hard economic times and the brain-drain that Iran has experienced ever since then. Like every country (hell, this is a human thing, not a national thing) there is a generation gap. The older generation wants the younger to appreciate the sacrifices they made and realize how good they have it. The younger generation wants to do its own thing, and not constantly have to live in a reverence for a past they did not participate in.
Siavash, the powerful and angry film directed by Saman Moghaddam, is all about that. It expresses things which cannot be expressed, easily, in a nation where censorship is still fierce. It asks questions about martyrdom and war, but it also shows that the younger generation - without a war to galvanize them - are left adrift. They want to "do something". They want to show that they are somehow as tough as their parents. But how? Where? There is no outlet. That comes up again and again in the film, and it's not made explicit, but the implication is clear. Siavash, a young man whose father was apparently killed in the war with Iraq (although his body was never found), is a musician, living aimlessly, trying to connect with a father he never knew, angry and introverted. As things start to break down for him over the course of the film, his aggression starts to come out unexpectedly. He, like the young Alexander Hamilton, wishes for a war to clarify his intentions, to fire him up, to make him relevant and a worthy man.
Siavash, played by the beautiful and sensitive Ali Ghorbanzade, is a musician. As the film opens, we see his group prepare for a series of concerts. He is late for the rehearsal because he has gone to visit his father's grave. He kneels by the grave, and, in voiceover, we hear him ask for his father's blessing. It becomes apparent that his mother has shacked up with another man (Siavash only refers to him as "that man"), and that she torments Siavash with how his dead father would disapprove of his bohemian life. Siavash is dying to know the truth. He knows he has chosen a different path from his father. There is no war for him to fight now. He is a musician. That is who he is. He wants his father to know that he is not a "punk", and he wishes his father would give him a sign that he is proud of him. That sign does not come. His mother doesn't help.
Siavash is a troubled young man, fatherless - like so many young people in Iran. His best friend (I loved this actor) tries to talk him about of being so "pessimistic". He wants Siavash to make up with his mother. It is important to not break family ties completely. But Siavash can't let it go. He is haunted by the thought that his father would think him weak, or silly, that he would not be proud of his son. His mother plays on those fears.
At one of his concerts is a young photographer from a woman's magazine, played by the gorgeous and wonderful Hedye Tehrani (she's on my 20 favorite actresses list). She is there on assignment.
After the show, she gets into a confrontation on the sidewalk with a guy who is harassing her. He appears to know her. He is haranguing her about her behavior, and she is screaming at him, "Why don't you leave me alone? I am here for my job - this has nothing to do with you!" Siavash, coming out from backstage, sees the confrontation happening and goes over to see if he can help. I am sure the fact that Ms. Tehrani is so damn beautiful has a little bit to do with his knight-in-shining-armor impulses, but you also get the feeling that he's basically a nice guy. Sweet. He steps in. "Why don't you leave the lady alone?" A fight eventually breaks out, and the harasser runs off into the night, leaving Siavash and the lady alone.
There is immediate chemistry. I love the first scene of their meeting. She obviously is not a shrinking violet, we just saw her shouting at a guy on the street, but she also has a gentleness to her, a sweetness. She senses something in Siavash. His need to protect, obviously, but the way she plays the scene you know that she senses his attraction to her too. Because this is Iran, these things cannot be spoken out loud. In a way, it makes such moments even more powerful, because it has to be done subtly, in behavior and pauses. Not to condone censorship, but I am continuously struck by how much Iranian filmmakers "get away with", making their art, as they do, in a theocratic society. Their first exchange pulses with unspoken feeling. There's humor there, too. You like this woman. You like her because she is kind to Siavash, and you think that maybe he needs that. He needs comfort. His experience of women, so far, has been the treachery of his faithless mother.
Against the laws of the land, Siavash and his friend drive her home. (Her name in the film is also Hedye). She sits in the back and they ask her what was that guy's problem.
She regales them with stories of how they were in college together, and he was obsessed with her. But instead of trying to court her like a normal man would, he instead harassed her, and reported her to the college for not wearing proper "Islamic cover". She got in trouble. He did not. In retaliation, the next day she showed up to class wearing a cardboard box over her head with two holes cut out for her eyes. Siavash and his friend laugh. She still can't see what is funny about it. Ramin (Siavash's friend) says, "I'm in college myself. That is a funny joke." The image of her showing up with a cardboard box over her head is delightfully subversive, really angry, actually - and it makes me love the character. She has gone on after college to become a reporter and photographer, and she would love to interview Siavash about his music. The paper she writes for is called The Women's Weekly and Ramin jokes that he doesn't want to be seen buying a copy of such a paper. She says she will send it to them.
Meanwhile, there is a lot of double entendre going on. The main focus of the scene is the unspoken attraction between Siavash and Hedye. But how, in such a country, do you ask for a girl's phone number? You can't date. You'd be arrested (which eventually happens in the latter half of the movie). She is still taken up with annoyance over her harasser, but she was touched by Siavash standing up for her.
Through a series of coincidences, they see each other again. She interviews him.
Siavash lives in an apartment by himself. The walls are a deep yellow and dark green. He has a fish tank. He sits on his bed playing his guitar, but you can tell his thoughts are elsewhere. On her, on his father. The phone rings, but someone keeps hanging up. He is alone. On the walls of his bedroom, he has a huge collage of gruesome photographs from the war with Iraq. It is a shrine, it is evidence of his obsession. In the middle of the photos of carnage, is a portrait of his mother, vibrant-looking beneath her head-scarf.
The war takes up all of his thoughts. He believes that no one can really know him, unless they know this about him. His friend Ramin tries to talk him out of his depression, tries to keep him calm, but it is not easy. Especially not because Ramin knows something that Siavash does not know: The week before, a bunch of POWs were released from Iraq, and Siavash's father, long-thought dead, was one of them. The POW foundation has contacted Siavash's mother (who has now, of course, moved on and is living in sin with the same man she has been with for 13 years) but no one has told Siavash yet. Ramin is supposed to give the news to Siavash, but he is afraid for his friend's state of mind.
Events begin to intensify. Siavash and Hedye are drawn to one another. There is something sensitive about her. She calls him one night. He has been sitting in his room, brooding. Instead of being chatty or social, she says on the other end of the line, "I can tell something is wrong. Are you okay?" Siavash lashes out back at her, "Are you being a reporter now?" She soothes, "No, no ... I just can tell something is wrong. I have no idea what is the matter, but I do hope you are okay, Siavash."
She's good people.
The man we first saw harassing her on the sidewalk was not just an excuse for an Iranian "meet-cute". He will not go away. He becomes a truly menacing character and you can sense how dangerous he is. He is obsessed with her. She said earlier in the film, "This is what happens when you let the classes mix. We Iranians are not ready for all of that. We haven't been brought up right," a fascinating look at the class divide in Iran, and the issues the upper class feel when confronted with the more traditional (and radical) element in their midst. This guy from college just can't deal with the fact that she has a life, that she has a job, that she does her own thing without bowing down before him, the male. He is in love with her, clearly, but he is so blunted and violent he can't recognize the softness within him. There are more confrontations, and they get worse. He puts her in the hospital.
Siavash comes to visit Hedye in the hospital, and he is so concerned and propietary towards her that she tries to joke him out of it. "Do you want me to get up and walk around so that you can see I am all right?"
Interspersed with all of these dramatic scenes, is footage from the various concerts Siavash and his group give. The music is fantastic. I yearned for a soundtrack. Sometimes melancholy and sentimental, sometimes thrumming and drum beats (reminding me a bit of music to riverdance to) - it is never anything less than riveting. The hairs on the back of my neck rose up, listening to some of this music.
Ali Ghorbanzade, playing Siavash, does not have an easy job here. He has to be sensitive and sweet, but not a drip. He has to spend the entire movie on the verge of tears. He has long shots where he sits in silence staring at his fish tank, holding his guitar. You know, it could have been a parody of itself, the Brooding Young Man Iranian Style. But Ghorbanzade manages to suggest the deep fissures in this young man, the competing interests: the growing love for Hedye (the moment with the rosebuds in the restaurant literally made me catch my breath), his increasing bitterness towards his mother, his feeling of helplessness in the Post-War society he lives in - the feeling that his life means nothing compared to the former generations - and then the chaos of learning that his father is actually alive, and what will THAT mean for him? Ghorbanzade keeps all of these balls in the air with his quiet heartfelt performance.
There are moments when he is up onstage, at the keyboard, playing - and the audience sits out there in the dark - and Hedye sits out there, too - and he manages to show us that he is starting to play just for her. Just having her out there makes him start to feel like a man, it "stiffens the space between his shoulder blades" (thank you, Odets), and gives him pride in his work. These are sexy moments. The music hums and beats, and she stares up at him, a small smile playing across her lips. It's not a gooey-eyed moment of pride, something deeper is going on between these two, and it really shows in the concert scenes.
She learns that his father is now alive and she begs with him to go see his father. She makes him promise. She doesn't say, "I cannot be with a man who doesn't resolve his family issues" - but you get the sense that that is what she is saying. She does it in a way that does not harangue him or belittle him. She knows it's hard. She knows he suffers. But his father is alive. He can't avoid him forever!
Hedye Tehrani has one of the most expressive faces in cinema. She's beautiful in an almost distracting way, but she is so fascinating to watch, because her inner life - whatever it may be - is always playing across her features. She acts between the lines. To say she "acts" is almost incorrect. She lives - onscreen. Sometimes she smiles and there's a beautiful mischief to her, and she's got a temper, and a sense of outrage.
Here, she plays a woman you really like (and that's a change for her, as an actress.) Tehrani, despite her beauty, can come off as rather dour, serious, even bleak. The parts she plays (Fireworks Wednesday - review here, Half Moon - review here, Hemlock - review here) show her fearlessness as an actress. She is not interested in being liked. There is a depressive quality to her. She has played two suicidal women (that I am aware of, I haven't seen all of her movies) - and it really works. You get the sense that this woman goes deep, that she has known despair, she has known loss, and it has cost her. But here she does something quite different, showing her range. She is feisty, smart, kind, and persistent. If there is a woman out there who could deal with Siavash's particular personality, it is this woman.
Their scenes together are a revelation.
The last moment of the film, with its sudden burst of drum-heavy music, is startlingly angry and moving. The flags of Iran flutter in the background, blurry, and in the foreground, we see the flowers on the grave, the flickering candle, and Siavash and Hedye, walking off together. It is not a neat resolution. The Iranian consciousness will be dealing with the fallout from the war with Iraq for years to come. Their losses were acute. The younger generation has inherited a whole different set of problems, and what are they to do with it all? Where are they to go?
The aimlessness and helplessness of the current generation, the feeling that they are lost without the blessing of their ancestors, and yet ... who would wish to bring back such carnage ... is all in the film.
And yet it remains a small intense drama, focused on what happens during one week in the lives of a couple of people.
Siavash came out in 1998, a decade after the end of the Iran-Iraq war. In many ways, it is an anti-war film, although it also honors the dead and those who made the sacrifice. It looks at the unseen consequences of huge world events, and also the haunting that can occur in an entire culture in the wake of such a war.
It is an important film.
1999's The Girl in the Sneakers was directed by Rasul Sadr Ameli, a native of Isfahan, Iran - who also directed 2002's award-winning Man, taraneh, panzdah sal daram (I am Taraneh, I am 15 Years Old) starring Taraneh Alidoosti, the wonderful mischievous bushy-eyebrowed actress I first encountered in the Fireworks Wednesday (my review here). Sadrameli has a background in journalism, and it shows in the films of his I have seen. Unlike Jafar Panahi, another Iranian film-maker I'm a huge fan of - who takes his movies out into the streets of Tehran (my review of The Circle here), liking the reality it provides, avoiding interior dramas ... Sadr Ameli is mainly concerned with the interior. Meaning: the family. The private lives of families in Iran. His films (and I've only seen a couple) focus on the dramatic moments in our lives (dare I say "melodramatic"?) when we come up against our families' expectations of us ... as opposed to what WE want. And naturally, because this is a film from Iran, Sadr Ameli mainly focuses on the plight of women, and the restrictions placed on women's lives. I suppose when you are talking about Iran, you actually can't get too melodramatic. It's all just a matter of degrees. The personal is political takes on a whole new meaning. Even in something as potentially fluffly as The Girl in the Sneakers, about a 15 year old girl in love with a boy she met in the park takes on vast social and cultural importance, shining a spotlight onto how unfair the situation is, and how, ultimately, ridiculous. But to say it is "ridiculous" is, in a way, condescending - in the same way that I find the making fun of Turkmenistan's former president Saparmurat Niyazov to be a dangerous thing to do, because yes, his behavior was often ludicrous - but it had serious and long-lasting influence on the people who have to live there. I wrote about that here in my post about Niyazov 5,000,000 years ago. The young heroine of Girl in the Sneakers, who moons about the streets of Tehran, trying to get in touch with her boyfriend, hiding from the police (because, you know, teenage romance is just. that. serious, goddammit... we need the POLICE to monitor a walk in the park) becomes symbolic. So much of the films in Iran takes on symbolic meaning, and perhaps some of that is unwarranted. Sometimes a spade is just a spade. But the Iranian filmmakers know what they are up against, they know the problem, and many of them are in the strange situation of having much more fame worldwide than in Iran - because their movies aren't allowed to be showed there. Kind of like Vaclav Havel having his plays in repertory around the world but NOT in his native land. Films made under such conditions have a gravitas that cannot be denied. They cannot be separated from the context under which they are made.
I love films from Iran, and have kind of gotten into a groove with them, where not everything is seen as some huge symbol of something else ... I can sit back and look at it as a story. A story from another culture, yes, but that's part of the interest in these films.
If Hemlock (my review here) is a Lifetime Movie of the Week, and Fireworks Wednesday is a bleak version of Desperate Housewives, then Girl in the Sneakers is definitely an ABC Afterschool Special. I could imagine teenage Iranian girls watching this and feeling totally validated, and "seen" and "heard". It even looks like an ABC Afterschool Special (although, granted, the copy I saw was a horrible video transfer and looked pretty bad). It tells the story of 15-year-old Tadai (played sensitively by Pegah Ahangarani), a young teenage girl who has met a boy in the park, and they have fallen in love. It is a teenage kind of love, passionate, out of control, and nobody's parents approve of the situation. As a matter of fact, the film opens with Tadai being called up by the Vice Squad, and brought in for interrogation about her behavior. Tadai is not appropriately submissive or sorry in this situation. For example, the policeman asks her if she has ever been to the boy's house - and she says, "No" followed by a long pause, and then adds, "Not yet." Tadai is not a floozy. She is a young girl having her first experience of love, and she is angry at her parents. She has fallen into a bit of a depression, can't eat, can't sleep ... and there's a horrible scene that made me truly angry - where they have to go to court to prove her innocence and she is taken off down a chilly tiled corridor with a nurse who examines her to see if she is a virgin (she is). But the humiliation of that ... And then the nurse emerges with her into the crowded courtroom, announcing to everyone, "This girl is a virgin." It's disgusting. But what is amazing about the beginning scenes of the movie is how casually it is all presented. It's like a documentary. The "drama" isn't pumped up - it already is dramatic ... and it doesn't feel "staged", you really get the sense that you are looking at something real.
Tadai's parents have descended into a minor war about the raising of their daughter, and there are scenes at home of Tadai's younger brother watching television, trying to drown out the sound of his parents' screaming upstairs. Neither of them want to take the blame for their daughter's behavior ... and I suppose they are truly worried for her. They aren't evil. Her mother says to her, 'You can't be so trusting, Tadai. The world will not be kind to you." There is some good advice in that.
Which Tadai proceeds to completely ignore, in true 15 year old style. Tadai is dying to talk to her new boyfriend, and there are numerous scenes throughout the film of her calling, hanging up when his mother answers, or having someone else call for her to see if she can get through (teenage love is the same wherever you go) ... she slowly becomes exhausted in her quest to get in touch with him. After all, he has had some issues with his parents as well. At one point, his father gets on the phone when Tadai calls and he tells her, "If you call this house again, I will lodge a complaint against you." Because in such a world, the state is involved in a micro-managing level with people's personal lives ... and so to be reported ... How on earth could she defend herself? She hangs up, scared, distraught.
Her parents no longer trust her to walk to and from school by herself, so either her mother or her father drives her. Tadai sulks in the passenger seat, as her mother lectures her, trying to tell her that her father loves her, he's just worried, and it's not so bad having your own personal chauffeur, now is it? Tadai is itching to get to a payphone. She is dropped off for school, and goes up to meet with a group of her friends, chattering and blabbing on the sidewalk like a group of pubescent magpies. Tadai's face is noticeably glum, but she tries to hide it, because whatever is going on with her is private. She's not a silly girl. Now her crush on this boy will obviously pass, and etc., but you can't tell a 15-year-old that!! Whatever she is going through is forever! And this is no "crush". This is love! But she doesn't seem like the type of girl to blab about it with her friends.
There is a scene later one when Tadai calls up a friend. She needs to talk. She needs to get advice, but also to just share what's happening with her. Her friend makes the mistake of saying, "Could we maybe talk in 2 or 3 hours? I'm cooking my first meal and I'm afraid it will burn." Tadai, who is not always pleasant, not always good, gets angry. She ends up telling her friend to 'go to hell' - Tadai!! Take a step back! - and her friend is angry, too ... Tadai is, in typical teenage fashion, making choices based on impulse and emotion, and so slowly things start to unravel for her, leaving her alone and having to survive by her wits. Things do not go well.
She runs away from home. The film is really the story of her 24 hours living on the streets of Tehran. She sells a necklace so she has some cash, which she mainly spends on phone cards to call the boy. But he isn't there. Ever. He will be gone for a couple hours. He's not home now. He was here but now he's gone. Don't call again.
She sleeps on a park bench. She meets a couple members of the underclass in Tehran, the beggars and gypsies and whores who are there but mainly invisible to those in the middle class. For the most part these people (especially one woman, who is obviously a prostitute - although it is never said) are kind to Tadai. But her mother's nervous advice from the beginning of the film hangs over the action. She gets into cars with random men, hitching a ride (and let's not forget that it is illegal for a single woman to be in a car with a man not her relative - not to mention a MINOR). We want to shout at her to stop!
She tries to check into a hotel, but is turned away - she's too young, she's a girl, she's by herself. She keeps trying to call her boyfriend and as the day drags on, she wilts. She begins to get desperate. Crying out to her new friend (the prostitute), 'I need to talk to him! Where is he? Why won't he come??" The prostitute, naturally, is a bit more worldly-wise about such matters, and there is an indication (rather disturbing) that she may be interested in our young heroine to put her into service, and maybe collect her pay. To induct her into prostitution, that is. There are many clues along these lines ... things said by other characters ("You're young to be starting out on that ..." says the newsstand owner) ... and Tadai hovers on the brink.
We feel that, we feel the danger of her situation ... but Tadai seems to be too self-obsessed (or, no, not self-obsessed ... obsessed with her boyfriend) to realize what these people may want to do to her.
Things build up to a crisis.
I won't reveal what happens. I will just say that Girl in the Sneakers, even with its rather ham-fisted approach to such matters, is effective ... and you know, when 15 year old girls are examined in a backroom of a courthouse to see if she has a hymen and then it is announced to the world ... well, maybe a ham-fisted approach is the most appropriate! But what I like about this film is that it keeps its focus. (That's one of the main reasons it reminds me of an ABC Afterschool Special - I mean, besides the focus on teenagers and their problems). The film doesn't try to do so much, it keeps its eye on the ball - Sadr Ameli keeps his camera focused on the beautiful face of his lead actress ... and that is our story. There is no big meltdown or sweeping violins ... but we are left with a sad resigned feeling, and yet ... we definitely also feel that the girl in the sneakers is going to be okay.
Because in the last moment of the film she makes a choice, which - to me - was unexpected, and yet deeply right.
Instead of being victimized, she chose.
And so maybe, like all of us, in Iran or not it doesn't matter ... she will survive her first fiery passion of love, she will not drop off the grid (as it seems like might happen) ... she will go home to her parents, finish school, and maybe find a life for herself that makes sense. She is 15. The love she has for her boyfriend is not built to last, although that doesn't take away from her agony in the middle of it.
Over the course of the film, she has become wise. That's what a little heartache will do.
When she sees her boyfriend in the park, she flips out and starts running towards him. The prostitute, eyes lined with kohl, looking on, mutters to herself, "Don't hurry, you fool" ... meaning: don't let him see how much you love him. Hold a little bit back for yourself.
But we can't learn those lessons until we make those mistakes.
In its own small way, The Girl in the Sneakers is quite profound (in the same way that I remember vividly those ABC Afterschool Specials when I was growing up). It took the issues seriously, it put itself on the ground level with the problem, not condescending or taking a "this too shall pass" attitude which is off-putting to teenagers ... and it created a character we could invest in.
I am still left with the image of Tadai, draped in her veil and trenchcoat, teetering along on the curb (she likes to walk on the edge, like a tightrope), her white sneakers making their way tentatively along the narrow path. Her dream (and she admits that it is crazy) is to walk from one side of Tehran to the other, ONLY walking on the very edge of the curb. A nice metaphor, not too overdone ... and it also emphasizes, through the sneakers, that this girl is really just a child, and not to forget that.
Be kind to the child. Let her have her experience. She'll be okay in the end.
At least I hope she will.
Half Moon, an absolutely wonderful film directed by Bahman Ghobadi, and with a cameo appearance by Hedye Tehrani, is a story about borders. Borders between countries and borders between life and death. The entire film takes place on the borderlands (or, perhaps, no-man's-lands) between Turkey, Iraq and Iran. There are times when the border is nothing but a ditch with great mountainous plains stretching out on either side. Terribly dangerous, but there's not a border patrol in sight. The feeling of how artificial it is is palpable, borders superimposed by the powers-that-be, leaving the Kurds homeless and stuck in the middle. What is a border? Isn't it sometimes silly? That is one of the overriding feelings I got watching Half Moon, watching Mamo, a famous Kurdish singer who has been living in exile in Iran, and his multitude of sons, try to get back into Iraqi Kurdistan for a concert. It is as though being Kurdish is a deadly secret. Border guards in Iran, who have been speaking Farsi all along, pull Mamo aside and whisper in Kurdish, "I'm Kurdish, Mamo ..." Mamo is a hero to them. His return to Kurdistan is a huge deal, a political event. The Kurds don't belong anywhere, but their sense of identity and nationhood is actually stronger than many who belong to actual recognized nations. Isn't that always the way. Nothing like a little oppression to solidify a people's identity.
Half Moon is modeled after Mozart's "Requiem", and while much of the symbolism is a bit heavy-handed (coffins, death, open graves), I think it works. Because again, we're in a borderland. It is not a realistic film. We are in the borderland between dreaming and waking states. There are times when we're not sure that what we're looking at is actually real. Is this really happening, or is it in Mamo's head? Or was it a dream? None of it ends up mattering, because as Mamo approaches death (he is an old old man, he has sons who are in their 50s and 60s), his consciousness begins to turn towards the afterworld. He knows it is coming. He can feel it. He can almost hear it. There are moments, in the middle of busy crowd scenes, when you can tell that Mamo is hearing something. An approach. Someone, or something, coming to "get" him.
Half Moon takes place in the wake of the fall of Saddam. Saddam's genocidal campaigns against the Kurds are well-known, and so Mamo (played heartbreakingly by Ismail Ghaffari) has lived away from his homeland for almost 40 years. He was (and still is) a famous musician, but the wars against Kurdish culture were just as devastating as the actual wars. Kurdish music banned, singers fled to the four corners of the earth, or imprisoned, or exiled. Saddam Hussein is now gone, and although the war still rages (as someone shouts across the border, "The Americans are shooting at everything that moves!"), Mamo and his sons, all musicians as well, are called back to "Iraqi Kurdistan" to give a concert of traditional Kurdish music. It will be a joyous celebration, a rebirth of cultural confidence, a keening cry of freedom.
Mamo is old. Such a journey (in a beat-up school bus) will be dangerous and arduous. But if he does one last thing in his life, it will be this concert. He has waited so long. Even though one of his sons pulls him aside and tells him that the village wiseman has warned Mamo not to go, Mamo will not turn back. He shouts at the jagged mountains, "Who wants to stop me?" Ismail Ghaffari has no other credits to his name. I would imagine he is probably a musician - but his acting here is breathtaking. He is a determined old man, sometimes bossy, and sometimes haunted. He is afraid of death (aren't we all?), and he is afraid that it will come before he reaches Kurdistan. His emotional isolation is total. We all die alone. But it is his job to keep the group together, to keep them focused on the task at hand. His face is cracked with wrinkles, his eyes glitter - sometimes with deep love and gentleness, other times with rage, or fear. It's a marvelous performance and there were a couple of moments when he brought me to tears.
Bahman Ghobadi, the director, has said that if he didn't get into film, he would have been a musician. This is one of the most produced of Iranian films I have seen ... in terms of the sound design. The music is omnipresent (oh, for a soundtrack!), and there are beautiful scenes of the bus traveling through the mountains, with Mamo and his sons playing their traditional instruments, as the fearsome landscape whizzes by outside. Just beautiful.
I began to think, as I watched this film, My God, it is art that holds us together. As Camille Paglia wrote once, (and I'm paraphrasing, sorry): "If we ever meet beings from another planet and want to show them who we are, it is by our art that we will want to be known." There is no official "Kurdistan", and even though Saddam is gone, the future of the Kurds is in flux. But the music survives, and it survives in the musicians. They have not been allowed to perform their traditional music in 40 years, but cultural memory is a long long thing. The body does not forget its origins. There is a reason why Mamo is so revered, and along the way, in villages and hillsides, whoever they meet, runs up to Mamo to kiss him, or get his autograph. It is because he contains the cultural memory of Kurdistan. Not just "contains" it, but embodies it. He is the embodiment of their hopes, dreams, wishes, and memories.
As they travel along, they pick up all of his different sons along the way.
There are a couple of stand-out scenes where - like in The Day I Became A Woman (my review here) - the landscape itself seems to turn into something mystical. I saw things in Half Moon that I never saw before. Like I mentioned in my review for The Day I Became A Woman, you become used to seeing the same old things in movies, even good movies. Streets, apartments, closeups, beautiful trees and ocean, but then you come across a scene that is totally and completely original, and you realize: Wow, there really IS something new under the sun. I love film-making like that. Needless to say, I am not talking about CGI. I am talking about the apartment on the white beach in The Day I Became A Woman, with the bed and the refrigerator standing on the white sand. I am talking about the traveling band of hippie mimes in Blow Up, playing tennis with an imaginary ball. Amazing scene. Mysterious, beautiful, unexplainable. I watch and I can struggle with what it "means", I can think about it, ponder it ... but in the end, what is so amazing about these moments is how they look. A movie becomes a painting. A movie becomes a dream-space. It's not a realistic medium anyway, it is necessarily subjective. I love it when a filmmaker has the confidence to not just realize that, but to utilize it. It takes guts and a personal visiom.
At one point, Mamo stops off to pick up his daughter who is going to be his female singer in the concert. Because she is a relative, traveling with the men will be allowed. (Don't get me started. Or, all right, get me started. Half Moon takes a delicate stance here - but there are moments in the film, poetic moments, which have as much anger as a feminist manifesto. But it is all in context of the story - which is tremendously important. Remember that Iranian filmmakers work under strict censorship, so they have to be very tricky in how they get their point across. But the situation not just of women in Iran, but of performers, is one of the themes of Half Moon. It is the female voice that can raise the male from the dead - this is Mamo's view, and his experience. He cannot perform without the "celestial voice" of the female. But obstacles pile up in his way - stupid bureaucrats, rigid mullahs, cultural bullshit - that says women are not supposed to perform on stage. Or with men who aren't relatives. Or ... basically do anything besides be a submissive wife and bear lots of sons. But the females in Half Moon are not just "celestial voices", but - at the end - transcendent angels of mercy - tapped into some chord in the earth that men can never hear.
But men need them. A woman can help the man hear that chord. She is necessary to him. Bahman Ghobadi is amazing in how he puts this into the film, and lets it just sit there. The censors were probably too dumb and too literal to pick up on it.)
Mamo's daughter is a schoolteacher, and her village was submerged in a flood. Everyone lost their homes, and the school was destroyed. So she has now set up a school, with desks and all, on the side of a hill, and that is where Mamo finds her, when he comes to pick her up to take her to Kurdistan. This is what I am talking about: it is a brief scene. Mamo's daughter cannot leave to go to the concert, she knows she is leaving her father in the lurch, but the schoolchildren need her. They all seem to be girls, in vibrant different colored chadors, sitting quietly at desks ranged across the hillside, with snow-capped mountains in the background. It's an incredible image. It stops the heart to some degree. There is no "meaning", it is just beauty and poetry. I loved it. Mamo's daughter senses, she just senses, that she will not see her father again. They embrace, and she weeps. But Mamo must go on.
And now he has an idea. He needs a woman. He needs a singer. A famous Kurdish singer named Hesho has been imprisoned with 1334 other "woman singers" in a village carved into a mountainside. They have been exiled there. Who knows why. For performing with men other than a relative, for performing at all, for performing Kurdish music which was not allowed ... who knows. Hesho has a "celestial voice" and is, in her way, as famous as Mamo. All of Mamo's sons try to talk Mamo out of going to 'get" Hesho. It is illegal, first of all. She has no permit. She is not allowed to travel with them. They all could be arrested. Mamo doesn't care. It is her voice he wants, he needs. Perhaps, on some level, he hopes that her voice will raise him from the spectre of death.
Watching the approach to the "village of exiled singers" is one of the most amazing pieces of film-making I've ever seen. Mamo approaches from afar, and it's almost difficult to see the village, since it's built into the rock. And in the distance, you can hear the singing voices, echoing through the mountains. All female. A celestial sound indeed. Mamo's son asks, "Who is that singing?" Mamo answers, "It is all 1334 singers. They might as well just be one singer." A truly potent evocation of cultural warfare and the results thereof. It took my breath away. Reminds me of Stella Adler's great instruction to actors and artists: "It is not that important to know who you are. It is important to know what you do, and then do it like Hercules." What happens when what you do is illegal? What happens when you are not allowed to do it like Hercules? Not just not allowed, but imprisoned? To hear the celestial voices of the women floating out of the mountainside village is to ache for everyone oppressed everywhere. But Ghobadi, again, does not hammer you over the head with it. He remains in the context of his story, which is tremendously important. All you need to do is to see the village and hear the women singers, and know that they have been imprisoned there ... and that's all you need. You don't need to add anything. As Mamo enters the village, to go get Hesho, all of the women who have heard of his approach - stand on ceremony. They stand on rooftops, on walls, they do not move or speak. They each hold huge drums, but they do not play. Not yet. It is a ceremonious return. He is a hero to them. He has become their voice. My God. It's such a moving and amazing scene. And, at some unseen cue, all of the women, as one, start to beat on their drums, and sing. It's a sound to make the hair on the back of your neck rise up. It makes sense, if you think like a mullah, that these women would be banished from society. Because if they were allowed to play like that all the time, it would be cause for revolt. In and of themselves, the sounds those women make have one underlying scream: FREEDOM. Dangerous. Mamo strolls through, and then walks back out - with Hesho at his side, a beautiful sad-faced woman with long grey braids. The exiled women crowd around them, making a corridor for them to walk through, banging on their drums, and singing. They cannot leave, they are still imprisoned - but Hesho will represent. Hesho will sing for them.
Hesho is a small part played by the exquisite Hedye Tehrani. More thoughts on her here and here. I strongly urge you to look up this woman's work and experience it. She's a giant star in Iran, and her films very often make it to the international film circuit - she's as big as they come in Iran - but you know, her cache as an actress is definitely not that she is a household name to us in the "West" (which always makes me laugh because if you look at the earth, east and west are all just a matter of perspective - depends on where you are standing, I mean seriously). But she should be known to all of us. She's doing wonderful deep-felt work.
The journey takes many twists and turns, some tragic, some comedic, and Mamo begins to lose faith that they will ever get there. Larger forces appear to be at work, nation-states, languages (you must speak Farsi, not Kurdish, etc.), warfare ... all gathering together to stop the concert from going on. It seems insurmountable. Not to mention the fact that every time they are stopped by a policeman or a border guard, Hesho must climb into the crawlspace beneath the floorboards, hiding from detection. A direct reference to Mamo's death-dreams, and his haunting image of himself looking up out of a coffin. Ghobadi makes that connection explicit. Mamo, an old man, trapped by his own approaching death. Hesho, a woman, and that is her only crime.
The film strikes a lovely balance between comedy and serious drama. The guy who drives the bus, who is filming the entire journey in the hopes that he can sell the tape to Kurdish television, is hysterical. Kind of a buffoon but with a heart so big you want to tell him to protect it a little bit more. I also love the one son who breaks out his laptop throughout the journey, to email so-and-so, or to look up a better way to get there on the Iraqi version of Mapquest. They all have Yahoo email accounts and they chat about them. "I'm at Mamokurdistan@yahoo.com ..." Messing with our preconceived notions. I always love that.
The last 20 minutes of the film were shattering for me to watch. Maybe because of where I am at right now in my life. But I was mopping the tears off of my face.
Bravo, Ismail Ghaffari, Mister actor with no credits ... You absolutely killed me. My desire to see that concert, to have everyone arrive safely, to have it "all work out", was so intense I could barely watch the end of the film. As death comes closer, breathing on the back of Mamo's neck, he begins to hear the music. The celestial chords of his own requiem.
Some of the more spectacular imagery from the film below:
In my continuing tour of contemporary Iranian cinema, I watched Hemlock last night. Directed by Behrouz Afkhami, and starring the wonderful Hedye Tehrani, it tells the story of a mid-level manager (played by Fariborz Arabnia) at a factory in Tehran - who is being bribed to sell the company to a bunch of exiled Iranians from Los Angeles - he will be made CEO if he accepts the bribe, and there's a shadiness to the entire thing. His partner gets in a horrible car accident (there is some speculation that it was NOT an accident) and is hospitalized. Now all of this is basically just prologue and context for the real guts of the story: Mahmoud (Arabnia) has a wife and kids, and lives in comfort in a middle-class suburb of Tehran. He begins to drive into Tehran every day to visit his injured partner in the hospital. While there, he meets and becomes captivated by a nurse in the hospital - played by Hedye Tehrani. Although Tehrani is a giant star in Iran, I only first became aware of her last year when I saw the lovely film Fireworks Wednesday (my review here). I sing the praises of Tehrani in that review, and I'll continue it here.
Hemlock is a melodrama, with serious issues being brought up - but in a kind of ham-fisted soap opera-ish style. If I had to come up with a word, I'd say it was "overwrought". It's basically the story of a man who has an extramarital affair - only in Iran they have a special name for it: "temporary marriage" (or sigheh). It's extremely controversial - and people on both sides of the argument feel very strongly about it. It's one of those weird issues where Iranian feminists line up with the conservative mullahs on the same side. Some feel that "temporary marriage" is akin to prostitution ... others feel that sex is a normal impulse, and people need SOME release, even if they are not married yet - due to whatever reason. "Temporary marriage" is a way to keep all sex within the bounds of legality. Elaine Sciolino wrote an article about temporary marriage which presents the issue pretty clearly. The pros, the cons ... and not just intellectual pros and cons, because, after all, this is not just an intellectual debate. It's an issue that actually affects real people's lives, for realz. I like Sciolino a lot - she wrote the wonderful bookPersian Mirrors: The Elusive Face of Iran (excerpt here) - she can be a bit soft on the regime, I'm not wacky about that - but her book is not primarily a political book (and neither are her columns - although you realize that any issue involving people's personal lives becomes political in Iran - down to the clothes people wear, and issues involving sex, birth control, masturbation ... Whatever. It's political.) I think Sciolino's gift resides (and I highly recommend her books) in presenting the people, in their context ... and yes, drawing conclusions ... but also being able to admit, "You know what? There are things going on here that I can't quite understand.") Temporary marriage is the real topic of Hemlock, but that kind of gets lost in the top-heavy plot, and some scenes which push beyond drama and go into something I would call over-the-top. But don't let that put you off. It's an interesting little film, a domestic drama, really - which confronts the issue of temporary marriage head-on, and how silly it is. It's an affair, plain and simple. His wife back home has no idea that he has a whole other life in Tehran.
Hedye Tehrani plays a modern woman, very unlike the more traditional wife, who is draped in the full black chador. Tehrani wears light flowered scarves around her head, Ray Banz, and long light-colored trench coats. She is independent (although we come to realize that she has a lot more complexity than is first revealed - her father is an opium addict, and she buys him opium on the black market ... she's basically his supplier. So there are these scenes of her careening around in a car with her drug dealer, a nice guy actually - she's smoking, and putting the drugs into her handbag ... It's a whole side of her that her "temporary husband", blown away by her beauty, never sees. Until the end, when it is too late). Mahmoud, who also seems like a modern man, reveals himself as traditional - when he suggests to her that they get a "temporary marriage" - basically licensing their sexual encounter - and she laughs in his face. "You believe in all that stuff?" she says.
A couple words about Tehrani. She is an actress. Many Iranian films use non-actors, and that has its uses - but when you see a script in the hands of an actress, who knows how to create a character, and make a scene happen - and have a subtext ... you can see the difference. Tehrani, like I mentioned in my review of Fireworks Wednesday, seems uninterested in being liked. And that's so rare in actors - especially gorgeous ones, and she's one of the most beautiful women I've ever seen. So far, she has revealed herself, as an actress, as willing to go where the character goes, do what the character does, and not protect herself. She is not particularly sympathetic in Hemlock, although eventually your heart does ache for her. She's a liar. She has not told Mahmoud the truth about who she is, and what her life is like. She makes up a story about being abandoned by her first husband, you know - to "up" the sympathy factor. She sneaks around, meeting her buddy who is a drug dealer. And as the film goes on, the "temporary marriage" she is in begins to grate. And then, not just grate - but drive her out of her mind. She wants to be validated, she wants to be accepted into his life. His wife doesn't even know. Tehrani shows up at their house one day, when he is not there, and sits chatting with the wife, making up a story about how Mahmoud was going to help her get a visa. Mahmoud begins to realize that, by letting her into his life, he has perhaps sown the seeds of his own destruction. He tries to cut it off. She threatens suicide. He pays her a settlement (which is part of the whole "temporary marriage" deal) and she stands in her kitchen, alone, looking at the coins on the counter, weeping. Tehrani is wonderful. The material is not worthy of her - it's all pretty conventional, the way it is filmed ... but I just love watching her act. She's unpredictable. She appears to be alive, rather than acting.
In one scene, she and Mahmoud sit and have a picnic in a park. She teases him about being a good Muslim. He says that yes, he does pray 5 times a day. She seems surprised. The thing about temporary marriage is that - as it is presented - it is little better than a sneaky affair. And she eventually, with the coins on the counter, realizes she is in the role of a whore. But she loves him. In the picnic scene, she asks him if he could teach her how to do the daily prayers. You get the sense that she is not interested in it for religious reasons, but as a way to being close to him. Tehrani is never playing just one thing. There's always a deep coursing river going on beneath her external actions ... she's fascinating to watch.
They have a date that night. She is going to cook him dinner at her house. We see her shopping beforehand, buying produce, and fish ... and then she goes to an upscale clothing store. The first floor has "modern" clothes - you can see that there are colors in the clothes on the racks. But she goes downstairs ... to where the traditional chadors are sold.
To me, this was the most subversive scene in the film (which, like I mentioned, is pretty conventional - and even with the "temporary marriage" thing is basically a Lifetime Movie - Iranian style - about infidelity). Tehrani tries on a black chador, staring at herself in the mirror. We watch the transformation occur - her shape obliterated - but because of the context in which she tries it on it becomes almost unbelievably provocative. She's not trying on the chador because she wants to become more devout, and show her devout feelings. Tehrani plays the scene so that we know she's doing it as a joke. A sexy joke. Mahmoud will arrive at her place, and see a black-clad woman waiting for him, and he will laugh, because it is so unlike her. It's not an expression of religious feeling - it's a costume. It's akin to buying a little sexy Frederick's of Hollywood number and answering the door in that get-up when your lover arrives. THAT is what Tehrani is playing in the scene.
Tehrani slowly drapes the folds over her face, her eyes mesmerized by her own reflection ... At one point, she starts to laugh to herself, laugh at what she looks like, and then, with mischievous glimmering eyes, she pulls the black veil up over the bottom half of her face, so only her eyes are visible. The typical image we have of Islamic women. But look at what is going on in her eyes. She is laughing. She is eager to show off her costume to Mahmoud, because he will think it funny, too.
A pretty ballsy scene, I'm thinking.
The film is drenched in pathos and tears, but once I succumbed to the fact that it was a Lifetime movie - I enjoyed it.
But mostly I enjoyed watching Tehrani at work. She's something else.
Iranian film The Day I Became A Woman (2000), directed by Marziyeh Meshkini (it was her first film, although she had worked as an assistant director before that on husband Mohsen Makhmalbaf's films) won awards around the world, it was a ringing success.
The film is broken up into three stories, seemingly unconnected, but on a closer look, there is a thread tying them all together. The theme is pretty clearly stated in the title of the film, but there is nothing rote or predictable about this film ... I'm a huge fan of Meshkini now, and eager to see whatever she does next. It's stunning. And the last story earns the right to be called Fellini-esque - there are images there that are so arresting that they verge on poetry. It's a dream-space, and there are moments where I couldn't believe what I was looking at. Beautiful!! And the final image of the film ... I won't give it away - you'll just have to rent it. I watched it with dropped jaw. Fantastic. A fantastic debut.
I've been watching quite a few Iranian films recently with strictly Tehrani settings, like Offside (review here), or The Circle (review here). The Day I Became A Woman is set on Kish Island, off the coast of Iran in the Persian Gulf, a spectacular place of white beaches and crashing surf. It's apparently a resort island, a vacation spot for the Iranian wealthy - and a place where it's a bit more relaxed for women to hang out. But the world of The Day I Became A Woman does not show that side of Kish Island. You would never know it was a resort spot from what we see in the film.
The first story is about a little girl on her 9th birthday, the day she is slated to "become a woman". Meaning, she will have to put on the chador, not play with (or talk to) boys anymore, and basically begin her training to become a woman. Hava (the little girl) is a wild urchin whose best friend is a little boy named Hassan. But on this day, her birthday, she has to say goodbye to him as a friend. Her mother and grandmother give her a break, and tell her she can go off and see Hassan, but they put a stick in the sand and tell her she has to be home when the shadow of the stick disappears. Hava races off to find Hassan. Throughout their interaction (they share a lollipop, smacking their lips because of the sour-ness), Hava keeps racing back to check the shadow of the stick. She gets kind of frantic. She doesn't question her "plight", she just knows it's unfair, because she loves Hassan. But you know, she's a kid. She does what the grown-ups tell her to do. Like most Iranian film-makers Meshkini uses a light touch with filming children. She does not overburden them with metaphor and meaning. They are uninhibited, and seem like the most child-like of children in film. Hava does not see herself as a victim of a patriarchal theocratic society. She sees herself as living in an unfair world because she can't play with her best friend. It's no different from other children wailing about how "unfair" it is that they can't sleep over a friend's house on a school night. I'm not saying the two things are equal, of course I'm not - but it's equal in the way it is portrayed. Children are innocent. They may be mischievous, and capable of the full range of human emotions, but they are not aware of the larger societal issues that make life the way it is. And so Hava is pissed at the unfairness of life. She is too young to rebel in any meaningful way, and the whole thing is unFAIR because she wants to go outside and play. She doesn't see purdah itself as unfair. She's too little for that. It's why the first segment of The Day I Became A Woman is so devastating, because Hava is too young to understand. But she will submit, because ... that's what you do when you're a kid. Little Hassan, sucking on a sourpop with his friend, is also an innocent ... he doesn't understand why things have to change so drastically. Yesterday you were my friend and now you can't walk on the beach with me? Why? The use of strictly non-actors gives the first section an almost documentary feel to it. The kids are 100% unselfconscious in front of the camera. They aren't saying lines, they aren't acting at all.
The third story in The Day I Became A Woman (I'll come back to the second one momentarily) shows an old infirm woman going on a shopping spree. She is a widow, she has a little money, and has decided to buy all the things she wanted to buy during her life but never did. Her own things. She is so frail that a small boy pushes her wheelchair around a glittery mall (not her grandson - he is black - and from a couple of comments she says to him, it becomes clear that once upon a time she was in love with a black man, but was not allowed to marry him ... so she feels like the little black boy could be her dream-son). She buys so much stuff that an army of small boys are gathered to roll her purchases down the street on carts. The little woman has pieces of cloth tied around her fingers, to remind her of what she wants to buy. I kept expecting the little boys with the carts to bring them to a house or an apartment complex ... but no ... they take them to the beach. And set all of the stuff up on the white sand. A huge bed. A refrigerator. A clothesline, with pots and pans hanging from it. A free-standing tub. A couch and a couple of armchairs. With the blue gulf beyond. I'm still thinking about the scene, and the amazing images of it. It was stunning. There were moments when I thought of Fitzcarraldo, with the boat going over the mountain. What I was looking at was real, and was obviously really happening. But it had such a surreal edge, and ... I guess I'm used to seeing the same images, just in different movies. Even very good movies. You know, you see apartments, and close-ups of faces, and shots of sunsets. I'm simplifying, but still. In The Day I Became A Woman, I saw new things. A clothesline suspended on two poles that were offscreen, with pots hanging from the line, and empty glass bottles ... the blue sea in the background. The grandmother and two women sitting on the couch and armchair, chatting, surrounded by white beach. Then, odd scenes: the little boy putting on makeup in the mirror. Smearing lipstick over his lips. Another little boy trying on what was obviously the grandmother's wedding dress once upon a time. A little boy dancing on a beach, wearing a wedding dress. Seriously, there were so many fantastical stunning images I couldn't process them at first. And it's all in service to that particular story. None of it seems imposed ... which is why "Fellini-esque" is the term thrown around in every review. It's artificial, the set-up is way out of the everyday - it's surreal, the classic sense of the word ... but with a rough edge, it's not a static image - people are alive in that surreal scene. It's a theatrical psychological moment - and film is the perfect medium for something like that. The whole thing took my breath away.
But it was the second story that is the masterpiece of the film. As monotonous as it will sound, I could have watched an entire two-hour movie of that particular story-line. It was brilliantly executed.
It starts with a sandy expanse of land, and a man on a horse. He sets off galloping across the land, and he rides like a bat out of hell. The horse is a gleaming black stallion, and the vision of the black stallion, and the white sand, and the man in the billowing white shirt - riding the horse as it flies across the earth - is stunning. And it sets up the mood and the pace for the entire storyline. The first story was somewhat static. We remained mostly on Hava's little face, as she chattered up to Hassan in the window, and they shared the lollipop. But this one is all movement. The camera never stops moving - until the very very end ... and as it slowly glides to a stop, it is shattering, because you know it's over. As long as there was movement, there was hope. I have no idea how they got some of these shots. The camera is obviously on a truck, going alongside the galloping horse at the same speed, but there is no jostling, no ups and downs or jerks ... it is a smooth and fast tracking shot, and at times it pulls back and swoops around in a curve, as the man takes off in another direction, giving us an even wider perspective. The choreography of the camera in episode 2 is remarkable. We aren't sure at first what the man is doing, but it is pretty obvious from his body language that he is not out for a leisurely ride. He is looking for something. And then in the distance (the land is absolutely flat), we can see small figures - moving in a horizontal line ... He gallops towards them. (Again, the camera is never once still. We never have a shot with the camera on the ground, and the man galloping by it. It is always in movement and so are the characters ... it's breathless, we are just trying to keep up with everyone. I need to own this film just so I can watch this sequence over and over again.)
As the man approaches the distant figures, we can see the sea beyond them, blue-green, crashing surf. There is a road along the sea. And along that road bicycle black-clad women, 40 of them, 50 ... pedaling furiously, black chadors billowing behind them. It's a stunning visual. We can hear the whizzing of the bicycle wheels, and the crank of the gears, and the little ringing bells when one wants to pass. It's a race. The women look identical, black cut-out silhouettes against the sea, but all wearing jeans and sneakers underneath - and this, like the man on the horse, is not a leisurely ride. They hunch over the handlebars, making themselves streamlined, small, their veils flying up and out behind them like crazy bat wings. Sometimes one surges ahead, and you can feel the others start to work harder, like, "Oh shit ... where does she think SHE'S going?" I just couldn't get enough of what this all looked like. Fantastic. There is obviously, again, a truck with a camera zooming along beside the women bicyclists - but there's no bumps, just a smooth fast procession. But then sometimes, we're in the thick of the race, and there's a handheld camera, and we can hear the heavy panting breaths of the women, the whizzing wheels, the clink-clink of bicycle bells ... the camera moves in front of the procession sometimes, almost leading them on, pulling them forward. The blue surf crashes on their right, and the desert spreads off to their left. The man on the horse makes a beeline for the race, and gallops along beside the women, peering at each one.
But of course they are indistinguishable from one another, because of the veils. He has to move a bit ahead of each woman, and peer back at her face. To see if it is her. It eventually becomes clear that his wife, Ahoo (played by the wonderful Shabnam Toloui - she has two lines, I think - "Hello" and "No" - after all, she's in the middle of a bicycle race, she's not up for chatting - but she's fantastic. Tragic.) has disobeyed his orders to not participate in the bicycle race. He's furious. All of this takes place as he gallops alongside her, and she pedals furiously, glancing up at him occasionally, but never hesitating, never faltering.
He's shouting, at first about how she hurt her leg and she promised him not to bike anymore with her bad leg. She ignores him. There's something frantic in her face. He soon starts to shout about the shame she has brought to him, and that if she doesn't stop the bicycle race he will divorce her. Ahoo keeps pedaling. Finally, he realizes it will do no good, and he gallops off. We think that might be the last of him, but sadly, it is not.
The race careens on at breakneck speed. There's a rivalry between Ahoo and another woman, who's listening to a Walkman as she rides. They are neck and neck. All we hear is her breathing, and the sound of the gears and the wheels. Sometimes a crash of surf. When music finally comes into the segment, near the end, it's horrible. Your heart breaks. You know it's a sign. An eerie portent. But up until then, it's human, and clashing, and fast, and pumping legs and panting breath. Life!
Her husband is not going to give up easily. He gallops back, this time with the village mullah, also galloping on a horse. The mullah gallops alongside Ahoo, shouting at her that that is not a bike she is riding, but "the devil's mount" and she is bringing shame to her family ... Ahoo keeps riding. Faster, faster, never stopping. The two give up and gallop off. We know now that they will be back.
Ahoo is so pumped full of adrenaline, and rage, and competitive spirit, and fear, that she surges ahead, far ahead of the others. She is a singular small black figure, all alone on the road. We still hear only her panting breath and the bicycle wheels.
We grow to hate the sound of hooves and whinnying, and the sound is brought in beautifully - sometimes we hear the hooves and the whinnying before we see the horses, and our hearts sink. The husband keeps returning, with other figures, all male, galloping on horses. Her father. Screaming at her. He tells her he will count to seven, and then she will stop bicycling. "Our tribe doesn't divorce!" He threatens to sic her brothers on her.
Ahoo, crazily pedaling, becomes one of the most heroic figures I've ever seen in cinema. She has no lines. She's an awesome athlete, first of all, with great endurance. She persists, she pushes on, she ignores the shouts and taunts ... but there are times when you can feel it's starting to get to her ... and that's when the other women start to catch up to her, and zip by her. This wakes Ahoo up to her situation, and she pushes forward, a burst of energy and speed.
Again, the camera is never still. It swoops ahead of the race, plunges itself into the middle of the race, sometimes catapults itself far back, so we can see the figures against the sea ... I eventually realized that the speed of the camera in the entire sequence reflects Ahoo's commitment. I became invested in how fast that camera was moving. As long as we zoomed along in a blur, there was hope.
Made even more tragic when you know that Shabnam Toloui, the actress, was banned by the Islamic clergy once it was discovered that she was a member of the Baha'i faith (the Baha'is are persecuted in Iran, sometimes even executed). She was banned from working in film and television in Iran, and finally couldn't take it anymore and moved to Paris to pursue her acting career. I wish her the best of luck. She's terrific.
The bike race/stallion pursuit is an absolutely spectacular and exciting bit of film-making - not just for a director's debut, but period.
Brilliant on every count.
Some screenshots below - but they just can't capture the sense of speed, and movement!
Jafar Panahi's 2000 film The Circle is a shattering piece of work portraying the restrictions on the lives of women in Iran. Panahi's most recent project was 2006's Offside, a comedic film about a group of tomboys in Tehran dressing up as boys and trying to get into a soccer game (my review here). In Offside, Panahi treats the restrictions (women not being allowed to go into a soccer stadium) with humor, pointing out how unbelievably absurd it all is, even laughable. The tone of Offside is light, frantic, and hilarious. Sometimes the best resistance to a stupid rule is to laugh at it. It may not change the rule, but it certainly takes the edge off.
In The Circle, that hilarious atmosphere is gone. Panahi pulls no punches, from the first devastating scene to the last devastating image. But, in true Panahi fashion, the issues are not presented in a maudlin manner. They don't need to be. The tendency to be "maudlin" is for the privileged, those who have space and freedom to feel self-pity. In Iran, there is no need for such indulgences. Panahi launches us into the chaotic loud streets of Tehran, using handheld cameras, which circle the participants in the drama (there are very few hard edges in the film, very few angles, something to take note of when you're watching it: look for all of the circles and curves in the camera movements and set-ups). It appears that the film crew is just grabbing shots, filming their actors in the midst of a real-life busy street, and indeed, as always, Panahi uses mostly non-professional actors for most of the roles. Panahi is not interested in detailed character analysis, he says as much himself. He is more interested in "types". Characters are drawn in bold primary color strokes, and we can recognize them within moments: the crybaby, the bitter one, the sassy one ... Panahi casts based on looks alone, a bold and courageous move, because often people who look right can't act for shit. Panahi has great confidence in himself as a director. He does exhaustive casting sessions, casting a wide net, and he also has been known to just approach a woman he sees in the park, who has the perfect look - and asks if she would be willing to do a screen test. (This was how he found the wonderful Nargess Mamizadeh, one of the main characters in The Circle. She's the one in the poster. She's not an actress - at least not professionally, but her looks - her scrunched-up beautiful face, with thick eyebrows, was just what he was looking for for that character). She has a black eye throughout the entire film, and it is never explained. It gives an unspoken backstory to the character, and makes us wonder from the get-go: Where did she get that? What is she running from?) Panahi only used two professional actors in The Circle, the rest were people he found who had the right "look". It's quite amazing, because everyone is great in the film. There are no weak links. There isn't a huge gap between the non-professionals and the professionals. Granted, Panahi is not looking for big cathartic scenes or delicate character development - something that is best in the hands of professionals. He's going for the message, and for the hyper-realistic atmosphere. And also, the pace. As with most Panahi films, the pace is breakneck.
The women of The Circle tear their way through the streets of Tehran, hurtling up against obstacles, hiding in alleys, crouching behind cars: the sense of being hunted is palpable. The women are right to be afraid.
There is not just one narrative in The Circle, we get many. Sometimes they intersect: we're following one group, and then suddenly another woman walks by and we find ourselves following her, and she takes up the storyline. Panahi's points are clear: this is not just about one individual woman. It's about Women(TM) and the circle of restrictions that make up all of their lives.
The film opens starkly. The screen is black, credits rolling. Throughout, we hear the sounds of a woman in labor. She's screaming and grunting and howling, and the nurse and doctor say encouraging things. In the last moment of the credits, there's a pause, and we then hear what we have been waiting to hear: the indignant yowls of a newborn baby.
Next thing we see is a blinding white wall, with the back of a woman's head standing there, she's draped in the full black chador. You can hear the screaming newborns behind the wall. There's a tiny slot in the door that can be opened by the nurses and our chador-ed figure knocks on the slot. A nurse's head peeks out. The black chador asks for the status of Solmaz's baby. The nurse says, "It's an adorable little girl!" Black chador has no response. Says again, "A girl?" Nurse says, "Yes!" and closes the slot. Black chador doesn't move. She stands there, still, a domed black figure.
She knocks on the window again. A different nurse opens it. "Yes?" Black chador says, "I'm here for Solmaz ... I know she had her baby but I don't know what kind ... could you check?"
A chill went through me at that moment. If you ask enough times eventually you'll get a different answer? Suddenly a girl will become a boy if you ask a different nurse?Apparently the ultrasound said it would be a boy, and everyone had heaved a sigh of relief in the family. Phew! A boy!! (I won't go into how despicable I find that attitude, in any culture.) But now, with the baby being a girl, it is valid grounds for divorce, the in-laws will be furious, the black chadored lady is the woman's mother, and for her, there is no joy at being a grandmother.
In one simple moment, Panahi indicts his entire culture. De-valuing women is a national concern.
As Panahi's film goes on, fast and furious, with girls in chadors running through bus stations, yearning for a smoke, huddled in doorways peeking out, hiding, terrified, trapped, you begin to see another side to the "Oh no, it's a girl" phenomenon. It is quite subversive, and really comes to fruition in the heartbreaking story of the single mother planning to abandon her 3-year-old daughter on the streets of Tehran. She says she hopes that her daughter will be adopted by a rich family who might take her away from Iran: "How can she have a future here? What is there for her in this life?" The woman had tried to abandon her child 3 times before getting up the guts. It rips her heart out. Watching her scenes made me go back in my mind to that first scene, with the open dismay at the baby being a girl. The critique is circular, as well as the structure of the film. With the world welcoming your birth with disappointment, what chance does a girl have? A baby absorbs love. Why wouldn't a baby absorb that other unwelcoming attitude as well? We may be horrified and pissed at the attitude, but by the time we get to the woman abandoning her daughter, we have to admit: we see her point.
The Circle is not a soap opera-ish litany of complaints, and the fact that I even have to make that clear is just evidence of how privileged I am. 5 or 6 women skulk through the streets of Tehran. They are unconnected (or so we think). It becomes clear that all of them have one thing in common: they have spent time in prison. The repercussions of such a stain on your life are long-lasting (in this country and in others!) Only in the world of The Circle, you can't be sure that these women didn't do hard time for, you know, hitchhiking, or letting their scarves fall off their heads, or driving in a car with a man who is not a relative. These aren't people who've murdered someone.
A couple of them have just got out. A couple of them broke out of prison with a larger group and are now on the run. One was in prison, but she is now a nurse, and married to a Pakistani man who has no idea of her past, and he can never know. He doesn't know why she won't go to Pakistan to visit his family, but she knows she will be stopped at the border.
These are women who are on their own, even when they are married, and the restrictions of their society makes it nearly impossible for them to survive and be self-sufficient. They need to travel with IDs at all times. They cannot travel alone. They cannot board a bus without a male companion who is also a relative. They cannot check into a hotel by themselves. It is outrageous. The Circle is titanically angry. The pace of the film is frantic. Nobody has time to reflect, or cry tears for themselves. Things are urgent. The police are everywhere.
One of the women comes home once she gets out of prison and it is clear that her brother means to do her harm because of the shame she has brought upon her family. She flees. But where can she go? She has no money. She can't check into a hotel. She can't jump on a bus and move to another town. To make matters worse, she is pregnant, and not married. She wants to have an abortion. This is presented with no euphemism, no judgment. Her lover was executed. What is this now-homeless woman supposed to do? Her family members are just as dangerous as the authorities. She has nowhere to turn. The baby must be gotten rid of.
One woman spent 2 years in prison and when she got out found that her husband had taken a second wife. She is grateful to the second wife, because the second wife took care of her kids while she was inside, and we meet the second wife, and she seems like a nice woman. But the betrayal is clear. NOWHERE is safe.
Meanwhile, it appears that everyone in Tehran is getting married on that particular day (Panahi's ironic sense of humor coming into play). Cars decorated with flowers and streamers meander by, in a long happy parade, we see a nervous groom spilling water on his nice shirt, we get a brief glimpse of a veiled bride in the back seat.
What is there in marriage that can offer sanctuary? This question is not asked overtly in the film, but it doesn't need to be asked. All we need to see is the procession of blushing veiled brides in the backseats of cars, viewed by women on the sidelines who have nowhere to turn. Even when they are married. Marriage is no protection.
One of the things that Panahi is so good at, (and I noticed this in Offisde as well), is that on an individual level - person to person - things aren't so bad all the time. Man and woman can greet one another without all of those restrictions between them. The sales guy in the shop in the bus station, who helps Nargessa with her purchase, teasing her about her boyfriend, and doesn't she know what size he is? The bantering is good-natured, easy, friendly. In Offside we had the characters of the guys hired to guard the girls, and we watch as the girls slowly break down the guards' authority, and finally the guys just succumb to the fact that this is a stupid rule, and we're all soccer fans, and Iran just won, hooray!! The girls did not cower in fear at the sight of the males. They basically thumbed their noses at them. Even the spectre of the morality police and their scary van doesn't dim the girls' spirits. Or if it does, it is just because now they can't hear what's happening in the game in the stadium.
So tyranny - and a "regime" - can never so atomize a population that human beings cannot connect. The regime may try, and boy, they do - and perhaps in extreme cases like North Korea, the totalitarian atmosphere has gone down into a cellular level, hard to know, but Panahi, in his subtle way, shows how the restrictions are not just bad for women, but bad for men, too. Because aren't we all just human beings? And aren't women our sisters, mothers, wives, sweethearts? Don't we, as men, love some women? How can we let them be treated like this? Women aren't a scary "other" - not face to face. They're just people we either like, want sexually, love, or are indifferent to. But the regime cannot let this freedom of thought stand, and so morality itself is policed. And of course morality means (in Iran, and elsewhere, like her): "How Women Behave". That's it. That's all morality is. If women would just act like LADIES, and keep their LEGS CLOSED, and did what they were TOLD, so that no man would ever be confronted with his own desires and have to actually negotiate them, and NAVIGATE them responsibly, as opposed to denying them outright, we wouldn't have such problems in our society! Because sex is at the heart of the morality issue, women are the focal point. They bear the brunt of the responsibility. It's been true since Eve took the fall. In Iran, women can't be allowed to drive in cars with men they aren't related to. What would happen next? Open anarchy!
But like I said, Panahi is not a black and white kind of guy. He messes with our assumptions and preconceived notions. In this wonderful interview with Panahi (highly recommended), Stephen Teo writes:
Like the best Iranian directors who have won acclaim on the world stage, Panahi evokes humanitarianism in an unsentimental, realistic fashion, without necessarily overriding political and social messages. In essence, this has come to define the particular aesthetic of Iranian cinema. So powerful is this sensibility that we seem to have no other mode of looking at Iranian cinema other than to equate it with a universal concept of humanitarianism.
When a woman's hair tumbling out of her headscarf becomes a national problem, it concerns all of us. And so while the men in The Circle are few and far between, they also are omnipresent. The women are either running from men who want to trap them and punish them, or mourning men who have also been persecuted by the regime. The circle continues.
The evolution of the film's journey is clear. We begin with a black and white image: black chador against white wall. Quiet and still. No movement. But soon we are out on the streets, and then we have nothing but movement, for most of the film. People running and waiting anxiously and hiding and whispering and hugging. At the end of the film, we meet a girl who has been arrested for prostitution (probably), although it is made to sound like she was just hitchhiking. We have never seen her before. She's a brand-new character. She's been hauled out of the car and is made to wait for the morality van to show up. She's kind of a hottie, truth be told, with sassy red lipstick. She calls the cop "honey", in a contemptuous way.
The van arrives, and she takes a seat. She goes to light a cigarette and she is told there is no smoking in the van. The issue of smoking is an ongoing theme throughout the film. Everyone wants to smoke, but nobody can, for this or that reason, and she, at the very end, is the only one who actually gets to the point where she can light up. I saw an interview with Panahi and he was laughing, saying, "In the West, of course, smoking is seen as dangerous - but here, in this film, smoking is seen as the ultimate freedom." The one other prisoner in the van is a man, and he cajoles the guards to let him smoke. They cave, say "Sure". All the men light up. The girl glances around her (oh, so it's okay that they smoke, and it's not okay that I smoke?), and with a "Fuck this" expression, she lights up. For the rest of the drive, the camera is on her. The men all talk to each other, bantering, laughing, whatever, it's unimportant the topic or subject matter. She has a flowered headscarf on, her face is impassive, she stares out the window, and smokes. It's a long scene. It struck me, as I watched it this last time, how quiet and still the film got at the very end. As still as the scene that started it off. She's a statue in profile. Her situation is frozen. Stasis.
What will be next?
Panahi says in that interview:
Coming back to your first question: why is Iranian film so beautiful? When you want to say something like this and then you add an artistic form to it, you can see the circle in everything. Now our girl has become an idealistic person and thinks that she can reach for what she wants, so we open up a wide angle and we see the world through her eyes, wider, we carry the camera with the hand and we are moving just like her. When we get to the other person, the camera lens closes, the light becomes darker and it becomes slower. Then we reach the last person, there's no other movement; it's just still. If there's any movement, it's in the background. This way, the form and whatever you are saying becomes one: a circle both in the form and in the content.
An important film. Banned in Iran (naturally), but "it" got out. The Circle got out and found its audience worldwide. Because of bootleg DVDs and illegal satellite dishes, everyone in Iran has seen The Circle. In reference to one of Panahi's other films, Offside, there were protests outside of soccer stadiums last year, with women holding up signs saying "WE DON'T WANT TO BE OFFSIDE", demanding that they be allowed into the game.
Obviously the authorities are right, in their warped world view, to ban Panahi's films. They are subversive, in the truest and best sense of the word. Movies like this have the potential to change the world. "How far that little candle throws his beams! So shines a good deed in a naughty world."
So perhaps The Circle is like a message in a bottle. A time-traveler. A flashlight in the darkness (a little candle throwing his beams far!), saying to future generations who hopefully will not have the same struggles, "Here is how we lived back then. Here is how it was for us." Panahi bears witness. He bears witness.
Suicide is (and always has been) a cross-cultural taboo. No religion is indifferent to it. I think the ancient Egyptians might have been a culture that thought it was a valid way to go, if you wanted to escape this life and move on into the next (I think I learned that in my humanities class a billion years ago) ... but in general, suicide is a big fat no-no. Everywhere. I'm not talking about political suicide - ie: kamikaze pilots and suicide bombers. That's something different, although, in its own way, it totally upends the natural order and sends those facing it into total chaos and fear. Who would do that?? Who would make that choice?? Etc. If you choose to commit suicide, then you basically don't get into heaven.
Due to the openness of our society, we can debate these things. No one is indifferent, but the word itself can be spoken and acknowledged. This is not the case in Iran - and so Abbas Kiarostami's Taste of Cherry, in a which a suicidal man drives around a giant construction site - trying to find a laborer who would be willing to bury him after he committed suicide - is a brave and almost political film. It's weird - perhaps Iranians would not agree with this, but I am an outsider: It seems that most films, even domestic dramas, are political, when seen in the light of the theocratic society they live in. The role of women, the strict morality rules, all of that top-down mullah stuff ... which affects the lives of everyday people to such an extraordinary degree ... That's REALLY what "the personal is political" means. So again, I'm an outsider and I think I might read a lot more into these things than might be there ... but I'm not quite convinced of that. Taste of Cherry was a massive international hit, and won the Golden Palm at Cannes in 1997. It was a HUGE deal. Kiarostami was allowed to attend the premiere at Cannes, which was also a huge deal - again, with the political implications in even things like movie premieres ... He was given a standing ovation by the very tough crowd there, who won't hesitate to boo you off the stage if they don't like what you've done (just ask Vincent Gallo!!). Taste of Cherry is an enormous feather in the cap of the Iranian film industry.
I read some of the reviews at the time and wondered if those folks had seen the same film I had. I'm a fan of Iranian film, as should be obvious by now - but Taste of Cherry left me a little bit cold. And for me, just the fact that Kiarostami was addressing a hugely taboo subject in his culture, is not enough for me to give the film a pass. I think the context is interesting, don't get me wrong, and I will watch pretty much anything that Iran generates - but films must also be judged on their own merits. Does it work as a story? I think about a film like Fireworks Wednesday (my review here) - and how much it works, just being itself - good story, good characters - Or a simple story like Children of Heaven - which is one of my favorite movies of all time ... and it just works as a story, first and foremost. The details of the story - the sibling relationship, the lower-class family's financial worries, the way the kids hide their plan from their parents, how clever they are in trying to get away with it ... just every bit works. It's funny, it's touching, it's suspenseful, it's poignant, and it ends with a running race through Tehran that is so exciting that the audience I saw it with at The Angelika (with Kate) burst into cheers periodically - as our hero surged ahead, straining to come in second. He is the best runner in his age group - but in order for his plan to work - he has to come in second. How on earth would you make that happen?? God, I love that movie. It's one of the best "family films" I've ever seen.
Taste of Cherry reminds me of reading a stilted translation of Hafiz or Rumi, Iran's major poets. The poems come off as almost treacly. Trite. I have pretty good translations of both poets, and I can kind of get why they are national heroes ... but it wasn't until I went to a Persian poetry reading at Bowery Poetry Club a couple years ago - and heard the folks there recite Hafiz and Rumi in Farsi (by heart, mind you) - that I could actually hear the poetry. And I didn't understand a word they were saying!! But it sounds gorgeous - in a way that it just canNOT when translated into English.
So I'm wondering if outsiders projected onto Taste of Cherry something that was not actually there. That's my experience of it, anyway - and it looks like Roger Ebert felt the same way. He writes:
Defenders of the film, and there are many, speak of Kiarostami's willingness to accept silence, passivity, a slow pace, deliberation, inactivity. Viewers who have short attention spans will grow restless, we learn, but if we allow ourselves to accept Kiarostami's time sense, if we open ourselves to the existential dilemma of the main character, then we will sense the film's greatness.But will we? I have abundant patience with long, slow films, if they engage me. I fondly recall ``Taiga,'' the eight-hour documentary about the yurt-dwelling nomads of Outer Mongolia. I understand intellectually what Kiarostami is doing. I am not impatiently asking for action or incident. What I do feel, however, is that Kiarostami's style here is an affectation; the subject matter does not make it necessary, and is not benefited by it.
Mr. Badii, the lead, played by Homayoun Ershadi, drives around, peering out his window at the various laborers he sees - quizzing them on their financial status, do they want to make some extra money?
There's something creepy about how this is played, and I do think that part of it is effective. Until we know what he wants, he either seems like a sex offender or a serial killer. He comes off as totally nosy. Some of the guys he talks to say to him, "Buzz off." Others get sucked in, because they're curious about what the job would be, and they need the money. He finally reveals his plan - to a young Kurdish soldier he picks up. They're parked on a mountain of earth in the industrial wastelands of Tehran - and Mr. Badii gets out of the car and points to a grave he has already dug on the side of a hill. He wants the soldier to drop him off there, and come back at 6 the next morning. He wants the soldier to then call out his name twice. "If I answer, help me out of the hole. If I don't answer, shovel earth on top of me." He has sleeping pills, which he will take. His plan is to die in the earth. The grave is already dug - he just needs the burial. Naturally, he runs into some resistance when he tells this plan. The Kurdish soldier (played by a non-actor - wonderful) balks. "I can't shovel earth onto someone," he says. Mr. Badii assures him that he will be dead - he won't be burying him alive! No, no, no ... the Kurdish soldier flees, running down the mountain of earth, away from Mr. Badii and his wack-job proposal. I don't blame him.
The film is made up of 4 or 5 of these proposals - to different folks ... and in between Mr. Badii circles through the dirt, driving, staring out the window, looking for someone who will agree. The scenery is monotonous - not just because of the monochromatic desert color-scheme - but also because it's the same spot, seen over and over and over again. I thought the film itself was shot beautifully, with long views of Mr. Badii's car, driving along with piles of dirt towering up over him. There are flocks of crows which take flight in front of his car, cawing indignantly. Mr. Badii stares up at them.
The symbolism is a bit heavy-handed and trite. There are no buildings where Mr. Badii drives. Just mountains of earth and a dirt road cut into the side of it. Mr. Badii is surrounded by earth. The scenery looks like one giant grave. There's even one shot where he stands on the side of the road, watching a huge tractor dump earth into a giant hole - and his shadow is seen against the other side of the hill, with the shadow of the falling dirt projected beside him. A gorgeous shot, but so obvious I thought - Come ON.
But my main issue with the film was in the performance of the lead. He is mainly seen in profile, as he drives along - and I just didn't feel the underlying despair at all. We are never given a reason for why he is suicidal. We don't know anything about Mr. Badii, and I'm not saying I needed it spelled out for me ("My wife died. Therefore I am suicidal") - but give me something. And if you're not going to tell me why, then the actor playing the part had better make me believe that he has a damn good reason. That he means business. I am thinking of Sissy Spacek's haunting performance in 'Night Mother - where she announces, in the first 5 minutes of the film, "I'm going to kill myself at the end of the night, Mother ... and I'd really like to enjoy our last night together." ???!!! Anne Bancroft, as the mother, of course goes apeshit. The thing that is chilling about that script is that the daughter does not give a reason. She's epileptic, if I remember correctly, she is divorced, she can't hold down a job, she lives with her mother - she has social problems. You know, she's had a shit hand dealt to her - but nothing outrageously out of the ordinary. She is not suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. She's not even really that unhappy. As a matter of fact, having made the decision to commit suicide cheers her up, she feels a lightness, a sense of purpose. She is happy with her choice. Her mother begs her - why? why? why? What can we do to change it? What are you unhappy about? Let's make it better! The daughter is basically like, "Nothing needs to be changed. I'm just opting out of life, that's all." She is calm, happy, and ready. She's done. She's done with life. So there's an example of how you don't need to have an A to B set-up, you don't need to bash me over the head with motivation or Freudian impulses, or childhood trauma. But give me SOMEthing. Mr. Badii seems pretty indifferent. His main concern is to get someone to bury him - and yes, I totally got his growing desperation to find someone to take on that task. That was quite real. But since we are given no background information about him - nothing - we don't know if he has a wife, kids, what he does for a living ... NOTHING. And the actor isn't revealing a deep chord of either despair or intense joy (like: I've made my decision to die, and I feel good about it) - He is not looking for advice, he doesn't want a lecture ... His performance left me cold. I wanted to tap into his experience, I wanted to have a more complex response to him ... but I just didn't. He's not a whiner, he doesn't over-act, he doesn't gnash his teeth or weep and wail. What I saw was a man driving around in circles, looking out his window, occasionally talking to people on the side of the road. That's it. If the actor had been actually playing something ... something that I got, anyway ... it might have been a different film for me. But he didn't appear to be playing anything. It's my opinion that he's gay and can't deal with it. I'm not just making this up out of thin air, there are clues along the way - and I've got to believe that Kiarostami knew what he was doing in that regard. When he sets off to go kill himself, we see him in his apartment - through the window. He's in silhouette. He walks around, washing his face, putting his coat on, ready to go. There is no wife, no children - at least not that we see. He lives alone. Why? What's going on? Then, there is the opening sequence with the Kurdish solider - before we know what Mr. Badii wants - and there is definitely an impression given that he has picked up the soldier and will pay him for sex. He is vague about his intentions, purposefully so - and Kiarostami allows the ambiguity to just sit in the air for a while ... until we learn more. The soldier tries to get more information out of Mr. Badii - what kind of job is it, what does he want him to do - and Mr. Badii replies, "It's your hands I want. Not your tongue." If this is an accidental bit of subtext, then boy, that's some accident. Obviously he's saying, "I don't need a lecture, I don't want you to talk ... I just want you to pick up a spade and shovel some earth..." Perhaps it's a matter of faulty or inaccurate translation, but I honestly don't think so. I honestly believe that that impression is given for a reason. Mr. Badii never divulges what his problem is (and of course, in Iran, being gay is even more unspeakable than being suicidal) ... but I'm going with the gay theory, and I'm sticking to it.
He eventually picks up a guy who works as a taxidermist at the National Museum. Kiarostami is known for working with non-professional actors and children - and many of the people picked up by Mr. Badii show Taste of Cherry as their only credit. They did not try to act. Sometimes there is awkwardness - like they speak over each other, and have to repeat themselves - the way it is in real conversations - but stuff like that is usually edited out. Here it is not. It actually didn't bother me. I liked it. The passengers he picks up (the Kurdish soldier, the seminary student from Afghanistan, and the Persian taxidermist) are, on the whole, played in a lovely, understated, truthful way. They don't seem like amateur actors. They seem like real people.
So the taxidermist is not an actor, but he has a giant monologue as Mr. Badii drives him through the mountains of earth. There is a trite-ness to the sentiments expressed here, but the down-to-earth way in which he plays it - makes the monologue worth the price of admission.
Taxidermist: I'll tell you something that happened to me. It was just after I got married. We had all kinds of troubles. I was so fed up with it that I decided to end it all. One morning, before dawn, I put a rope in my car. My mind was made up. I wanted to kill myself. I set off for Mianeh. This was in 1960. I reached the mulberry tree plantations. I stopped there. It was still dark. I threw the rope over a tree but it didn't catch hold. I tried once, twice, but to no avail. So then I climbed the tree and tied the rope on tight. Then I felt something soft under my hand. Mulberries. Deliciously sweet mulberries. I ate one. It was succulent, then a second and third. Suddenly I noticed that the sun was rising over the mountaintop. What sun, what scenery, what greenery! All of a sudden I heard children going off to school. They stopped to look at me. They asked me to shake the tree. The mulberries fell and they ate. I felt happy. Then I gathered some mulberries to take them home. My wife was still sleeping. When she woke up, she ate mulberries as well. And she enjoyed them too. I had left to kill myself and I came home with mulberries. A mulberry saved my life. A mulberry saved my life.
Mr. Badii: You ate mulberries, so did your wife, and everything was fine.
Taxidermist: No, it wasn't like that. But I changed. Afterwards, it was better, but I had, in fact, changed my mind. I felt better. Every man on earth has problems in his life. That's the way it is. There are so many people on earth. There isn't one family without problems. I don't know your problem - otherwise I could explain better. When you go to see a doctor, you tell him where it hurts. [Long pause.] Excuse me, you're not Turkish, are you? [Mr. Badii shakes head] Here's a joke. Don't feel offended. A Turk goes to see a doctor. He tells him: "When I touch my body with my finger, it hurts. When I touch my head, it hurts, my legs, it hurts, my belly, my hand, it hurts." The doctor examines him and then tells him: "You're body's fine, but your finger's broken!" My dear man, your mind is ill, but there's nothing wrong with you. Change your outlook. I had left home to kill myself but a mulberry changed me, an ordinary, unimportant mulberry.
Near the end of the film, we suddenly see the film crew filming earlier sections of the movie - the soldiers running by on drills, stuff like that. We see the camera guys setting up, it is as though we are watching a video monitor, we see Kiarostami standing by his camera man, we see the lead actor hand a cigarette to Kiarostami ... Nothing in the film has set us up for this kind of commenting-on-the-fact-that-we-are-making-a-film style. Nothing. It's fine if you comment on the fact that you're making a film - it's very much in vogue!! - but this? It doesn't fit, and seems to serve no purpose. What we are being told is: It's only a movie. What you just saw was a movie. To say that this approach does not work in this particular film is a vast understatement. To my mind, it's a cop-out and a huge error. The film collapses in on itself immediately, when we are pulled out of it. Kiarostami should have stuck to his guns, and just ended the damn thing, on its own merits. I was left hanging in the wind, by that ending, and it doesn't serve the film at all (regardless of what interpretation or spin you put on it).
The last shot of the film is self-explanatory, I suppose, but it's baffling to me why Kiarostami made that choice. Much of Taste of Cherry has to do with distance - so I get that part of it. We get long long vistas, of Mr. Badii standing on a dusty dirty hill, staring into the smoggy panorama of Tehran. We see FAR in this film. Even when we're in deep close-up with Mr. Badii driving, out of his window you can see vistas and dirt-mountains ... Nothing is claustrophobic or urban here. There's lots of building going on, but there are cliff-faces and you can see across ravines - and the people look like miniature figures, the cars like Matchbox cars. Sometimes we just get a long long shot of Mr. Badii's car circling the dirt cliffs - and we hear the conversation going on in the car from that remove. Much is seen via long long distances.
So there's obviously a style being used here, an approach - which doesn't serve the film, in my opinion, although it is quite beautiful to look at (screenshots below. Just gorgeous). And so to suddenly get a meta-moment when we are reminded that this is a film we are watching, and we see the director in sunglasses, and hear the walkie-talkies buzzing ... it's jarring. It doesn't work. At all.
The more distant we get from Mr. Badii, the more we realize the hollow performance at the center of Taste of Cherry.
If you're interested in Iranian cinema, and you don't know much about it, then you really have to see Taste of Cherry - it has its place in the history books, just because of the brou-haha surrounding its tour of the festivals - the fact that it was so honored (and that Tarantino is such a fan-boy about Kiarostami) is a big deal, a groundbreaking moment in the late 90s which catapulted Iranian film into the world limelight. And rightly so. Kiarostami is one of the major players in Iran, and his work needs to be dealt with on its own terms - because he's that good. I love Ten - and it has a gimmick to it as well (much of Kiarostami's films are gimmicks, experiments) - but in that case, it works. The gimmick is set up from the start, and it ends up serving the film as a whole, instead of detracting. So to me, Taste of Cherry falls short, for Kiarostami - even though it is the film that he is most known for. I applaud any addressing of a taboo subject. I applaud any courageous confrontation with censorship. Taste of Cherry has all of that. But, in the end, it did not have the courage of its convictions. It reassures us: It's only a movie, it's only a movie.
I know that. I know it's only a movie. Pointing it out to me adds nothing.
And I just wish I cared more!
Deserted Station is a haunting quiet (at times too quiet) film based on a story by Iranian great Abbas Kiarostami, and directed by Alireza Raisian, it tells the story of a husband and wife (the wife is played by the wonderful Leila Hatami, who starred in Leila - my thoughts on that film here), on a pilgrimage to Mashad (presumably from Tehran). They bicker a bit in the car. She tries to tell him a story about the nastiness of their neighbor, and he brushes it off. She says, "You don't understand the poisonous darts women can throw at each other." The anecdote has something to do with having children, being pregnant. We get the sense that there might be trouble in that arena, for this couple. He is a photographer. He continually stops the car to shoot the scenery, and when his wife takes a nap, he takes pictures of her sleeping.
It's never expressly said (because things are rarely expressly said in Iranian films) that the husband is kind of useless - but the impression is given that he's intellectual, distant, always looking at the world (and his wife) through a camera lens. And then when their car breaks down, he is unable to fix it, and has to go for help.
it is as much about the windy desert landscape as anything else. The scenery does not need to be editorialized, or shot in a specific way - it is just there - the salt plains, the mountains, the towns cut out of the rocks ... All Raisian needs to do is place his characters in that context, and feelings are evoked.
The town is full of women and children - no men. All of the men work in the cities as laborers, and the kids never see their fathers. Maybe once a year. Many of them dont have mothers either. Mahmood wanders around, for a while, asking for help, but the women keep walking by, many of them struggling under heavy loads. We see him dwarfed by the landscape. He is a solitary black-clad figure, surrounded by bleached tan rocks, crumbling doorways, strange unearthly rock formations.
Finally one woman stops, and she tells him to go find Feizollah - he should be able to help. She asks him where he was headed. He tells her to Mashad, on a pilgrimage. She looks at him and says, with no provocation, "You were not called then." Meaning: it's meant to be that you would break down here. The saint did not call you. Mahmood doesn't quite like that comment, you can see him balk. There's trouble in paradise. What does it mean to 'not be called'? Feizollah is found. He's a great character. The only man left in the town, he has taken it upon himself to set up a school for the village children. He has procured notebooks. He teaches classes in history, dictation, mathematics. He also cuts the children's hair and nails (which is what he is doing when we first meet him). He takes care of these kids. Many of them are staying with relatives. They have been forgotten. "Deserted", to coin a phrase. But Feizollah gives them structure to their days. There is recess. Class. He also is a mechanic. And he also ran for office - for a city council seat or something like that. Mahmood gets the story there, and sees the campaign photos that Feizollah has circulated - tells him that the photos are amateurish, he should get new photos done - and Mahmood would be happy to help. This gives Feizollah a launching-off place for a diatribe about politics, which - seen in the context of Iran's political landscape at this time, the censorship, journalists in jail, random crackdowns on students, etc. - is breathtakingly courageous. "The people don't want 'real'," says Feizollah. It's all about the "spin", and the image. Feizollah and Mahmood ride to where the car is broken down on Feizollah's motorbike. The situation is more complicated - Feizollah will need to dismantle the truck, go for parts, etc. etc. He suggests that Mahmood and his wife go catch a nearby train to Mashad, and come back later for their vehicle. They don't want to do that. Eventually, it is decided that the wife (who has no name, not that I can remember, anyway) will go back to the little town - and be a substitute teacher for a day - Feizollah is worried about leaving the kids unattended. She will do that - while Mahmood and Feizollah deal with the broken-down car.
So that's what happens. The wife finds herself surrounded by children (and God. You just love all of them. They're typical for Iranian films - which often have to do with children. They are scrappy, real, rambunctious - and don't seem like actors. They probably aren't actors. They are a GANG, these kids. Awesome).
There's one little girl who is deformed, she can't walk, and she is at the head of her class. The other kids in the class take turns carrying her around in a little backpack. They're all quite casual about it.
We don't know, at first, what is going on with the wife, although we know that she is sad. Something's wrong. We got that from the first conversation with her husband, when she was trying to make him understand how much the neighbor gets under her skin. Near the end of the film, she says to her husband (a great line): "I don't know myself yet. Don't tease me, Mahmood." He gives her a look, suddenly gentle, and backs off. Okay. I won't tease. Mahmood is so self-involved that he can't really fathom what his wife is going through (we learn that she has had two miscarriages, and is pregnant yet again, but of course filled with fear that this one will end as well). He confides in Feizollah about the situation, and brushes it off, like, "You know how women get worked up about these things." Feizollah is much more of a philosopher about things. He beams with happiness when he tells Mahmood he's been married 10 years. He says that having a daughter has taught him patience, and that is a good thing. He also knows that life is possible without having children - children aren't everything. Mahmood seems kind of cut off from this type of conversation. It's not that Mahmood is arrogant, or openly a dick. It's just that he's detached. He hides behind his work and his intellectualizing of emotional events.
In the town there is a sheep in labor - she has been in labor for two days. Feizollah is worried about it - because it is his sheep, and his animals is how he scrapes out a living from the land. The women take over caring for the sheep. There is also a hugely pregnant woman in the town, and it is feared that she will give birth at any moment as well. The wife is surrounded by birth and impending birth. Everyone assumes that she must have an entire brood of children - she's married, after all! She hides her pain about her fertility within her, but it starts to take over the whole film.
The film switches back and forth between the two men - and the wife back with the children - and there's a bit of monotony in this structure that doesn't quite serve the story. It drags. It's meant to drag, I know that - this is not about its plot - it's really just a day in the life ... but it's important to stick it out, to tolerate the draggy sections - in order to get to, first of all, the rawly beautiful end sequence (wow. I was surprised by how moved I was - beautiful use of music, too. Beautiful.)
And second of all, to a section where the kids are playing hide and seek with her - in two deserted trains which sit on an unused section of track. It's where they play. The trains sit silent, open, and they are falling apart, rapidly being eaten up by the desert. The windows are broken, the doors and steps are rusted - there are compartments, old-fashioned North by Northwest compartments - lots of great places for kids to hide. The trains sit side by side. There are no kids in sight. But you can hear them calling to the wife, their voices echoing creepily - "Over here!" "Look over here!" "We're behind you!" The great thing about the story-telling style of Iranian films is how they avoid, at all costs, saying anything on the nose. They do not lead you by the hand. I suppose part of this is because of having to deal with censors - the film-makers try to get away with as much as they can, without ever saying "Here is what this is about." Sometimes that leads to opaque or rather boring stories - you wait for the crisis, or the conflict ... but it doesn't come, or it is so buried in symbols that you can't even "get it" (although most Iranians would probably get it immediately). There are sections of Deserted Station where all that seems to be going on is the wife giving dictation classes to the students, and then letting them go off and have recess. There does not seem to be any urgency. We are not sure what we are looking at. But the hide-and-seek in the trains section is absolutely gorgeous - it's like a poem, so yes - its language is symbols, metaphors. What we are looking at is a grown woman, walking between two deserted trains, as all the kids hide in the trains, calling out to her tauntingly. The scene goes on for much longer than we would expect, and there is no resolution. She doesn't break down, she doesn't speak out what she is thinking. We just see her wandering around, no kids in sight, but they are heard in the air, coming from every direction ... and we already know her pain about children ... so her search for the kids, her fruitless search through the empty dilapidated trains, is excruciating. There's a moment near the end of the scene when she walks into an empty compartment and sits down. We aren't sure what is happening. At that moment, we can see out the window - a train hurtling by - on the working tracks 100 yards away. The sound of the movement fills the air, and slowly, the camera closes in on her face. She sits there, still, and her eyes are closed. But Leila Hatami is such a good actress that I could feel her melancholy and her psychic pain vibrating on the surface of her skin. The eyes are so important for actors. Here, she does not use them, and she does not need them. Her sadness about children radiates out of her face, as the train shrieks by in the distance.
It's a stunning sequence. Strangely powerful, and it retains much of its mystery. It's hard to talk about. Because I want to talk about "what it's about" ... but that's not really the point with a movie like Deserted Station.
The film has stayed with me.
Dariush Mehrjui, director of Leila, is a figure who embodies the entire 20th journey of Iranian film. Check out his stunning bio here. His films have often been festival favorites, garnering great international acclaim. His journey as a film-maker is a personal one (as can be said about most Iranian directors - they make what pleases them, and hopes it will pass muster with the regime) - he tackles issues that matter to him (the struggle of post-revolutionary Iran to find its way) - and also the always-thorny issue of women in Iran. He is fearless, when you know what he is up against. In Leila he brings up the unspeakable, and examines it, delves into it, lets the events play themselves out - without too much intervention on his part. The implications are enormous, his critique implicit.
Leila (played by Leila Hatami) and Reza (played by Ali Mosaffa) are newlyweds. (Also, I just love that these two actors are married in real life. The rapport you see between them is genuine.) And on Leila's birthday she discovers that she is infertile. So begins a year of testing, and medical consultations, and increasing desperation. Reza tries to assure Leila that he did not marry her for babies. He doesn't even really like kids. He loves her. But unfortunately, his family feels otherwise. Reza is the only son in a family of daughters, and it is not just inconceivable (bad pun) that he will not bring forth a child (preferably a boy) but not an option. This is a modern-day story - these are not peasants, or illiterate third-world people. They live in luxury. They have cars and good jobs. But Reza's mother (a horrifying woman, a true Medusa, everyone turns to stone when they look at her - she's played with a relish by Jamileh Sheikhi) insists that Reza WILL have a child, and he must take a second wife. It is this journey, the fight over the second wife (which implies the fight in Iran between tradition and modernism), that makes up the true story of the film. So not only does Leila have to deal with the fact that she cannot get pregnant, an issue that most women have strong feelings about - regardless of their culture - she has to deal with the fact that Reza's family believes she needs to be put aside, for other concerns. She will be "first wife", everyone reassures her, but there will, indeed, be a second wife. Reza has all kinds of feelings about this, too - because his match with Leila is a true love match. She is the only woman for him. But the family will not be denied. And so Leila and Reza find themselves in an upside-down world, a world that sometimes is horrifying, insensitive, and yet what are they to do? They fight, they make up, they find the humor in the situation (which is truly amazing to watch - and makes you ache for them ... because you can feel their love, the fact that they can crack up about how absurd it all is) ... but in the end, what is there to do? Should they run away? Where no one knows them, where they can just live without the pressure of their families to be a certain way? Leila and Reza return from the infertility doctor with the bad news, and are at odds with one another. They don't know where to look, what to say. We have already seen them previous to this scene, laughing and talking and making fun of things ... so their silence is deafening, and we feel the loss of their earlier comradeship. Leila says to Reza, "What should we do tonight?" Reza opens the fridge and looks in, contemplating, and replies, "We could stay home, whip up something to eat, moon over each other ... and then maybe watch a movie?' Just that one line alone ensures that I will be invested in this relationship and what happens to it. I love them both.
The movie has an overall impression of lightness, even with the scenes of deep grief and solitude. There are countless scenes of Leila and Reza (husband and wife) driving the highways - we see out the front windshield - sometimes it is blaring sunlight, we see the mountains to the north of Tehran, the bustling city streets around them ... and sometimes it is dusk, the sky a deep dark blue, the streetlamps at the edge of the highway stretching off into the distance. Reza and Leila's heads silhouetted against the landscape, as they chat about what happened during the day, the various "second wives" they have interviewed. It's chillingly normal.
There is a great heaviness in their world, events have moved beyond their control, and both of them are caught up in it - to family obligations, to their own sense of truth, to their desire to make the other happy (which is one of the major fault-lines of the film) ... but the look of the film, the feel of the montages, the way characters fade in and out as they walk down hallways, showing the disorientation at the heart of grief, that you literally do not know where you are at times, you lose substance, you become like air ... is all very light. You yearn for someone (other than Reza's monstrous mother, that is) to put a foot down, to say, "No. Here is where we stop. Here is the ground beneath our feet, and we will go no further." But what happens when your desire to please overrides all other considerations? What happens when depression - deep and acute - fogs your vision? Where does happiness lie? In yourself? In your spouse? Can one spouse be happy when the other is in despair? How do we stay connected, in the midst of our shared loss?
Leila and Reza try to fight it out. But at times they are working at cross purposes. And in the world depicted in Leila, a young married couple is never alone. Their families are chattering in their ears at all times, whatever is going on in the relationship is everyone's business, the phone rings off the hook throughout the film. You cannot say No to your family. You cannot screen your calls. There would be hell to pay. The atmosphere is suffocating. At times I wanted to say to Reza or Leila, as they sat in their house, mourning, fighting, silently enduring - and the phone kept ringing - I wanted to say, "Let the machine pick up! Don't answer!" But no. They can't.
In their world, their parents - and aunts and uncles - all have a right to intervene, to interject themselves, to ask nosy questions, to talk incessantly about sperms and eggs and Leila and Reza's sex life- as though it is anybody's business! Leila and Reza are not given a chance to interpret their own experience and figure out what they want to do, with the news that she is infertile. It is a raw wound. For both of them. Terrible news, painful, shatteringly so. But the way it is treated by their families (not all members, but certainly the most vocal) as a problem to be solved, with no sensitivity, everyone barges right into the center of the action, discussing Leila's "barren womb" and Reza's frustrated sperm, no holds barred. An infertile woman is public property. A family crisis.
It's a painful film, but with many moments of great joy ... and I was left, at the end, with hope. But then again, I'm certifiable.
Leila and Reza are happy. We see a series of moments in their lives, shot Cassavetes-style, with very little editorializing. We just see moments, out of context, but they add up to a whole, an impression more than a factual representation ... a montage-effect of an entire relationship. We see Leila and Reza having a candlelight dinner at home, and cracking each other up over nothing. She bursts out laughing, he wants to know what is funny, she can barely speak, which starts him laughing, which makes her lose it all over again. They enjoy each other.
We move on. Moments are not dwelt upon or analyzed. Reza shows up at the door of their lovely house with random ridiculous gifts, the sole reason behind them to make her howl with laughter. Which she does.
In these simple scenes, we see that both members of this couple are devoted to pleasing the other. Even if it means being silly. One of their favorite things to do is to make shish kebab, grilling it outside in their backyard. They chop up the vegetables and meat together, Reza mans the grill, Leila mixes the yogurt sauce, and it's nighttime, cool, they are alone, in their love and their simple pleasures of marriage.
Again, we don't get many scenes of this - just 3 or 4 at the beginning - and that is all we need. The relationship is set up. The love between them is established (without anyone ever saying, "I love you.") Most of what they do together is laugh. They like to go out to eat. They like Japanese food. You know. Regular newlywed stuff.
You do get the sense of their families hovering on the outskirts. It's a loud noisy gossipy world, of busybodies and nosy questions. Leila and Reza, before they get the bad news, treat it all with humor and tolerance. Within a week of their getting married, everyone asks when they will get pregnant. The film opens with Leila's birthday - and Leila and Reza going to parties - first at his family's house, and then at her family's house. We can see the differences between the two families: Reza's family is a bit austere, they live in a towering marble mansion, with elegant green walls, and artwork everywhere, a bit chilly. Reza's mother and his aunt run everything - they remind me a bit of Regan and Goneril from King Lear. Reza has three sisters, formidable women in their own right, married themselves - and they end up becoming important allies later on. Reza's poor father is henpecked and overrun, he says things like, "I have no idea what is going on in this house" as the women race around, chattering and making plans ... as he retreats to his study.
But he is nobody's fool, as we discover later. It is just that he has learned the power of silence and withdrawal. But when he does speak? Wow. You better listen. Not only does he hold a part of himself separate from his overbearing wife, but he maintains a slow still pool of kindness and compassion, within him. It is a cruel world, and Leila and Reza will be overrun by it ... but Reza's father sits back, and looks at Leila, with kindness. He can see what she is going through. He can see her pain, and he feels for her. And you realize that that is no small thing. That compassion is actually everything.
But what is, essentially, so chilling about Reza's family - and I think the house Mehrjui chose to place them in is indicative of a larger point he was making - is that they are the ultimate in privileged. They have great wealth. They have cell phones and also social power (any young girl would be thrilled to be a "second wife" marrying into such a family). And yet, when push comes to shove, this ancient and cruel tradition of polygamy emanates from his family. Not Leila's, who are more traditional, certainly not as wealthy. Leila's family, when they find out about the second wife, are horrified, and furious. We might think (in our mistaken preconceived notions) that it would be opposite - that Leila's family, their lower class status - would be the ones clinging to "the old ways". That modernism and technology, in and of themselves, bring enlightenment, and represent a break with the past. But no, that would be too easy - and Mehrjui is not interested in the easy way out. We make assumptions. And Mehrjui shows us where we are wrong (but again, without a heavy hand. All of this is implied - you just have to look at Reza's parents house in comparison to Leila's parents ... the difference is right there).
At Leila's birthday party, Reza's mother - who reminds me of a fat black widow "s" - with her big bug-eyed glasses and cooing dominating smile - comes up to the camera, which we are to understand is Leila's point of view - and whispers that Reza needs to have a son, and soon.
Or Reza's older sister walks up to the camera and whispers that Leila needs to make sure Reza doesn't get too fat, that she needs to feed him such and such ...
Anything that has to do with Reza is up for conversation. He is the King, the golden child, the beloved son who has been babied and pampered by a houseful of domineering women. The fact that Reza has any balls at all (and he does, he really does) is amazing. His main goal is to make his wife happy, and to be a good husband. But this one goal ends up butting against his mother's goals for him. And Reza is caught.
At first, I didn't like the convention of actors talking right to the camera, it seemed too obvious ... but by the end of the film, as it used again and again, it took on a different aspect. It is always the women who speak directly to Leila ... and their comments and "gentle suggestions" (which are actually commands) begin to add up to an overriding sense that Leila is not alone in her own head. She cannot make up her own mind ... the voices of the others take over. Sometimes Mehrjui puts an echo on those voices, to show that there is a reverb. And eventually, all these black-veiled women end up feeling like a Greek chorus, prophesiers of doom or revelation. And Leila can't ignore their whisperings. She lies in bed, by herself, and hears them still.
You can tell, in these early scenes, despite the fact that Leila and Reza obviously have an open and loving relationship, that man is King. Reza is the beloved only son. Leila is just a conduit for his seed. It is her job to produce. Get crackin', dear.
We move on from the party at Reza's parents house to the party at Leila's parents house. This house is a more traditional Middle Eastern house - one-story - with a tall gate blocking the garden and house from public view. The tables are low to the ground, and everyone sits on the floor. The kitchen bustles with activity, and the men in the family sit around eating, laughing, making dirty jokes, and teasing the women. One of the men plays a guitar (or a Persian version of such) ... accompanying the raucous family gathering with music. The walls are lined with books (how I yearned to browse those shelves!). Leila has a younger sister, who is mischievous and still single, she is Leila's best friend and confidante. There is also an uncle (played by Mohamad Reza Sharifinia) who is one of my favorite characters in the film - Uncle Hossein. He wears a long robe, he has a flowing beard, he is single, and makes huge pronouncements about what his wife should be, and everyone laughs in response. "She should be beautiful and educated and rich ... but she also shouldn't talk too much!" Everyone howls, and says, "Who would have you, Hossein??" There's a nice easy feeling here, with these people. They cook together, eat together, sing together, and Reza is accepted as a beloved member of the family.
That man right there is Uncle Hossein. He is a breath of fresh air.
The honeymoon is soon over. Leila and Reza have not gotten pregnant, and so they go to see a doctor. The hospital is cold, clinical, and empty. We see Leila and Reza walking down a hall together, and they look so small, dwarfed not only by the building, but by their new circumstance. The doctor is female, glamorous, unsmiling, with a gauzy white chador. She is from another world, the world of medicine, and certainty, where words like "ovum" and "progesterone" and "ovaries" are thrown around, as though they are not knives, cutting deeply into someone's personal experience. It's not her fault. She's a doctor. But Leila and Reza sit and listen to her, realizing what is ahead of them - fertility treatments, maybe artificial insemination, a long road ... and the doctor's voice goes into an echo, leaving the two of them disoriented, and alone.
Tests are done. Leila and Reza are not even able to wait in peace, their phone rings off the hook - Reza's mother and his witch-like aunt - wanting to know what the prognosis is. They continuously sound the same refrain, to Leila: "It can't be Reza's problem. We've never had such a problem in our family. Reza is fine, it must be you who is the problem." Leila shows amazing forbearance, listening to all of this. Reza is starting to break free from his family, in the face of all of this, you can feel it. He ceases caring (at least openly) about having a child. What he wants is to be with Leila, and to have a happy marriage. He insists he doesn't care about having kids, and you know what? I believe him. Not that he wouldn't welcome children, but he's certainly not about to divorce Leila if the problem is hers. That would be unthinkable. Through the course of the film, one of the things that becomes apparent is that, for Reza, there is only one woman in the world. And that is Leila. If she departs, then so does his chance for happiness. I am sad for Leila, and what she has to go through. But in many ways, I am sadder for Reza. He is the one who is truly caught, and he is the one who is going to lose. Ali Mossafa, the actor playing Reza, is wonderful. Infertility happens to both parties in a marriage. And he is willing to give up the dream of children to have a happy wife again. He says to her once, the saddest line in the film, "I want the old you back."
They learn that it is Leila who is infertile. So commences a year of exhausting upsetting tests and medication and ovulation and herbal remedies ... Leila and Reza visit an orphanage, just to see what the process would be for adoption. They're not sure if it's what they want to do, but they are weighing all the options. Children play outside like maniacs and Leila wanders among them, looking at them, laughing, sometimes not laughing, taking them all in, trying to see how it would feel to her to take one of them, not her own, home. As she wanders through the children, Reza stands off to the side, watching her. I'm not sure what I would say that I see on his face. It's not just one thing.
Love for her. Sadness for her. Sadness for himself. Trying to gain strength for whatever they have to face. Trying to reconcile his dreams for himself with the reality in front of him. It's a lovely moment.
And the pressure is growing, from Reza's side of the family. At a family picnic, Reza's mother takes Leila aside and says that it is time to start thinking about Reza taking a second wife. Leila wouldn't be so selfish as to deny her her posterity, would she? The second wife would merely be a baby-maker, she wouldn't usurp Leila's position ... Leila must think about it, and must also convince Reza that this is the right step. As a person living in America, that scene is the most difficult to handle. It's foreign, it seems cruel and savage, it seems that Leila is not being considered, that her pain is not being taken seriously. Her pain is selfish. Stop whining about being infertile - what is important is that Reza procreates. Leila tries to say to her mother-in-law, "Reza doesn't really care for children ..." and Reza's mother pooh-poohs this. Of course he does. He is just saying that so Leila won't feel bad.
She's a horrible woman. Insinuating, undercutting, dominating ... Leila "owns" what Reza's mother says to her. She begins to look at Reza in a new way, and wonders if it is true ... is he just placating her? Will he regret staying with her? Will he regret having no children? Will he grow to hate her? Reza's mother assures her that this is her future. Leila begins to lose her grip on herself, and her own sense of her relationship. Even though Reza says to her, in private, "Don't listen to my mother. She's bossy and full of shit. I don't care about kids. I love you. I want you. I don't want a second wife."
There are heart-aching scenes of Leila praying by herself. Sometimes there is a voiceover, her quiet voice saying, "God, why are you punishing me? Have I sinned?" Other times, there is just silence, with the echoing of the muezzins in the distance, calling people to prayer. Leila, though, prays alone. It is her own grief. She feels cursed by God.
And on a superficial note, Leila Hatami is one of the most beautiful women I have ever seen, and the camera adores her face, caressing its curves, mulling upon her chin dimple, she's got a face made for the movies - gorgeous, evocative, yet asymmetrical, and totally itself. When she cracks, and starts to weep, it is even more terrible, because her beauty is so singular and serene, so attention-getting in and of itself.
And so begins the battle, the main battle of the film, which has multiple tentacles. There is the growing pressure from Reza's mother and aunt, to start interviewing second wives. There is the increasing strain between Leila and Reza. Reza makes himself clear - he does not want a second wife. He would rather be alone with Leila, childless. A baby (ie: sex) without love is meaningless to him. Leila begins to sway to the other side, she begins to put the pressure on Reza to start thinking about a second wife. It is mainly so that she can X herself out of the picture, and martyr herself. Her pain is so huge that she feels it cannot be born any other way. Again, this may be incomprehensible to us, in this society - but Mehrjui makes the point here that it should be incomprehensible to anyone with a caring heart. In his way, his film is a revolutionary document. A clarion call for equal rights and for compassion. Leila's response to the savagery is understandable in that context. Who could bear it? She cannot bear seeing Reza unhappy and she wonders if Reza might be happier with a child. Reza begins to cave. He is overrun by women (as usual). He is furious about this. There's a great scene where Leila and Reza fight and Reza explodes, "Why hasn't anyone asked me MY opinion about this? Why doesn't anyone care what I am going through?" It's a valid question.
There's a tragic scene where Leila and Reza sit at home, drinking tea. Suddenly Reza picks up his empty cup and looks down at the tea leaves and begins to read his fortune out loud. "There is a man who is so in love with a woman that he will do anything to make her happy. The man wants to run away with her, where they can be alone in their love." Leila picks up her cup, and reads her fortune. "There is a woman who only wants her love to be happy. She will do anything for him."
But by this point, Leila and Reza have different definitions of what will make the other happy. Leila, even in her misery, thinks that what Reza's mother says is true. And that what will make Reza happy will be to have a second wife, who will bear him a child. Reza thinks that what will make Leila happy is to turn her back on all of the whisperings from his family, and re-enter their lives together, as a couple, childless or no.
Reza's sisters, who, up until this point, have been a mystery, descend upon Leila one afternoon. There are three of them. They clomp up the walk, chadors billowing, and they look vaguely terrifying. I think it was Guy de Maupassant who described fully veiled Arab women as looking like "death out for a walk". To me, that's what Reza's sisters (even though they are not Arab) look like as they tramp loudly and seriously towards Leila's door.
But then ... amazingly ... they sit Leila down, talk right to her (to the camera) and tell her to get a backbone. She needs to say to their mother, "Take a hike, lady." They warn her that if she accepts the proposition of taking another woman into her home, she will lose Reza forever. They bring forth arguments - valid ones. A man can't help but fall in love with a woman he makes love to. Especially if she bears him a child. Could you let Reza fall in love with someone else? Reza is a man - but he is dominated by his mother - don't let her run all over you! Stand up for yourself, say NO - tell her in no uncertain terms that the second wife thing is OFF. Reza is depending on YOU to stand up for yourself and for your marriage! He is only succumbing because he thinks YOU want it!!
So suddenly, "death out for a walk" becomes a welcome collective voice of humanity and sanity. I love those women. They had kept quiet, out of deference to their mother and Reza for a while - but finally decided: You know what? This is nuts. Let's go talk to Leila.
But they do not convince her. Leila says she has "turned to stone". She becomes annoyingly passive, and hands the reins over to Reza's mother. Reza says things to Leila like, "I wish you would scream at me and tell me that you would never accept a second wife ... I wish you would stamp your feet and say No!" But she doesn't. In a sense, she leaves him alone in it. A very selfish act. But understandable, nonetheless. Her guilt is huge. She looks at his sad worried face and knows that it is because of her.
So Reza's mother and aunt begin to propose possible women as second wives. Leila is bound to secrecy and told not to tell her family. Which is so unethical and sneaky, and of course only what we should expect from Reza's bitch of a mother (who, in the end, gets what's coming to her - in one of the funniest shots in the whole film. I laughed out loud and clapped when I saw it, thinking, "Ha! Serves you right, lady!!")
Reza and Leila drive around Tehran, to go on these ghoulish "interviews". Leila is dropped off in a public place, and she wanders the streets, or in the park ... waiting for Reza to come back from his interview and pick her up. It's all so absurd. Leila can hardly believe what is happening to her. Reza is not enthusiastic about any of it. He makes it clear that any possible second wife must be "cleared" by Leila first. Otherwise, no go. But you can sense Reza's dread. He drives off, leaving Leila alone.
And the funniest and most wonderful things start to happen on their long drives home, as Leila asks Reza about each woman he had to meet. These are my favorite scenes in the film, these drives. Leila asks for a report - "Okay, so tell me everything. What was she like?" And Reza starts to regale her with stories - about one woman's facial tick, and one woman's cheeky rude manner, how one of them was pissed that he planned on staying in Iran, how one never spoke but her father grilled Reza on his financial situation ... how one of the women blurted out, "So your wife can't have kids, right? You should divorce her, and marry me ..." ... All of these crazy stories, and they are not told in a gloomy way, but as ridiculous comedic set-pieces. Leila listens, and laughs hysterically - saying stuff like, "Did she really say it like that?" Or "Come on, you're exaggerating ..." In a creepy way, not totally explainable, Leila and Reza become closer during those drives, making fun of these poor prospective second wives. I love that! It's not "rational", and it's a bit beyond the pale ... but don't we, as humans, sometimes behave in the weirdest of ways, especially under duress? Reza does an imitation of the bitchy mother of one of the girls, and Leila cracks up. It's like they're in it together. They're in it together. I cling to that, watching the film ... still feeling that somewhere, beneath all of it, they are holding hands, maintaining that original bond. A lovely touch, those scenes.
I love the one dinner scene, at home, when Leila starts to tell Reza about one of the prospective women that Reza's mother wanted him to meet. She says, "Her father is a colonel in the army." Reza glances up, deadpan, and says, "A colonel in the army?" Like: my second wife will be a colonel in the army? His joke takes Leila by surprise, and she starts cracking up - and then begins a long goofy scene of the two of them making this prospective wife more and more grotesque: "Maybe she will be bald." "I wonder if she will have an artificial eye." "I think she might have two artificial limbs." By the end, they are both crying with laughter.
You rarely need to have actors say the words "I love you" in order to convince us in the audience that they are in love. In fact, it is better to NOT have them say "I love you". The "Maybe she'll be a gimp" and the "I bet she will have a big gold buck tooth" scene says, clearer than any other kind of language: "I love you, dear." "And yes, I love you."
And what wonderful film-making that is.
I will not tell you how the film ends. All I can say is that it is a searing unforgiving examination of a situation that affects the lives of millions of people - and also a window into a world that remains somewhat mysterious to those of us on the outside. But Leila is not opaque. It is not the closed walls of the Middle Eastern houses, with private life safely ensconced beyond view. Mehrjui takes us back there, into that world, into the lives of these people, struggling to do the best they can, to be their best selves, and to cope with the cards that God has dealt them.
5 or 6 years ago, Iranian film director Jafar Panahi was headed off to a soccer game at Azadi Stadium in Tehran. His 10 year old daughter begged to come with. Females are not allowed to go to the stadium to watch soccer games. It is the rule. Panahi explained to his daughter - No, you cannot ... it is the law that you cannot go. It's a stupid law, but it is the law. But she begged. Panahi was not about to stay home - he wanted to go to the game - so he struck a deal with his daughter. He said, "Okay - we'll go - and we'll see if we can sneak you in somehow. But if they catch us - you have to come back home, because I want to go to the game." His daughter agreed. Of course, they get to the security gates at the stadium, and immediately the guards said, "Nope. She can't go in." As agreed, the daughter walked off - in the direction of home - and Panahi went on in to his seat in the stadium. About 10 minutes later, he looked up - and saw his daughter strolling down the steps towards him. She sat beside him. He was gobsmacked to see her and asked, "How did you get in?" And she said, "There is always a way."
That comment ("There is always a way") was the germ of the idea for Offside, Panahi's 2006 film about a group of 6 girls who dress up as boys and try to get in to see a soccer match in Tehran.
The girls are not trying to sneak in to see just a soccer match - but THE soccer match in 2005 - when Iran played Bahrain and won, therefore qualifying for the World Cup. Much of Offside was filmed in real-time, during that game. The celebrations you see at the end of the film were actual celebrations. Panahi filmed with handheld cameras much of the time, since he did not have permission to do what he was doing ... but since it was a national event with media there, to cover the soccer game, he was able to blend in, and nobody wondered who that guy over there was, filming things. Offside feels like a documentary in many ways, there are no "extras", no set-up interiors ... it's all out in the open, with the sound of the stadium roaring in the background.
Panahi is known for his documentary-like films, much of which take place out in the streets of Tehran. He doesn't like to do domestic dramas because when you film inside a house - because of the restrictions placed on actors - you cannot have it be realistic. For example, in real life - a woman comes home, hangs out with her husband and children - and she takes her veil off. She sits in her own home, and doesn't need to be veiled. But because it is a FILM, the woman then has to be veiled at all times, even privately in her own kitchen. Panahi doesn't like that. It grates on him, film should be as real as possible. So he likes to shoot out in the streets, he likes to use unprofessional actors - people who are right for the part, look right, whatever ... Most of his films have to do with restrictions anyway - and he is truly inventive, in how he goes about doing what he's doing, working under such conditions, trying to get around the censors, and the moronic Director of Culture, or whatever his title is. But he still gets into trouble anyway.
Panahi's film Crimson Gold was being considered for an Academy Award nomination - but one of the requirements of the Academy is that any film under consideration must have been screened for at least one week in its native country. Crimson Gold had not been screened at all. It hadn't made it past the censors (it was too "dark"), and the Dipshit of Culture refused to distribute it at all. Sony wrote letters to the powers-that-be in Iran, mullahs and bureaucrats, begging them to screen it for one week only - so that it could be in the running for an Academy Award nomination. (First of all, Kudos to Sony for that.) Sadly, the answer was a resounding No - and so Crimson Gold couldn't be on the short list. Panahi has had many notorious moments such as that - and he is always on the outskirts of being in trouble, somehow.
I love his stuff. It has a real-time feel to it. He rarely uses professional actors. There is a rawness and an honesty to the performances - and he takes credit for that (in a good way). He believes that it is the director's job to make sure the actor feels confident enough to give the performance. So if an actor is bad, unprofessional or professional, the director shares much of the blame. And Panahi tells the actors that right off the bat, especially the unprofessionals - those who have never worked before - who say to him, anxiously, "I don't know how to act!" He reassures them - Yes. You do. I will not let you look bad. You are perfect for the part. You're going to be great - and if you're not? It's MY fault, not yours.
Iranian directors need to find ways to get around all the malarkey, the draconian censorship, the fact that 30 groups of people (not artists) have to sign off on the film before it can even be considered for distribution. So if you're portraying a guy in the army - you have to send a copy of the film to the damn army and say, "Is it okay how we are portraying you?" And so it goes. Many Iranian films do not open at all in Iran - but have much success abroad. But now, with the bustling traffic in bootleg DVDs - most people in Iran are fully aware of the vibrant awesome films their countrymen/women are making. And that's great. Their film industry is something to be proud of. (Excerpt here about Iranian cinema).
Offside did not open at all in Iran, for obvious reasons (I mean: the reasons are obvious if you think like a mullah.) Offside is not subtle. It is a truly subversive film, in the best sense of the word, a sharp-edged piece of political and social art - but on the other hand - it's not ponderous, or intellectual, or heavy-handed. Quite the contrary. Offisde is hysterical, exuberant, fun, exciting - there are moments at the end when I found myself on the edge of my seat, and then found myself bursting into applause, along with the girls.
Panahi makes his points though. He makes his points. So much so that at a soccer game last year, a group of Tehrani women showed up at the gates of the stadium, wearing white scarves, and holding up big signs saying, "WE DON'T WANT TO BE OFFSIDE". Pretty awesome.
So obviously, despite the fact that those in control did not allow Offside to be shown - it was available, bootleg, on the sidewalk, whatever. Even though it made no "actual" money, as in tickets sold, it's one of Panahi's most successful films - he thinks everyone in Iran has seen it, probably! His view is: denying women their basic rights (going to see a soccer game, participating in the national celebration, etc.) is not just bad for women, but bad for everyone. It also forces women to be duplicitous - and that was one of the big points he wanted to make, too. Instead of women being allowed to go into the stadium dressed as women, with veils and skirts, etc - women who want to go HAVE to be sneaky, and cut their hair, and put on pants, and dress up as boys, and take these huge risks. They have to participate in the mindset that says that they are "other". Maybe the woman is very religious, maybe she is devoted to wearing her chador because it expresses her religious feelings - but she ALSO happens to be a soccer fan ... so she must abandon that essential part of herself, her religion, and dress in a way that doesn't feel right to her. This is obviously a crazy-making situation - and it's not just with soccer but all levels of Iranian life. Panahi has daughters. He sees it at work in his own life. And he doesn't think it's right. And so his films try to address these issues - for future generations, who hopefully will not have to live under such restrictions. But he believes his films will stay "fresh", because they will be documents "of how we lived once".
I really admire Panahi, in case you haven't guessed. I admire him for his courage - I mean, imagine being a director and KNOWING that the film you are making will not be shown anywhere in your native land. It's like Vaclav Havel writing plays for decades which garnered critical praise around the world - yet his own countrymen were never allowed to see the plays. It is the typical story of being exiled within one's own nation. And so it gives Panahi's films, and Iranian films in general, a very specific intensity, a piercing sense of courage and import - because you know what it took to get them made, and you know that they are rarely congratulated by their own nation's bureaucrats - for doing Iran proud. Panahi feels that being considered for an Academy Award is an honor, and not just for him - but for all of Iran. The mullahs and the ruling regime obviously feel differently.
What is so terrific about the films from Iran is that you do feel the overshadowing sense of a State with a capital S ... and yet the individual is not crushed. The individual survives. But because of censorship, they are forced to be subtle. And thus, in some cases, way more inventive. My review of Fireworks Wednesday addresses some of those issues. Fireworks Wednesday is, essentially, a soap opera - but underneath, you can sense a social critique, a critique of the class divide in Tehran, and an honest look at the chador and what it represents. It's breathtakingly courageous, when seen in the proper context! Without the context, you might just think: Whatever, it's a soap opera. But no. Movies represent individuals, and it is the individual who is most feared in a theocratic or totalitarian government. It is the individual who is the most dangerous. Crowds can run you over, it is true ... the masses are quite powerful in and of themselves ... but there is nothing more frightening to a ruling power than the individual. And that is why Offside, with its fond and funny portraits of these 6 girls trying to bust into the stadium to see the soccer game, is subversive. As subversive as a secret political movement or underground newspaper or jailed dissident. Because it says: We are individuals. ALL of us.
Panahi saw the film as a comedy, despite the seriousness of the issue being presented. That's probably one of the reasons why it was banned so fiercely, because nobody likes to be laughed at, nobody likes to be told, "You know what? Your laws are not just stupid - but they are downright silly!!" He said, "It's a funny situation. 100,000 men are watching a soccer game, and because these girls are women they can't go inside. I didn't need to add anything to it."
None of the girls have names. But they all have recognizable personalities, separate characteristics.
There is the "leader", played by Shayesteh Irani: a tough girl who smokes - who really does look like a boy in her get-up. It's hard to tell what her gender is. She is brought to the little "jail" in the back of the stadium, where they put all the girls who tried to bust in - and one of the guards looks at her, says, "Are you a boy or a girl?" and she gives him a cocky look and fires back, "Which do you prefer?" She is tough, she is aggressive, she wants to see the game, and she is PISSED that she is missing it.
There is the quiet worried girl played by Sima Mobarak-Shahi who opens the film. She's on a minibus filled with rowdy guys, and she hopes her disguise will work (although a couple of the guys on the bus figure it out - she's obviously a novice. The other girls are way more tricky, and know how to ACT like a boy - she is still too stylish). She has the colors of Iran painted on her face, and she's pretty, delicate-looking, and very serious. Her energy is a bit different from the other girls - all of whom are, frankly, soccer FANATICS - just as out of control as the boys. She's more subdued, and at the end we figure out why.
It's also a nice touch: along the journey of the day (the film takes place in 90 minutes - the exact time of the soccer match between Iran and Bahrain in 2005) - boys come in and out of their experience ... the boys are everywhere: on the bus, in line at the stadium, in the stands, in the men's room - and there are a couple of moments where you can see the boys, the younger generation, as separate and distinct from the mullahs and the regime. For example, one boy on the minibus looks at her, and realizes: wow. That's a girl. He pulls one of his friends aside and gestures over towards the girl, sitting by herself - and he says, "That's a girl!" His friend says, "It's none of your business. Don't mess up her plan for her." You know, those small moments of solidarity ... of looking the other way ... Totalitarian regimes are expert in creating duplicitous populations - those who behave one way in public and another way in private. I have a Persian friend who told me the parties in private houses in the suburbs of Tehran are some of the best and most insane parties he's ever been to. Of course at any moment the Vice Squad could knock at the door, and then everyone runs around and the girls put on their veils, and the smuggled booze is dumped down the toilet, and someone answers the door and says, "Yes, we're having a prayer meeting ... sorry we were a bit loud." Vice Squad drives off, and then the veils are ripped off again, boys girls dancing together, music blasting, etc. You become adept at lying. Even if you are an honest person. And so there are a couple of boys the girls encounter through the day who sort of make way for them, and let them pass ... let them "try to get in" if they want to ... it's none of our business. If you think about the Vice Squad, and the sense that the women in the country are OWNED by the men - by ALL the men, not just their fathers and husbands - but the "virtue" of women is seen as a national concern - then just those small details, kind boys looking the other way and letting the girls try to sneak in ... is also subversive. Because it says, in no uncertain terms: "WE'RE together - the boys and the girls. YOU in the regime are the ones who are on the outside. "
One of my favorite moments in the film comes when a guard is taking one of the girls to the bathroom. He has to make sure there are no men in there. Finally she goes into one of the stalls. While she's in there, a group of guys come into the restroom - and the guard tells them, No, you can't go in. They fight back. It's 7 against 1. The poor guard is shoving at the guys, and everyone is rowdy and shouting. The girl comes back out from the stall, timidly, and peeks around the corner. She sees the brou-haha in the narrow hallway leading out into the stadium. She isn't sure what to do. She's supposed to be under guard - but the guard, at the moment, is busy fighting with the 7 guys. One of those guys (the one wearing the green flag wrapped around his head above) has already had words with the guard, and had already seen the girl being led into the bathroom. He looks up from the fight, and notices the girl peeking around the corner. Wordlessly, he gestures to her - "Run - I won't stop you ..." and he pushes in against the crowd of fighting guys - so she has more room to run by. Which she does. She runs out.
I just love that moment. Individual acts of kindness. The boy might be perceived as an enemy - since he's a boy, and he can go into the stadium and do whatever he wants. But he's not an enemy. He lets her run by him, he makes room for her. It's her right to run, it's her right to try to see the game. Beautifully played.
One of the girls (the girl mentioned above in the bathroom) is a jock - she's played by Ayda Sadeqi. She plays soccer herself, on a women's league. She is involved in the most surreal section of the film - the section which I felt was most openly angry, when she has to go to the bathroom - so a guard is elected to take her to the nearest men's room (no women's rooms at all in the stadium) - and he has to clear the men's room out first, and he makes her wear a poster over her head with the face of a soccer star on it - so that no one will see she's a girl. So to see her tripping along next to the guard, wearing a man's face over her own ... It is a powerful statement of how insane the rules are. It is a denial of her humanity. Panahi said, about that particular scene - that by putting the man's face over her own - it is his way of showing that women are forced to deny their sexuality, in the current culture. She is a girl. She is also a jock. She loves soccer. She is as big a fan as all the boys raging around her. But she doesn't get to see the game. It is absurd. And when she has to go to the bathroom, the most universal of human acts, she has to wear a poster of a man's face over her own. Damn, that's good stuff. Bravo.
There is one girl (she was my favorite - she is so alive, so expressive!) who has the colors of Iran painted across her face - she's played by Golnaz Farmani, and she had actually come to the stadium that day with her best friend. Her best friend managed to get in, but she was busted. She is taken to the pen. Later, the father of the best friend - who has learned of the girl's plans to sneak into the stadium, comes looking for his daughter. He scans the faces in the pen - and then sees the face of his daughter's best friend. He goes into a rage and reaches out to hit her, and all of the girls (as well as the main guard) intervene. She is frightened, reaches in her backpack, and slowly puts on her chador, obliterating her individuality. She is ashamed, ashamed of herself for being "unwomanly" - in boys clothes ... but then, as the soccer game heats up - she slowly starts to lose her mind - and watching her respond to the play-by-play on the radio is like watching a replay of all of us Red Sox fans in the bar on October 27, 2004. She believes in wearing the chador, she is ashamed in the face of the condemnation of her friend's father ... but then, by the end, she stops caring, and there she is, leaping around in her full veil, jumping up and down screaming at the top of her lungs, pumping her fists in the air, gesturing like crazy for everyone to shut up so she can hear the radio ... Awesome character. I loved her.
Then there is a younger girl played by Nazanin Sediq-zadeh, she's maybe 14 or 15 years old. She rarely smiles, she is so tense and into the game. But she also knows her parents are going to FREAK, especially since she was busted - and now she has to go off in the Vice Squad van to be interrogated, with nary a phone call home. She is panicking. Her parents will worry when she doesn't come home. When we first meet her, she is sitting on the ground in the pen, crying. The other girls, who are all in college, tell her to stop being a baby, and she does. A real growing-up moment for her.
And lastly, there is the girl who dresses up as a soldier, and actually made it to the official stand, where all the big-wigs in the regime sit to watch the game. Her one error is that she sat in the officer's seat. She stretched her legs out, lackadaisacal, comfortable, like, "Ho hum, I'm just a dude in the army, here to see a soccer game" ... and the officer saw her and didn't at first register that it was a girl. He was more concerned that she was in his seat. So she's hauled off to the pen. Her offense is seen as more serious, because she dressed up in an army uniform, so she is the only one in handcuffs. She's a great character, a tall lean Olive Oyl type ... she's led up to the pen, and one of the guards walks over to her, and she gives him a goofy parody of a salute. He is not amused.
An added element to Offside is the 2 or 3 guards watching over the girls. Most of them are not from Tehran - they hail from Tabriz or Mashad or Azerbaijan - a totally different culture, more rural first of all - and one of them, the main guy, played by Safdar Samandar, is pissed at his assignment away from his family. There's a drought at home, his mother is sick, and his cow is dying. He feels responsible for those things, and is furious that he is stuck guarding these hooligan Tehrani tomboys. And the girls don't make things easier on him by making fun of him, shouting at him, and when he tries to be serious and angry with them, many times they burst into laughter right in his face. It shows, subtly, the divide between urban sophistication and rural conservative values - which takes place in every culture everywhere. The guards are the ones in uniform, they are the ones in charge, but they barely have control over these girls. The point is made clear that these guys assigned to guard the stadium are not part of the ruling regime. They are not mullahs. They are grown-up boys in an army uniform, and they, too, are pissed that they are missing the momentous game. They try to be official and stern with the girls, who get more and more rowdy as the game goes on ... but it's a losing battle, because they, too, are caught - in a culture that isn't quite fair ... they start to feel the meaninglessness of this assignment - and there are a couple of great shots of the guards standing outside the pen (the camera never ever goes inside the pen with the girls, by the way - very nice symbolic touch) - looking in at the girls, who are all laughing, and cheering, and talking - and at one point re-enacting a play that one of them saw. And the guards don't say anything, but you can feel that - I guess what I could feel from them was that they were thinking, "What on earth is so wrong with girls going in the stadium? They're soccer fans, just like us."
They don't SAY that, and many of them parrot the same old tired lines, which the girls pooh-pooh. "Men swear in the stadium! You can't hear swears!" That's the main one. Meanwhile, the lead girl swears like a truck driver, stalking around smoking in the pen, saying, on occasion, "This is BULLSHIT."
It's great fun. It's a serious issue, naturally - but the way it's handled in Offside is so much fun. They're all likable, they all have flaws, they're not always nice, or polite ... but they have one thing in common: they are soccer fans, and they are out of their minds at the prospect of Iran going to the World Cup.
Panahi thinks that soccer is an excellent metaphor to be used in Iranian films - because it's a way for the populace to let steam off, in a government-approved way ... and when you're there, in the crowd, it's so loud and crazy that you can say whatever you want. You can shout, "FUCK THE MULLAHS" and nobody would be likely to hear you in the roar. It's freedom.
Afshin Molavi wrote in his wonderful book The Soul of Iran:
Franklin Foer of the New Republic wrote a great book,How Soccer Explains the World. In it, he referred to Iran's "football revolution," the moment in 1997 when some 5,000 Iranian women defied a ban on entering the stadium, and literally stormed the gates to join 120,000 screaming men in celebration of Iran's just-returned soccer stars, who had qualified for the World Cup. Foer accurately sensed an important marker in Iranian history, one that led to a series of more soccer-related political demonstrations over the next few years. When Iran defeated the United States in a World Cup soccer match in 1998, the country exploded in celebration and the Islamic Republic found itself in a bind. The Great Satan had been defeated, but the popular celebrations on that night challenged hard-line government orthodoxy. Women danced with men in public, people threw firecrackers at the police, and many chanted slogans against regime hard-liners.
Often after big matches, young men - unemployed and angry - vandalize government property while chanting crude slogans about the opposing team and, occasionally, their own leaders. In 2001, a few thousand Iranians, incensed by rumors that the team purposefully lost a key World Cup qualifying game by government order, clashed with police while chanting antigovernment slogans. Though the rumor - fueld by diaspora television stations - is unlikely to be true, the national team displayed a striking inability to beat lesser teams during the qualifying stretch and failed to make the 2002 Cup. In a sense, the team's soccer malaise mirrored the country's political malaise, as hard-liners tightened their grip on power and the country's reformists took a beating without much of a fight.
Reminds me a bit of the late great Ryzsard Kapuscinski's essay "The Soccer War" (excerpt here).
Soccer: a way to express nationalism in a way that seems "safe" to regimes that fear their own populace. Yet very often, it is NOT safe, and the regimes find themselves having to do battle against their own athletes, trying to control the sport, and therefore the population. Don't get TOO happy ... remember who's in charge here!!
That struggle, that inner conflict - exists in the guards in Offside - who aren't mullahs or bureaucrats ... but they represent the law, obviously, and they do their best to uphold it.
And yet something wonderful happens near the end of the film. The game isn't over yet - there's a little bit left to go - and the girls are hauled into the Vice Squad van, and taken off to God knows where, to be interrogated, arrested, whatever. The funny thing, though, is that none of them seem to care about that. They are just pissed that they're missing the end of the game.
Not even just pissed. They are devastated, antsy, frustrated. They peer out the windows of the van, trying to see televisions in passing delis and houses - trying to get a vibe on what is going on. Finally, the main guard - the one who has been most tormented and angry - caves - and turns on the radio. Sadly, the antenna is broken. So this guard - this guy who is hauling the girls off to Vice Jail or wherever they are going - hangs out the window of the van, propping the antenna in place, jiggering it around until they get reception. You can hear the girls all shout encouragement, as one, from the back. Reception comes in - all the girls shout, "Yes! Yes! Stop there! That's it!" He jiggles it a bit more, and suddenly there is static and you can hear all the girls shout, "No!! No! Turn it back, turn it back!" And he obeys! You know why? Cause he wants to hear the end of the game, too.
The last 10 minutes of the film just made me smile, ear to ear. There is an unbroken shot of the girls crowded in the back of the van, listening to the game on the radio. There is also a boy in the Vice Squad van, who was busted for having firecrackers - and at first nobody likes him ... he makes the mistake of referring to the lead girl as a "chick" and she stands up, walks down the aisle of the van - and head-butts him. Literally! Butts him with her head so hard he falls down! But they eventually make up and finally, as the van careens through the highways of Tehran, they all settle down to listen to the radio. With the poor guard hanging out the window, holding the antenna in place. We hear the announcer giving a play by play (and it was a real game, remember - so everyone in Tehran would remember the blow-by-blow) - and the girls all react, to each play - they surge up in excitement, they subside in despair, they are on the edge of their seats - and sometimes the tension is too much that they have to just get up and switch places, for no reason. They just have to move. As it comes down to the last few seconds of the game, it is altogether too nervewracking, and the 6 girls all grab hold of one another - hugging onto each other, gripping each other's arms and hands - listening so hard to the radio it is like their SKIN is listening. Marvelous. It's SO fun to watch all of them! And when Iran wins (and again, this is no spoiler - since it was an actual game, and made headlines around the world) - everyone just goes APESHIT. I found myself clapping and laughing FOR them as I watched them scream and hug and cry.
Look at their faces in this series of screenshots. Look at what they're going through - collectively and as individuals! I loved watching all of them. They make me laugh.
The film is about participation, obviously. Watching the girls scream out the windows of the van, waving at their celebrating countrymen, waving sparklers, screaming, clapping ... abandoned, free, insane ... you can see their desire to just participate.
That's all. Not to take over, or displace the men, or try to be men. If they could go to the stadium in their chadors, they would. They would rather be women. But desperate times call for desperate measures. These girls aren't radical revolutionaries or political dissidents or intellectual troublemakers. What they are are soccer fans.
And so. A girl's gotta do what a girl's gotta do.
The Reed Flute's Song - by Rumi
Listen to the story told by the reed,
of being separated,
"Since I was cut from the reedbed,
I have made this crying sound.
Anyone apart from someone he loves
understands what I say.
Anyone pulled from a source
longs to go back.
At any gathering I am there,
mingling in the laughing and grieving,
a friend to each, but few
will hear the secrets hidden
within the notes. No ears for that.
Body flowing out of spirit,
spirit up from body: no concealing
that mixing. But it's not given us
to see the soul. The reed flute
is fire, not wind. Be that empty."
Hear the love fire tangled
in the reed notes, as bewilderment
melts into wine. The reed is a friend
to all who want the fabric torn
and drawn away. The reed is hurt
and salve combining. Intimacy
and longing for intimacy, one
song. A disastrous surrender
and a fine love, together. The one
who secretly hears this is senseless.
A tongue has one customer, the ear.
A sugarcane flute has such effect
because it was able to make sugar
in the reedbed. The sound it makes
is for everyone. Days full of wanting,
let them go by without worrying
that they do. Stay where you are
inside such a pure, hollow note.
Every thirst gets satisfied except
that of these fish, the mystics,
who swim a vast ocean of grace
still somehow longing for it!
No one lives in that without
being nourished every day.
But if someone doesn't want to hear
the song of the reed flute,
it's best to cut conversation
short, say good-bye, and leave.
(I found a quote below that references Rumi being heard in the downtown New York performance art scene - which makes me think of an Iranian poetry festival I went to - at the Bowery Poetry Club - where Rumi, Hafez, Ferdowsi and others were celebrated - it was mainly a Persian crowd, and it reminded me of the Bloosmday celebrations I've gone to, where it's been mainly an Irish crowd - meaning IRISH Irish - and people know large sections of Joyce's book by heart, and shout it out during the celebrations in unison. Sitting in that dark club, surrounded by rowdy wine-drinking Iranians - all of them with their dog-eared books of Hafez and Rumi, shouting out poems in unison - in Farsi no less!, a collective cultural memory ... it was one of my favorite New York experiences ever. Don't come between a Persian and his poetry!!)
"He turned into a poet, began to listen to music, and sang, whirling around, hour after hour." -- Annemarie Schimmel
"Praise to Early-Waking Grievers
In the name of God the Most Merciful, and the Most Compassionate.
This is the fourth journey toward home, toward where the great advantages are waiting for us. Reading it, mystics will feel very happy, as a meadow feels when it hears thunder, the good news of rain coming, as tired eyes look forward to sleeping. Joy for the spirit, health for the body. In here is what genuine devotion wants, refreshment, sweet fruit ripe enough for the pickiest picker, medicine, detailed directions on how to get to the Friend. All praise to God. Here is the way to renew connection with your soul, and rest from difficulties. The study of this book will be painful to those who feel separate from God. It will make the others grateful. In the hold of this ship is a cargo not found in the attractiveness of young women. Here is a reward for lovers of God. A full moon and an inheritance you thought you had lost are now returned to you. More hope for the hopeful, lucky finds for foragers, wonderful things thought of to do. Anticipation after depression, expanding after contraction. The sun comes out, and that light is what we give, in this book, to our spiritual descendants. Our gratitude to God holds them to us, and brings more besides. As the Andalusian poet, Adi al-Riga says,
I was sleeping, and being comforted
by a cool breeze, when suddenly a gray dove
from a thicket sang and sobbed with longing,
and reminded me of my own passion.
I had been away from my own soul so long,
so late-sleeping, but that dove's crying
woke me and made me cry. Praise
to all early-waking grievers!
"Around the first century AD, Balkh became an important staging post on the Silk Road, selling and trans-shipping raw silk from China to Persia and eventually Europe. The city spawned many imitators, among them Samarkand, Marakanda, Bukhara, Khiva, Merv, Tus, Ravy and Qom. After Muslim Arab armies arrived in 663 AD an Islamic renaissance flowered in its thriving bazaars, bathhouses and barrel-vauled palacees. By the eighth century the military prowess, artistic refinement and scientific achievements of the Islamic world had far surpassed the Christian West. Thinkers, poets and mathematicians thrived in Balkh, among them the Persian free-thinker Omar Khayyam, who spent his formative years there. In 1207, the city gave birth to another wild man, the poet Jalal-ud-Din Balkhi, also known as Rumi, who held that music and poetry could facilitate direct and ecstatic experience of God, and founded the Sufi Muslim order of whirling dervishes." -- Christopher Kremmer, "The Carpet Wars"
"Much of subsequent Sufism rests on the notion that when the lesser, egotistically oriented self of a person is displaced, the greater or Universal self is found, enabling the experience of contact with the Divine. The ordinary, sensible world is simply the reflection, at its more attenuated end, of the Divine emanantion, and Man its most exquisite mirror. As the dust of egotism is blown from the mirror ... The foundation of Sufi practice is neither ascetism nor retirement from the world, although there may be periods of both. The austerities of monasticism were disapproved of by the Prophet himself, and Islam never fully lost the company (or the genes) of its most spiritually inclined. It is perhaps the Sufi's willingness to undertake his spiritual training in the rough and tumble of life that accounts for the breadth of Sufism's appeal. In Sufism there is the renunciation of ties, but the most obvious among these - the visible ties of the material world - are the least essential. 'Is there anything more astonishing,' writes a nineteenth-century Sufi master, 'than that a man should put the blame on his professional activity for not being able to perfect himself?' " -- Jason Elliott, "An Unexpected Light"
"Along with a throng of pilgrims, I removed my shoes and entered Rumi's blue-domed mausoleum. A sign in English greets visitors with Rumi's words: 'Come, come whoever you are, whether you be fire-worshipers, idolaters, or pagans. Ours is not the dwelling place of despair. All who enter will receive a welcome here.' Turkish women wrapped in red head shawls and men with beards and woollen hats mingled easily with Western tourists amid the overlapping Oriental carpets and gold-leafed Koranic calligraphy framed by colorful tiles. Not just the tourists, but the pilgrims too, were happily snapping photos. Rarely had I been in a holy place with such a welcoming climate." -- Robert Kaplan, "The Ends of the Earth"
"The political upheaval [in Iran] particularly opened the way for a revolution in Persian literature. For over a millennium, poetry had had priority in a land that revered the lyrics of mystics such as Hafez, Ferdowsi, Rumi and Attar, who wrote at the height of Persian and Islamic glory in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries." -- Robin Wright, "The Last Great Revolution"
�Jalaluddin Rumi was, among many other things, a lover of irony, of the odd and absurd juxtapositions that life creates. So it may be that he would have savored the fact that Madonna set translations of his 13th century verses praising Allah to music on Deepak Chopra�s 1998 CD, A Gift of Love; that Donna Karan has used recitations of his poetry as a background to her fashion shows; that Oliver Stone wants to make a film of his life; and that even though he hailed from Balkh, a town near Mazar-i-Sharif situated in what is today Afghanistan, his verse has only become more popular with American readers since September [2001], when HarperCollins published The Soul of Rumi, 400 pages of poetry translated by Coleman Barks. September 2001 would seem like an unpropitious time for an American publisher to have brought out a large, pricey hardback of Muslim mystical verse, but the book took off immediately. It has a long road ahead, however, if it is to catch up with a previous Rumi best seller, The Essential Rumi, published by HarperCollins in 1995. With more than 250,000 copies in print, it is easily the most successful poetry book published in the West in the past decade� -- Ptolemy Tompkins, Time Asia Edition, September 30, 2002
"Persian literature and architecture had a great influence on the Seljuks. It may be telling that Rumi was a cult figure among hippies in the 1960s and 1970s. He was born in 1207 in Balkh, in the northern, Turkic, part of Afghanistan. As a boy, he traveled with his father for several years across Persia and eastern Anatolia to Konya (the hippie route to India, in reverse). Travel, evidently, leavened Rumi's spirit, and his tolerance. A flower child of his time, he believed that men, regardless of race or religion, were united, and linked to all of nature by love. This view, which may have had roots in the pre-Islamic past, was expressed in Rumi's characteristically sensuous poetry:
And I am a flame dancing in love's fire,
That flickering light in the depths of desire.
Wouldst thou know the pain that severance breeds,
Listen then to the strain of the reed.
Rumi believed that love of God transcends particular religions and nationalisties and that Moslems are by no means the only people to whom God has revealed himself. Rumi said that we should simply say 'farewell' to the 'immature fanatics' who scorn music and poetry. He cautioned that a beard or a mustache is no sign of wisdom - if anything, travel (the nomadic life) will bring wisdom.. Rumi was an ascetic, the opposite of a religious activist like Mohammed: He thought that men and women should shun politics and concentrate on discoveries of their inner selves. He favored the individual over the crowd and spoke often against tyranny, whether of the majority or the minority, When Rumi died in Konya on December 17, 1273, Christians, Jews, Arabs, and Turks poured forth from the surrounding countryside to mourn. They cried en masse and tore their clothes as a sign of grief. His tomb became a site of pilgrimage. In a part of the world associated with fanatics, he is one of history's truly ecumenical figures." -- Robert Kaplan, "The Ends of the Earth"
"Rumi�s spirituality is suffused by a sense of cosmic homelessness and separation from God, the divine source.� -- Karen Armstrong
"Rumi is able to verbalize the highly personal and often confusing world of personal/spiritual growth and mysticism in a very forward and direct fashion. He does not offend anyone, and he includes everyone. The world of Rumi is neither exclusively the world of a Sufi, nor the world of a Hindu, nor a Jew, nor a Christian; it is the highest state of a human being--a fully evolved human. A complete human is not bound by cultural limitations; he touches every one of us. Today Rumi's poems can be heard in churches, synagogues, Zen monasteries, as well as in the downtown New York art/performance/music scene." -- Shahram Shiva
More on Rumi here. Fascinating stuff there. Did you know that 2007 would be the year Rumi turned 800? Turkey has declared 2007 to be "International Rumi Year".
Other National Poetry month posts
And here is my next excerpt of the day from my library.
Next book on the shelf is The Last Great Revolution : Turmoil and Transformation in Iran , by Robin Wright. Wright, a reporter who first started covering Iran in 1973 - writes this book about where Iran is now - the revolution launched them to one place, and it is now 20, 30 years later - what's going on there now? Her main focus is cultural. (Look at the cover of the book in that link - that's the kind of duality she is exploring). She refers to it as " great revolution" not like "whoo-hoo, isn't it awesome" - but "great" as in history-making. Like the Russian Revolution. The French Revolution. The American Revolution. These are revolutions that changed the world. On multiple levels. Good or bad, it doesn't matter - they are huge events. Robin Wright writes from a bias - she loves the Iranian people, and she hates the government. But she has lived and worked there for many years. Each chapter takes on a different topic: freedom of the press (a fascinating chapter - newspapers closing because of censorship and then opening the next day - same paper, different name), birth control (huge government-run campaign to educate the populace about birth control - couples about to be married have to take the course, it's mandatory), separation of church and state, Islam and democracy (it is through this book that I was introduced to Abdul Karim Soroush - she does a whole chapter on him). He's a theologian, a philosopher - he has been called "the Iranian Martin Luther". FASCINATING man.
Anyway, it's your typical book - I would say that it's not that well-written. If you want one of these "Let's look at the entire country in 300 pages" type of books about Iran, then I would recommend Persian Mirrors. Beautifully written.
Wright's prose is a little bit boring to me. BUT - she has an entire chapter on the film industry of Iran, which is interesting and active - and that's why I really appreciate this book. She interviews the main actors, the directors ... the challenges they have with the censors - which is why so many Iranian films are about kids, and kids facing challenges, etc ... They just stay away from portraying adults altogether. Has anyone out there seen Children of Heaven?? One of my favorite films - it's on my Top 50 list - It actualyl did quite a bit of business here in the US, and was nominated for a best foreign Film Oscar - so you will be able to find it, probably, at Blockbuster, or on Netflix. It's a good film to watch with your kids, too - if they're able to read - it'll take them about 10 minutes to get used to the subtitles. I saw it in the movie theatre in New York and while there were lots of adults in the audience, a lot of parents brought their kids - 9, 10 year olds ... who just LOVED it. There's a running-race at the end of the film which is so exciting that one of the kids sitting in front of Kate and I started cheering the "hero" (a 10 year old boy like himself) on. Wonderful film. I've been very interested in the Iranian film industry ever since.
So whatever, politics shmolitics, Islam Shmislam, I'm going to post an excerpt about the film industry in Iran. Specifically about one of its biggest stars Akbar Abdi. Robin Wright lists a quote from Ayatollah Khomeini at the top of this chapter: "There is no fun in Islam." Hey, Ayatollah, thanks for the sunshine, jagoff!!
Abdi's words on Buster Keaton bring a lump to my throat. The universality of art. The universal language of actors. It just moves me so much.
The Last Great Revolution : Turmoil and Transformation in Iran , by Robin Wright.
Akbar Abdi is Iran's greatest comedic actor. A playful, pudgy man with fat cheeks and a thick walrus mustache that turns down instead of up at the sides, Abdi is best known for his breakthrough role in a breakthrough film called The Snowman.
The movie broke so much ground, in fact, that it was pretty much banned indefinitely by the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance in 1995. The black-comedy plotline involved an Iranian who went to Turkey in a desperate bid to get a visa to the United States. He repeatedly got scammed, leading him into ever deeper intrigues and compromising antics. But that wasn't the most controversial part of the film. What really offended censors was that Abdi played a woman.
"I was the Tootsie or Mrs. Doubtfire of Iran," he said with a mischievous smile when I visited him in 1998 on another movie set in Tehran.
As one of the character's ruses, Abdi did exactly what Dustin Hoffman did as Tootsie and Robin Williams did as Mrs. Doubtfire. He disguised himself as a woman to get what he couldn't as a man. The main scam in The Snowman had Abdi dressed as a woman paying money to a man he thinks is an American to marry him -- since marriage to an American is one of the few surefire ways for an Iranian to qualify for a visa.
But to conservative censors, the plot was also a surefire way to get slapped with an official ban for being "un-Islamic", even though The Snowman was supported by the official Islamic Propagation Organization and even though the character ended up falling in love with an Iranian woman and returning home.
"It was a wonderful part. A man trying to be a woman is one of three roles every actor wants to play. The other two are an addict and a crazy person," Abdi said, puffing on a Marlboro Light during a filming break. He'd just finished entertaining the cast and crew with a funny Turkish song and a little jig. They were all still chuckling in the background.
The Snowman did finally open in Iran, however. After President Khatami's 1997 election, one of the new culture minister's first acts was to lift the ban on the Abdi film. It instantly became a box-office hit. I saw the film several months after it was released; it was still playing in Tehran cinemas. For his role, Abdi told me proudly that he'd been nominated for a best actor Tandee, Iran's equivalent of the Oscar. The film also grossed more than any other movie that year -- by far.
Abdi claimed that he wasn't bitter about the delay.
"I wasn't worried, because the film probably was a little bit ahead of its time," he reflected. "Even three years later, it still had problems."
Big problems, in fact. On the day The Snowman was to premiere in Isfahan, militant Hizbollah thugs attacked the local theatre. They destroyed posters of the film. They threatened people lined up for the show, including females and children. And then they attacked anyone who didn't flee.
The cinema succumbed -- and shut down. The Snowman opened in November 1997 in twenty-two other Iranian cities, but not in Isfahan.
Just to make sure that the theatre didn't try again, militants returned for several days and held "God is Great" victory prayers on the street outside. No one even tried to stop them. Nor did police and city officials in Isfahan step in, despite the fact that Hizbollahis repeatedly broke several laws.
In a sign of the times, the showdown was defused only after the leading local ayatollah intervened -- on behalf of the movie. Ayatollah Jaleleddin Taheri used his Friday prayer sermon to scold Isfahan officials for their failure to act -- either to ensure law and order or to allow an unbanned movie to be shown.
"If the police and intelligence forces and the governor's office are unable to deal with them," the seventy-year-old cleric warned, "then let them tell me and I'll put them in their places."
Taheri's word was final. So The Snowman finally opened in Isfahan too, several weeks after its premiere elsewhere. Again, it was an instant hit.
I asked Abdi if humor was more sensitive in an Islamic theocracy -- or if there was even such a thing as Islamic humor.
"It's better not to use terms like that," he replied. "After all, what is human humor? It's the same for Christians too."
Then with a twinkle in his eye, he boomed, "Oh, I'm afraid the ceiling will collapse because I'm telling such lies!"
The film's producer and several crew members who'd gathered around to listen laughed again.
"What I mean is that a human should be a human and know God. But he shouldn't be afraid if he says this kind of thing is true. We're all humans with similar values," he added, in a more serious tone.
I asked Abdi if he was religious, and if being religious was important to an actor hoping to make it in the Islamic Republic.
"I can't say I'm very religious, but I believe in God. I believe in God very much," he said.
"At the beginning of my life, I believed because of my mother. Since I loved her very much. I wanted to follow her way. As a child, I prayed and fasted because I wanted her to love me. It's the same at the other end of life. Sometimes when people grow older they think they should get closer to God. They think if they no longer commit the sins they did when they were young, then they'll get closer to God," Abdi added. "I'm not like that. Now I really believe in God."
The thirty-eight-year old actor, however, hardly fit the outside world's image of a devout Iranian believer. He had shaken my hand when we were introduced. During the filming break, he sat across from me in a heavy military uniform for his part as a famous nineteenth-century shah. The bulky black jacket with gold trim and epaulets was wide open, fully exposing his white T-shirt underneath.
I asked Abdi whom he most admired as an actor or director.
"God," he said, pausing. Then he smiled. He clearly thought my questions were taking the religious stuff too far.
"No," he said, smiling and waving his hand sideways in the air as if to erase his words.
"It's probably Buster Keaton. For him, humanity is important. He cares about the other side of the coin. Sometimes when I've seen his films or biography I've actually broken into tears because I see a similarity between us. He was a very lonely person. And usually comedians know sadness better than others."
Before he resumed filming in the opulent Mirror Room of Golestan Palace -- golestan means "rose garden" and is so named because of the splendid flower beds alla round it -- I asked Abdi if there was any other daring role he wanted to play.
"I think playing a bisexual would be very interesting," he mused.
In light of my conversation with Mohajerani about the arts portraying homosexuality, I asked Abdi if he really thought that kind of role could ever be written into an Iranian movie script.
"Who would've thought a man could play the role of Tootsie in Iran?" he replied. "So maybe even that's possible here.
"Maybe ..." he repeated, for emphasis.
"Someday," he added. Then he turned and went back to the set, cracking jokes in Persian to amuse the crew.
A few actors do have star quality in Iran. Ihsan, the wiry little taxi driver who'd taken me to Golestan Palace, had lingered on the edge of the set during my interviews. He came up close when I talked with Abdi, almost hovering over me at the end, so I introduced him.
"It was like meeting Clint Eastwood or Charles Bronson," he gushed later. "We don't get opportunities like this."
Yet making a film in Iran is not a major production, at least compared with the way most American or European movies are made. Both the cast and crew of Abdi's movie were tiny -- six actors and actresses and a staff of thirty camera, sound, light and set technicians. As in most Iranian films, the director was also the lone screenwriter. The set had no trailers for the stars or caterers for lunch. The cast and crew had all taken public transportation, or driven themselves and parked in the small lot outside the palace. Lunch was strictly brown bag.
Equipment was also sparse. The lone camera was a German-made Arriflex BL4S.
"This kind of camera probably hasn't been used anywhere in the West for fifteen years or more," Habib Allahyari, the film's tall dapper producer told me as I inspected it.
"After eight years of war and two decades of sanctions, we make quality films good enough for the whole world with this old equipment. Give us your facilities and we'll give you ours -- and then we'll compare films," he added, though with envy rather than anger.
For all the pride Iranians have in their films, the industry gets few perks. The crew had to suspend shooting for a couple of hours until repairmen quit making banging, clanging noises as they worked on the old downtown palace, built just a few years after Tehran became the capital. The shahs were coronated in the ornate first-floor ballroom before the court aristocracy and diplomatic corps. Anyone can visit now, though few besides foreign tourists bothered a generation after the last shah's departure.
Iranian movies also tend to be low-budget, to say the least. Abdi's new movie involved a sixty-day shoot and was onen of the costlier recent productions, Allahyari said. The budget was about $185,000, and it was that high only because the producer counted on a big audience. The last movie Abdi starred in grossed a billion tomans, or about $1.2 million at the exchange rate of the time.
Yet Iran's vibrant and original cinema may be the richest cultural byproduct of the revolution -- often in spite of the revolutionaries themselves.
In the 1990s, Iranian films were good enough to become standards at the world's major film festivals. And they fared well, taking major prizes at Cannes and other festivals from Switzerland to Singapore, Canada to South Korea, Italy to India to Israel, Japan to Germany, Australia to Argentina, Belgium to Brazil, Spain to China. They won for best picture, best foreign film, best director, best script, best actor, best documentary, best short film, and best jury. The Taste of Cherries, the story of a man talked out of suicide by the taste of cherries, won the Cannes Palm d'Or in 1997.
Iranian films even did well in America. The New York Film Critics Circle named The White Balloon, a poignant tale of a little girl and her brother who lose their money on the Iranian New Year and their encounters with people who try to help them retrieve it, as the best foreign film in 1996. It also won the Cannes Camera d'Or for best feature film in 1995.
Of the seven-year-old girl who plays the lead role, the Hollywood Reporter raved, "She displays a range of emotions that would stymie Meryl Streep."
Life in the Mist won the Horizon award for short films at the Aspen Filmfest in 1999. It was a powerfully simply story of a young Kurdish boy who made the family's only cash income by carrying goods on his mule along the rough Iran-Iraq border. With the death of the mule, he was forced to carry the goods himself, in turn triggering other challenges and adventures.
In 1999, Lincoln Center in New York, the American Film Institute in Washington and the Chicago Art Institute all held retrospectives honoring director Dariush Mehrjui, arguably the father of modern Iranian film, who's been ranked by both domestic and foreign critics as the most important of Iran's new generation of directors.
In Hollywood, Children of Heaven was one of the five films nominated for a foreign Oscar in 1999. The heartrending tale centers on a nine-year old boy named Ali who accidentally lost his seven-year-old sister Zahra's only shoes, a tattered pair with pink bows. To hide the loss from their poor and occasionally employed father, Ali and Zahra swapped the only pair of shoes between them, racing to meet after her school shift ended and before his began. Sharing a single pair repeatedly got both children in trouble. To solve their problems, Ali entered a long distance race -- in which, of course, shoes were a prize. The catch was that it was third prize. The subtle ending did not include Ali's winning the shoes.
The competition for best foreign film taht year was arguably the toughest in Oscar history. Iran's Children of Heaven was up against Italy's Life is Beautiful and Brazil's Central Station -- both of which were so impressive that their foreign stars were also nominated for best-actor and best-actress Oscars. Children of Heaven lost to Life is Beautiful, which also took the best-actor Oscar.
Despite the rich variety of plots, Iranian films tend to share several striking features: Characters aren't crafted from superlatives -- the prettiest, the wealthiest, most powerful, bravest or strongest, nor the most evil, ugliest, dumbest, or most cowardly. They're instead quite ordinary folk: small shopkeepers, poor families, children or housewives. The settings are not sets but real homes and back alleys, villages and schoolytards, downtown shops and public streets.
The stories also don't center on earthbound asteroids, spy escapades, sinking ocean liners or historic epics. Little is glamorous.
The common thread in many Iranian films is instead a deceptively simple story line culled from small events, encounters or challenges that subtly offer the grist for bigger themes. The heroics involve getting rhough the calamities of daily life, rarely unscathed. Many amount to modern fables that leave viewers with hauntingly deep feelings.
And here is my next excerpt of the day from my library.
Next book on the shelf is Persian Mirrors: The Elusive Face of Iran by Elaine Sciolino. Elaine Sciolino is a senior correspondent for The New York Times and has been covering Iran and the Middle East for years. I really like this book - with a couple of caveats. She's a wonderful writer - and makes me feel like I am THERE. If you read my blog, then you know my fascination with all things Persian, and my yearning to go there someday. A book like hers makes me feel like I am there. I think she's a bit soft on the regime - I've read that critique of her before - she was good friends with Khatami - and I think that might have colored her response to some of the more disturbing things in that country. So that kind of bugs me. But some of the images she shares in this book have stayed with me a long time - these crazy house parties in suburbs of Teheran - the women showing up in billowing black chadors - entering separate doors from the men - Then once they're inside, off come the chadors, and everyone's wearing teeny sundresses and platform sandals, all the guys in Western dress - and there's booze and dancing all night. Then, when it's time to go home - on go the full chadors, men and women leave separately - and it's as though it never happened. How do the citizens navigate such a situation? It's a strange thing when most of the citizenry is involved in just trying to FOOL their own government ... the government being a big nasty moralistic prude. And the young kids are just trying to have a bit of fun, and "fool Daddy", by sneaking out of the house, and raiding the secret liquor stash. Like - what happened to this pure Islamic Republic? People are OVER it. At least as described in Sciolino's book.
The way she describes the city of Shiraz makes me yearn to go there. Argh. I just don't know if it'll ever happen.
Like I said, I don't think Sciolino is completely reliable - but one of the things I get from her writing, is how much she loves that country, and how much she loves the people she has met there. That passion comes through in this book.
By the way, I was in an elevator with two guys. They were obviously co-workers. They were talking about something, and one guy said to the other, "So - you're obviously a born-and-bred New Yorker, huh?" The other guy said, "Actually - no ... I was born in Iran." I could feel that word just LAND in the elevator. The guy who had asked the question said, "Really! That's ... interesting!" (He really did sound interested.) I wondered what was going through the completely Americanized Iranian man ... if he knows that saying he is from THAT COUNTRY will ... somehow make people feel differently about him? If he's hesitate to share it?? I heard a bit of hesitation in the voice before he said, 'Actually, no ..." The guy who had asked the question said, "So when did you come here?" And it was not at all a surprise (of course) when the Iranian said, "My family came here in 1979."
The exodus.
I'm going to post a bit of an excerpt about Qom, the theological center south of Teheran, where Khomeini got his start. It's Mullah Central down there.
From Persian Mirrors: The Elusive Face of Iran by Elaine Sciolino.
Qom, a gloomy, dusty thousand-year-old city on the edge of Iran's great salt desert, is only ninety miles from Tehran. It might as well be nine thousand. Its main industry is producing mullahs, much as the industry of Vatican City is training priests. And like the Vatican, Qom is a sheltered, unhurried religious refuge, where clerics can debate without attention to time and without fear of interference from the state. In the Islamic Republic, Qom has assumed another role as well: it is the idea factory for a regime that seeks to regulate daily life with all the worldly tools of a modern state even as it tries to bring its people closer to God. That is the principal reason Montazeri was allowed to continue spreading his ideas, even after he had been stripped of power and liberty.
Before the revolution, Qom was a desolate place known as a center for study and worship and a producer of fine silk carpets and of sohan, a caramel and pistachio brittle. The more the Shah consolidated his own power, the less attention he paid to Qom, a guidebook published by his Ministry of Information and Tourism devoted just three paragraphs to the city.
Ayatollah Khomeini changed all that. His appeal was exceptionally strong in Qom, where he had lived and preached for years before he was sent into exile. In January 1978, a crowd there demonstrated against the Shah in the ayatollah's name. According to some reports, clerics and Islamic militants set up street barricades, smashed buses, halted trains, and attacked banks and shops; they were not silenced even after the police opened fire. Many Iranians came to regard what became a two-and-half-hour shooting spree as the opening shots of the revolution. Afterward, the regime bused thousands of factory workers and low-level government employees to Qom for a counterdemonstration in support of the Shah. But the violent crackdowns sparked a cycle of mourning - and more demonstrations and violence - every forty days until, a year later, the Shah fled the country and Khomeini returned.
The first time I visited Qom I witnessed the slaughtering of a camel. It was a bright, cool, sunny day in February 1979, just a few days after the revolution, and the sacrifice was made to honor Khomeini's triumphant return after an absence of more than fourteen years. His followers made a path of red carnations for him, filled the walls with his portraits, and strung revolutionary posters and banners between minarets and lampposts not only in Persian, but also in Arabic, English, French, and German (for the benefit of foreign journalist, I presumed). Khomeini had ordered that no camels were to be killed in his honor, but his followers paid no heed. The giant beast was forced on its side by a handful of men. One man swiftly slit the camel's throat with a sword. Blood spurted high into the air. The crowd praised God and smeared their hands and faces with the blood. That day, Khomeini sat in the front seat of a white Chevrolet ambulance; members of the foreign media were put on a long flatbed truck. We made our way through a shrieking crowd of clerics who chanted slogans on megaphones, soldiers who had stuck carnations in their rifles, and hundreds of thousands of people who kept running to catch up. In my chador, I slipped at one point and grabbed the arm of a young bearded Iranian assigned to help us. "Don't touch me like that!" he said. "You are in Qom."
Yes, I was in Qom.
It was in Qom that Khomeini set up his government just days after the victory of the revolution. In thoseheady early days, Qom seemed like the center of the universe to its residents. No longer a religious backwater, it became very much like an eighteenth-century European court where people came and went and pleaded and waited for favors. Government officials made pilgrimages by helicopter from Tehran, often several times a week, to consult Khomeini. Courtiers and security guards shielded the ayatollah from most of the supplicants. Every day thousands of people crowded behind green metal barricades at the end of the street where Khomeini lived to get a glimpse of him, usually no more than a one-minute wave from his window. Among the throng one day was a woman who told me she had come with her blind daughter all the way from Isfahan to get Khomeini's blessing, and a widow with seven children who said she had come from Mashad to ask for an increase in her pension.
After the revolution, the city emerged as an even more important Shiite pilgrimage site and the country's most authoritative center of learning. "Islam has no borders," Khomeini said, so the seminaries attracted religious scholars and students from around the world as the exportation of Iran's revolution became one of the pillars of the new Islamic system. The religious teachers of Qom were assigned the task of indoctrinating foreign students with tales about the Islamic revolution and how to duplicate it back home. During the war with Iraq, the ranks of the seminaries swelled, in part because clerical students were exempt from military service. By the turn of the century, tens of thousands of students were enrolled in the Qom theological seminaries alone.
Over the years, I have made the drive from Tehran to Qom more times than I can count: with a group of American tourists, with officials from the Ministry of Islamic Guidance, with a nephew of Ayatollah Khomeini, with Nazila. The trip has gone faster since a six-lane highway was built. But I still don't feel as if I fully understand the place. Even for many Iranians, Qom seems alien. Religion dominates the culture and the clerics don't like outsiders. I have worked for a long time with secular Iranian women who hate to go there because of the way the clerics look at them. A foreigner can be spotted from miles away. I keep going back to Qom because I hope that each visit will reveal more. And indeed, it is different every time.
The distinction between what is public and what is private is drawn more starkly in Qom than in the rest of Iran; the curtain of privacy is far more tightly drawn around the clergy, making it especially difficult for an outsider to get inside. Hotels generally don't welcome women traveling on their own, and restaurants are hard to find. Qom has only one main avenue; everything important is within walking distance - the central shrine, the seminaries, even a new Islamic computer center where Koranic teachings and interpretations are on the Internet. Even so, an outsider cannot navigate without a guide. To get anything accomplished, you have to be invited; someone who belongs has to lead you down the narrow streets and do the introductions. It is especially difficult to make appointments in advance. The trick is to start out from Tehran at about 6:00 a.m., arrive at eight, and work until noon. That's when most clerics pray, eat, and nap. Most of the city shuts down until about 5:00 p.m., when work begins again.
The centerpiece of Qom is the grand, gold-domed shrine that houses the tomb of Massoumeh, the sister of Imam Reza, the eighth Imam, who died in the ninth century. Thousands of pilgrims come every day to say prayers, beg for favors, and leave wads of bills as donations. They solemnly finger the silver cage that houses Massoumeh's tomb and then touch their faces, as if her aura will somehow rub off on them.
There is an air of informality in the shrine, as in mosques, that doesn't exist in most churches and synogogues. The religious complex, like others throughout Iran, is more than simply a place of prayer; it is also a place of political mobilization. During the war with Iraq, the clerics set up enlistment centers for teenage volunteers and donation centers here where people could contribute their gold jewelry and coins to the war effort. The shrine is also a place for socializing, for getting out of the house. Women sit on the carpets and eat picnic lunches with their children. And the courtyard is known as a meeting place where the Shiite Muslim practice of sigheh, or temporary marriage, can be arranged by a lonely pilgrim and a woman who needs money.
Qom is a very different place than it was at the beginning of the revolution. It boasts recreational parks and movie theatres. Most of the bookstores sell only religious books, but I have also found English-language volumes: King Lear, Paul Kennedy's The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, and a wide assortment of Persian-English dictionaries. Clerics drive motorbikes and some women even dare to go out on the streets in scarves and long coats, rather than black chadors.
And here is my next excerpt of the day from my library.
Next book on the shelf is Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples by V.S. Naipaul. This is the sequel to the last book I excerpted Among the Believers. Naipaul returns to the 4 "converted" countries he visited in the first book: Indonesia, Malaysia, Iran, Pakistan. In 1995, he took a 5 month trip through these four places. He had last been to many of them in 1979 - so the changes are startling. Mainly economic changes, especially when it came to Indonesia.
Here's an excerpt from his section on Iran. He meets a man named Ali - who is in his 60s. Ali made a fortune during the Shah's time as a real estate developer. He was a supporter of the revolution - because he wanted his country to be free, his people to be liberated. But as we all know - the revolution took a bit of a turn, shall we say, with the Khomeini return. Ali suffered greatly in the early years of the revolution - because of his success. He was kidnapped three times, arrested, thrown in jail ... But he survived that rough time - learned how to live with the new rules of the new regime.
Anyway, here is part of Naipaul's long interview with Ali. I love these two books. I highly recommend them both.
From Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples by V.S. Naipaul.
Some people Ali knew, supporters of the revolution, turned against it after the first month. Ali thought he should give it a little more time. But then, about two months after the revolution, when the executions began, he had serious doubts. People who had done nothing were arrested and taken to jail. Many of them disappeared. "Then they started charging into people's houses, confiscating their properties. We had no security for our property or our children or our wife." I felt that the word in Ali's word was the word Mehrdad had introduced me to: namoos.
A revolutionary court, the Court of Islamic Justice, had been set up about a month after the revolution. One of Ali's best friends was second in command in that court, and Ali used to go every day to see what he could do to save people he knew.
"That court was going almost twenty-four horus a day. Khalkhalli was the master of that court." Ayatollah Khalkhalli, Khomeini's famous hanging judge. "He used this court as the instrument of his executions. It was in Shariati Street. Before the revolution it was a military court. The Shah had set up this court to try his opponents. Almost the same people who had set up this court were now tried in it, in the same building. My friends were in the court for about two years."
But long before that time Ali had given up on the revolution, and he was deep in his own torments.
"We expected something heavenly to happen -- something emotional. When we were kids of twelve and thirteen we used to read accounts of the French Revolution, the American Revolution, the Glorious Revolution in England. And the Russian Revolution. But we were always fascinated with the French Revolution. It was something done by God, you know. In the last generation most of the Iranians who had studied abroad had French culture. We were hypnotized by their stories of the French Revolution. We all thought revolution was something beautiful, done by God, something like music, like a concert. It was as though we were in a theatre, watching a concert, and we were happy that we were part of the theatre. We were the actors now. For years we had been reading about Danton and Robespierre. But now we were the actors. We never thought that those killings would start afterwards."
It took a year for the communists and the Islamics to move away from one another. But the Tudeh, the communist party, had infiltrated every branch of the new government. They even went to the Friday prayers in the mosques. They showed themselves as people of God. The communist party in those early days put itself entirely at the service of Khomeini. They said, according to Ali, that they didn't want executive power; they were content to be counselors. And they were behind the nationalization of banks, insurance companies, factories. They gave the Soviet-style aspect to government and official demeanor which the visitor could still notice.
After six months of the revolution Ali was insecure and bitter. Life wasn't easy. It was impossible to work. The new officials were hostile; they looked upon Ali as part of the old regime. Some people in Ali's company began to agitate against him. Two or three of them would come to Ali's office to "question" him. He had to buy them off. And at the end of the first year he was kidnapped.
"This was in Kerman. I was on my land. We were building houses. They came in a car, three or four of them. They asked me to help them in a building project they had. I got in the car, and they drove me away. They kept me fifteen kilometers away in a desert area and questioned me as in a court. It was in a little shanty house, a shepherd's shelter. They were young boys. They had seen a lot of cinema. Now they had guns in their hands and they felt really big."
The guns were from the armories of the Shah's army. When the army collapsed, and it collapsed suddenly, many people ran to the armories to get guns. For four months after the revolution the guns were piled up in the university and were being given away to anyone who asked for one and could show an ID card. Many people offered Ali guns, but he soon realized that guns were no use to him, because he couldn't kill anyone, even to protect himself. And perhaps if he had had a gun and had tried to use it at the time of his kidnapping, he might have been harmed by his boy kidnappers.
He thought now to move carefully with these boys, in order to find out just how many more were behind them. Perhaps there was no one else. Perhaps there were four thousand, and they were planning to hold him for a ransom. They talked for ten hours in the shepherd's hut in the desert. At last they said they were going to release him, but he had to pay them. He didn't want to pay them too much; he didn't want to encourage others. He promised very small sums. The boys were enraged. They threatened to kill him. They threatened to destroy his building company. But he didn't promise more.
He said, "I was very strict."
And in the end he was released. But this kidnapping added to his insecurity. There were four million people in Tehran; and it seemed that any four of the five million could come with guns to demand money. And all the time now there was trouble with local officals. They began to occupy his land and housing developments. They said they were government property and had to be given to the people.
"The local government man actually confiscated many properties in Kerman, mine and other people's."
"What was he like? Did you get to know him?"
"He was connected to the mujahidin group. Very leftist, one hundred percent against capitalists."
"What was he like physically?"
"He was about thirty-four, short, fat. Full of resentment. An educated man, an engineer. I am sure he was beaten by SAVAK. And he was full of resentment. He caused me a lot of damage. Millions. Many millions. I met him a few years ago. He came to my office. He was poor. He had been kicked out of office. The government had put him in prison. He came to me and asked for a job. He came and kissed me and asked for pardon. He was then about forty-five. He had an old jacket. I told him that every kid had toys, but there is one toy that is the special toy. 'I too have toys. I have been used to living well, to enjoy myself, and every night, all through my life, I have had lavish food. I am still doing that. And that is my favorite toy. If because of what you have done I didn't have my lavish living for one night, I would never forgive you. I would never pardon you. But what you did was like a little fly walking on my skin. It couldn't hurt me.'"
A lawyer friend of Ali's had come into the room where we were and was sitting with us -- it was a Friday morning, the Muslim sabbath -- and I felt that the presence of this third person was encouraging Ali's unusual passion.
I asked, "Did you give the man the job?"
"I didn't give him the job. Because people of this kind can never be enlightened. If they had the chance again, they would hurt me again. So they should be kept away."
And now, a year into the revolution, Ali was being pushed from every side, by government people, by communists within the government, and by simple agitators. He was kidnapped three or four more times.
"I wasn't much afraid to go with them, because I knew that my reasoning was stronger than theirs. The first time you think it's a wild animal, it's going to tear you apart. But once you tame this animal, you can order them around."
There was now, too, a constant harassment from the Revolutionary Guards, jumping into the garden and looking through the windows to see whether anyone was looking at television or videos, or breaking into the house to search for alcohol or ham or women's dresses or men's neckties, all now forbidden things.
"And if you were cleanly dressed, they didn't like it. They would attack you. It was like Pol Pot, but n ot so extreme. Ten percent. It was a full revolution."
"A full revolution?"
"The reins of government went altogether out of the hands of government, out of control. It was anarchy and terror. The reason was Khomeini himself. About three months after the revolution I was taken by my ayatollah friend to meet Mr. Khomeini. The ayatollah friend had explained to Khomeini that I was a developer and a technical man and could help with housing problems. I and the ayatollah friend and Khomeini were sitting together on the ground in Khomeini's house. The door opened. Some mullahs came in. Khomeini started talking with them. Later some more mullahs came in. And it went on and on until the room was full of mullahs, two hundred of them. And they all wanted money to take to their students and religious organizations in their own towns. Khomeini said he didn't have money to give to all of them. Then he said, 'Go to your own towns. Fine the first man who is rich or the first man who has a factor or a huge farm. And force him to pay you.'"
This language from the head of the government shocked Ali. And this was when he realized that Khomeini was leading his people to chaos.
The lawyer sitting with us said, "His mental discipline was different from other people's. He was a man of the people. He understood the majority of the people. The majority were not educated. They wanted to get money and things. They didn't want revolution. They wanted money, and Khomeini knew that."
Ali said, "The majority wanted to loot."
The lawyer said, "So he made disorder in the country and let them loot. He did what they wanted."
Ali said, "When he said 'Follow the law', it wasn't the law of the country. It was his law, the law in his own mind. Before the revolution he said it was un-Islamic to pay taxes to the government. After, he said it was Islamic to pay taxes to the government. He wanted complete chaos. That day in his house I realized this man is not a man of government. He was still a revolutionary. He couldn't control himself. Until the very last day he was making disorder."
I wondered whether this disorder, this constant "revolution" (a word with misleading assocations), wasn't an aspect of Shia protest. But when I made the point neither Ali nor the lawyer took it up. They were disillusioned men; they spoke out of a great torment; but they were so deep in Shiism, it was so much part of their emotional life, that they couldn't take this step back, as it were, and consider it from the outside.
They began to talk instead of the Islamic law of necessity, in whose name Khomeini, always acting religiously, had said and unsaid things.
Ali said, of this law of necessity, "To protect yourself, you can sometimes do something wrong. The ayatollahs can mediate between the first level of laws, which come from Allah, and the second level. When the need arises, the ayatollahs can for a short time issue secondary orders." The example he gave was close to him. "In Islam the protection of people's property belongs to the first level of laws. But during Khomeini's regime, while he was alive, there was a shortage of land for housing. So Khomeini said, 'Using my privilege of ordering the second order of laws, I am going to grab plots of land that belong to anybody in the town, without paying any compensation, and I am going to subdivide it and give it to the people who need it. Because there is necessity.'"
And now, to prove that this action of Khomeini's was excessive, the lawyer began, as I felt, to take me down the lanes and ancient alleyways and tunnels of Islamic jurisprudence such as was taught in the theological schools of Mashhad and Qom.
The lawyer -- delicately eating small green figs whole, and, in between, peeling and eating other fruit -- said, "About a hundred years after the birth of Islam one of the caliphs in Mecca wanted to take land around the holy place. People were living in houses around this holy place, the Kaaba. But the law didn't allow the taking of the land. Protecting people's property was a duty of the caliph. So the caliph invited the big muftis to his house, to find some way. The best opinion was that of a direct descendant of Prophet Mohammed, the fifth Shia Imam, Bagher. He said, 'You can take those houses around the Kaaba because the Kaaba came first. Value the houses, and pay the owners, and send them away.'"
Ali said, "Khomeini has set a bad example. Every ayatollah now can claim necessity, as Khomeini often did, and break the law." And Iran was still living with his Islamic constitution, which gave him supreme power, and established the principle of leadership and obedience. The constitution provided for an elected assembly, but there was also a council, which could override the assembly.
Ali said, "He had an instinctive brain. He was instinctively intelligent. An instinctive, animal intelligence. Because of this he could command the people. He did not have an educated intelligence. He didn't become emotion. He was very cool."
And here is my next excerpt of the day from my library.
Next book on the shelf is Among the Believers: An Islamic Journey by V.S. Naipaul. VS Naipaul went on a 7-month journey in the early 80s through 4 "countries of the converts" - non-Arab countries, countries of converts to Islam. He has no sympathy for religious fervor whatsoever, and he makes no bones about it. He distrusts fundamentalism of every kind. He and Christopher Hitchens are brothers in this respect. He is right in his assessment that converts are usually more fanatical than those born into a faith. I've known a few recent born-agains in my day, and I can say that he speaks the truth. Uhm - wow. Total personality change. Total erasure of sense of humor. Where did the personality go? A lot of people can't stand Naipaul because of this hostility towards religion, but in my opinion - this personal bias makes him a clear-eyed critic of certain aspects of faith-based societies. Same with Krakauer who wrote that blisteringly hostile book about Mormons - Krakauer came right out and stated his bias in the beginning, so you, as a reader, know what you're dealing with. I don't share Naipaul's distrust for people who have faith - not at all - but I do share his abhorrence of fundamentalists, of any stripe, and I make no bones about it either. Naipaul has no patience whatsoever with those who do not use their MINDS. But anyway, back to this book, which is quite quite wonderful: He travels to Iran, Pakistan, Malaysia and Indonesia. He talks to people. A lot of the book is conversation. He speaks to students in madrassahs, he speaks to mullahs, he speaks to regular everyday people on the street.
There's a sequel to the book which I'll excerpt tomorrow - he returns to the same 4 countries a decade later - and looks up all the same people he met the first trip. The two books together are fascinating and rather prophetic looks at Islamic countries, and the radicalization of the Muslim faith. Especially his chapters on Indonesia, which I'll excerpt here.
I love Naipaul. He's such a crank. And a damn fine writer as well.
The excerpt gives you a real feel for the book. It's all about PEOPLE. Naipaul tells the history of certain events, certain areas, etc., through one person's personal history. Very very interesting. The following excerpt is a bit long, but it's worth it. It's about an Indonesian man named Suryadi.
From Among the Believers: An Islamic Journey by V.S. Naipaul.
It is dizzying to read of recent Indonesian history. And to look at it in the life of one man is to wonder how, with so little to hold on to in the way of law or country, anyone could withstand so many assaults on his personality.
Suryadi was in his mid fifties. He was small, dark-brown, frail-looking. He was born in East Java and he described himself as one of the "statistical Muslims" of Indonesia. He had received no religious training; such religion as he had was what was in the air around him. He wasn't sure whether he believed in the afterlife; and he didn't know that that belief was fundamental to the Muslim faith.
He belonged to the nobility, but in Java that meant only that he was not of the peasantry. The Dutch ruiled Java through the old feudal courts of the country. But Java was only an agricultural colony, and the skills required of the nobility in the Dutch time were hnot high. Suryadi's grandfather, as a noble, had had a modest white-collar job; Suryadi's father was a bookkeeper in a bank.
It was possible for Suryadi, as a noble, to go to a Dutch school. The fees were low; and Suryadi, in facat, didn't have to pay. The education was good. Just how good it was was shown by the excellent English Suryadi spoke. And recently, wishing to take up German again and enrolling in the German cultural centre in Jakarta, the Goethe Institute, Suryadi found that, with his Dutch-taught German of forty years before, he was put in the middle class, and he was later able without trouble to get a certificate in an examination marked in Germany.
Early in 1942 the Japanese occupied Java. The message from Radio Tokyo was that the Japanese would give Indonesia its independence, and there were many people willing to welcome the Japanese as liberators. Suryadi was in the final year of his school. The Dutch teachers were replaced by Indonesians, and the headmaster or supervisor was Japanese. For six months classes continued as they would have done under the Dutch. Then -- and it is amazing how things go on, even during an upheaval -- Suryadi went to the university. The lecturers and professors there were now Japanese. But the Japanese simply couldn't manage foreign languages. They recognized this themselves, and after a time they appointed Indonesians, who worked under Japanese supervisors.
The Indonesians used the classes to preach nationalism. Already much of the good will towards the Japanese had gone. It was clear to Suryadi that the whole economy was being subverted to assist the Japanese war effort. Thousands of Indonesians were sent to work on the Burma Railway (and there is still a community of Indonesians in Thailand, from the enforced migration of that time). Radios were sealed; the radios that had once brought the good news from Radio Tokyo could no longer be listened to,
Two incidents occurred at this time which made Suryadi declare his opposition to the Japanese. The university authorities decreed that all students were to shave their heads. It was the discipline of the Zen monastery. And Suryadi felt it as he was meant to feel it: an assault on his personality. And then one day on the parade ground -- students were given military training -- a student was slapped by a Japanese officer. All the Indonesians felt humiliated, and Suryadi and his friends held a protest demonstration in the university. Thirty of them, teachers as well as students, were arrested by the Japanese secret police and taken to jail.
In the jail they heard people being tortured for anti-Japanese offences and even for listening to the radio. But Suryadi's group were treated like political prisoners; and they continued to be disciplined in the way of the Zen monastery. They were beaten with bamboo staves, but it was only a ritual humiliation. The bamboo staves were split at the end; they didn't hurt, they only made a loud cracking noise. After a month of this Suryadi and his friends were released. But they were expelled from the university. So Suryadi never completed his education.
They had got off lightly because the Indonesian nationalism leaders were still cooperating with the Japanese. Sukarno never believed that Japan was going to lose the war, Suryadi said. Sukarno didn't even believe that the atom bomb had been dropped on Japan. It was only after the Japanese surrender that Sukarno and the nationalists proclaimed the independence of Indonesia. And four years of fighting against the Dutch followed.
What events to have lived through, in one's first twenty-six years! But Suryadi was without rancour. The events had been too big; there was no one to blame. He had no ill-feeling towards either Dutch or Japanese. He did business now with both; and he respected both as people who honoured a bargain. The Japanese had the reputation in Southeast Asia of being hard bargainers (there had been anti-Japanese riots in Jakarta because of the Japanese domination of the Indonesian market); but Suryadi had found the Japanese more generous, if anything, than the Dutch.
Suryadi was without rancour, and it could be said that he had won through. But there was an Indonesian sadness in him, and it was the sadness of a man who felt he had been left alone, and was now -- after the Dutch time, the Japanese time, the four years of the war against the Dutch, the twenty years of Sukarno -- without a cause. More than once the world had seemed about to open out for him as an Indonesian, but then had closed up again.
He had lain low during the later Sukarno years. Army rule after that had appeared to revive the country. But now something else was happening. A kind of Javanese culture was being asserted. Suryadi was Javanese; the Javanese dance and the Javanese epics and puppet plays were part of his being. But he felt that Javanese culture was being misused; it was encouraging a revival of feudal attitudes, with the army taking the place of the old courts. Suryadi had the Javanese eye for feudal courtesies. He saw that nowadays the soldier's salute to an officer was more than an army salute; it also contained a feudal bow. It was a twisted kind of retrogression. It wasn't what Suryadi had wanted for his country.
And he had lost his daughter. She had become a convert to the new Muslim cause -- the Malaysian disease, some people called it here. At school and then at the university she had been a lively girl. She had done Javanese dancing; she was a diver; she liked to go camping. But then, at the university, she had met a new Muslim, a born-again Muslim, and she had begun to change. She went out with her hair covered; she wore drab long gowns; and her mind began correspondingly to dull.
Suryadi and his wife had done the unforgivable one day. They had gone among the girl's papers, and they had come upon a pledge she had signed. She had pledged to be ruled in everything by a particular Muslim teacher; he was to be her guide to paradise. She, who would have been a statistical Muslim like Suryadi and his wife, was now being instructed in the pure faith.
Suryadi didn't take it well. He thought now he should have been calmer in the beginning; by making his dismay too apparent he had probably pushed the girl further away from him. He said to her one day, "Suppose someone asks you to go out camping now, will you say, 'I can't go, because I have no assurance there will be water for my ablutions before my prayers'?" He had spoken with irritation and irony. But later she came back to him and said, "I have checked. In the Koran there is nothing that says it is obligatory if you are travelling." And Suryadi understood that she had become impervious to irony; that she had become removed from the allusive family way of talking. The intellectual loss was what grieved him the most. He said, "But don't you have a mind any longer? Do you have to go to that book every time? Can't you think for yourself now?" She said, "The Koran is the source of all wisdom and virtue in the world."
She had married the born-again Muslim who had led her to the faith. She had a degree; he was still only a student at the university; but, like a good Muslim wife, she subordinated herself to him. That was the new sadness that Suryadi was learning to live with: a once-lively daughter who had gone strange.
Still, recently he had found a little cause for hope. He was driving her back one day to her in-laws' house, where she lived with her husband. He said, "I have bought that little house for you. Why don't you go and live there? Why does your husband want to keep on living with his parents? It isn't right. Why doesn't he make up his mind to act on his own?" She had said then, "He's got an inferiority complex, Father."
And this little sign, the first for some time, that his daughter still had a mind, was still capable of judging, was a great comfort to Suryadi. She had seen what was clear to Suryadi: that the boy was a poor student, didn't have the background, couldn't cope with university life. He was still some way from taking his degree and wasn't giving enough time to his work. During the month of Ramadan, the fasting month, he had given up his work altogether, fasting all day and going to the mosque in the evening to pray. This was easier than being with the difficult books; and his religious correctness was admired by his Islamic group at the university.
Suryadi's daughter had seen this on her own. That was some weeks ago. And it was now what Suryadi was waiting for: that in time she might see a little more.
At the end, just before we separated, Suryadi said, "But I've been lucky. I haven't been like so many others in Indonesia, switching to another wavelength under pressure."
"Another wavelength?"
"You know how people are like here. But perhaps you don't. They turn mystical. Logical, rational people. They start burning incense or sitting up at night in graveyards if they want to achieve something. If they feel they are frustrated, not advancing in their work or career."
"Do you call that mystical?"
"I don't know what else you call ilt."
And here is my next excerpt of the day from my library.
My history bookshelf. Onward.
Next book on this shelf is called Shah of Shahs by Ryszard Kapuscinski.
This is about the fall of the last Shah of Iran and the rise of Khomeini. Kapuscinski was there. He appeared to be here, there, and everywhere, through the 60s and 70s. He was in Teheran when the hostages were taken - he lived in Iran and reported on the events. Again - what I find so fascinating about this book (and his book about Ethiopia) is that he ... in a subtle way ... uses these books to criticize Communism and the leadership back in his homeland of Poland. He could not openly criticize. That was not allowed. But he could write a blistering book about the Shah of Iran, making all the points he wanted to make about the Soviet Union ... Totalitarianism pretty much takes on the same guise from country to country. The people back in Poland would have gotten the point. They would have understood the subtext of Kapuscinski's book.
Listen to this section of Shah of Shahs where he describes SAVAK, the secret police of the Shah. Doesn't really take a rocket scientist to figure out that this could also apply to the KGB.
From Shah of Shahs by Ryszard Kapuscinski.
Savak had a good ear for all allusions. One scorching afternoon an old man with a bad heart turned up at the bus stop and gasped, "It's so oppressive you can't catch your breath." "So it is," the Savak agent replied immeditaely, edging closer to the winded stranger. "it's getting more and more oppressive and people are fighting for air." "Too true," replied the naive old man, clapping his hand over his heart, "such heavy air, so oppressive." Immediately the Savak agent barked, "Now you'll have a chance to regain your strength," and marched him off.
The other people at the bus stop had been listening in dread, for they had sensed from the beginning that the feeble elderly man was committing an unpardonable error by saying "oppressive" to a stranger.
Experience had taught them to avoid uttering such terms as oppressiveness, darkness, burden, abyss, collapse, quagmire, putrefaction, cage, bars, chain, gag, truncheon, boot, claptrap, screw, pocket, paw, madness, and expressions like lie down, lie flat, spreadeagle, fall on your face, wither away, gotten flabby, go blind, go deaf, wallow in it, something's out of kilter, something's wrong, all screwed up, something's got to give -- because all of them, these nouns, verbs, adjectives, and pronouns, could hide allusions to the Shah's regime, and thus formed a connotative minefield where you could get blown to bits with one slip of the tongue.
For a moment, for just an instant, a new doubt flashed through the heads of the people standing at the bus stop: What if the sick old man was a Savak agent too? Because he had criticized the regime (by using "oppressive" in conversation), he must have been free to criticize. If he hadn't been, wouldn't he have kept his mouth shut or spoken about such agreeable topics as the fact that the sun was shining and the bus was sure to come along any minute? And who had the right to criticize? Only Savak agents, whose job it was to provoke reckless babblers, then cart them off to jail.
The ubiquitous terror drove people crazy, made them so paranoid they couldn't credit anyone with being honest, pure, or courageous...
Fear so debased people's thinking, they saw deceit in bravery, collaboration in courage. This time, however, seeing how roughly the Savak agent led his victim away, the people at the bus stop had to admit that the ailing old man could not have been connected with the police. In any case, the captor and his prey were soon out of sight, and the sole remaining question was: Where did they go?
Nobody actually knew where Savak was located. The organization had no headquarters. Dispersed all over the city (and all over the country), it was everywhere and nowhere. It occupied houses, villas, and apartments no one ever paid attention to...Only those who were in on the secret knew its telephone numbers...Whoever fell into the grip of that organization disappeared without a trace, sometimes forever. People would vanish suddenly and nobody would know what had happened to them, where to go, whom to ask, whom to appeal to. They might be locked up in a prison, but which one? There were six thousand. An invisible, adamant wall would rise up, before which you stood helpless, unable to take a step forward.
Iran belonged to Savak.
It was Savak that banned the plays of Shakespeare and Moliere because they criticized monarchical and aristocratic vices. Savak ruled in the universities, offices, and factories. A monstrously overgrown cephalopod, it entangled everything, crept into every crack and corner, glued its suckers everywhere, ferreted and sniffed in all directions, scratched and bored through every level of existence...
The people waiting at the bus stop knew all this and therefore remained silent once the Savak agent and the old man had gone. They watched each other out of the corners of their eyes, for all they knew the one standing next to them might have to inform...Without wanting to (even though some of them try to hide it so as not to provoke any aggressive outbursts), the people at the bus stop look at each other with loathing. They are inclined to neurotic, disproportionate reactions. Something gets on their nerves, something smells bad, and they move away from each other, waiting to see who goes after whom, who attacks someone first. This reciprocal distrust in the work of Savak...This one, this one, and that one. That one too? Sure, of course.
Everybody.
And here is my next excerpt of the day from my library.
My history bookshelf. Onward.
Next book on this shelf is called Nine Parts of Desire : The Hidden World of Islamic Women by Geraldine Brooks, a foreign correspondent for the WSJ (she's also married to Tony Horwitz - a guy whose books about travel literally make me laugh OUT LOUD ... He wrote a book called Baghdad without a map - which is a complete joy, and which I'll get to later). Nine Parts of Desire is just one of a TON of books I have in this line. A mix of history, political analysis, and anecdotal information - describing the lives in various Islamic regimes. This one focuses on female lives. Each chapter explores a different topic: marriage, war, divorce, sex, career ... Geraldine Brooks, having lived in many of these countries as a correspondent, befriended many women - who let her into their inner sanctum - something that is VERY difficult. It's easier for a female journalist to get behind the veil than a male journalist, obviously. Brooks was invited to private parties, where women took off their veils to reveal slinky designer clothes - where they would drink bootlegged liquor, and sit around and talk about sex. It's a fascinating book.
The title comes from a quote from Ali - the founder of the Shiite sect whose death (I think he died in the 4th century) is still commemorated to this day (you know those pictures we see on occasion of bloody Shiites, marching through streets with blood pouring down their faces? That's the commemoration march for Ali - their founder). Anyhoo - he apparently said something about God creating sexual desire in ten parts - women got nine of those parts and men got one. Which gives you some idea of the FEAR of women inherent in this culture. It's sort of the opposite of the idea that we have (at least, judging from movies in the 1950s - movies like Splendor in the Grass etc - anything to do with teenagers falling in love) - The attitude here is, apparently, that men's sexuality is out of control and it is up to the GIRLS to put a rein on it, and be responsible. Do not expect that the boys will be able to STOP when you say STOP. Because their sexuality is BIGGER than ours (the girls) and it is up to US to control the event. It is the opposite in the Islamic world. Women are seen as so much more sexual than men (they got NINE parts, men only got one!) that women need to be completely controlled, and men need to protect themselves from the wildly out of control lascivious sexual desire of the female - it will threaten to drown him if he does not rein it in.
I will excerpt a section from the chapter entitled: "Politics, With and Without a Vote". It describes a protest organized by 47 Saudi women against the rule that they are not allowed to drive. The last quote in this excerpt never fails to bring a huge lump (of sadness and outrage) to my throat.
From Nine Parts of Desire : The Hidden World of Islamic Women by Geraldine Brooks
Across the border in Saudi Arabia, even the notion of a debate is anathema. Saudi Arabia has virtually no political culture. "We don't need democracy, we have our own 'desert democracy," explained Nabila al-Bassam, a Saudi woman who ran her own clothing and gift store in Dhahran. What she was referring to was an ancient desert tradition known as the majlis, weekly gatherings hosted by members of the ruling family, where any of their subjects were free to present petitions or air grievances. In fact, the majlis was an intensely feudal scene, with respectful subjects waiting humbly for a fefw seconds' opportunity to whisper in their prince's ear.
Nabila told me of a friend who had recently petitioned King Fahd's wife to allow the legal import of hair-salon equipment. Technically, hairdressing salons were banned in Saudi Arabia, where the religious establishment frowned on anything that drew women from their houses. In fact, thriving salons owned by prominent Saudis and staffed by Filipina or Syrian beauticians did a roaring trade. "My friend is tired of having to run her business in secret," Nabila said. But so far she had received no response to her petition. "Petitions do work," said Nabila. "But in this society you have to do things on a friendly basis, like a family. You can ask for things, but you can't just reach out and take things as if it's your right." A rejected petitioner had no choice but to accept the al-Sauds' decision. With no free press and no way to mobilize public opinion, the al-Sauds ruled as they liked.
If there was one thing that Saudi women were prepared to criticize about their lot, it was the ban that prevented them from driving. During the Gulf War the sight of pony-tailed American servicewomen driving trucks and Humvees on Saudi Arabian roads invigorated a long-simmering debate on the issue. The Americans weren't the only women drivers the war had brought. Many Kuwaiti women, fleeing the Iraqi invasion, had arrived in Saudi Arabia unveiled, at the wheel of the family Mercedes.
By October 1990, articles about Saudi women seeking the right to drive had begun appearing in the heavily censored press. Women quoted in these articles said they'd been alarmed to realize that they wouldn't have been able to transport their children to safety as the Kuwaiti women had done. Some raised economic issues, calculating that twenty percent of average Saudi family income was spent on drivers, who had to be fed and housed as well as paid a salary. Saudi had 300,000 full-time private chauffeurs -- a staggering number, but still far short of providing a driver for every Saudi woman who needed mobility. Women without their own drivers could get around only at the whim of husbands and sons. Some proponents of allowing women to drive played the Islamic card, pointing out how undesirable it was for a woman to be forced to have a strange man as part of her household, and to drive around alone with him.
On a Tuesday afternoon in early November, forty-seven women, driven by their chauffeurs, converged on the parking lot of the Al Tamimi supermarket in downtown Riyadh. There, they dismissed their drivers. About a quarter then slid into the drivers' seats of their cars, the rest taking their places as passengers. They drove off in convoy down the busy thoroughfare. A few blocks later, the cane-wielding mutawain of the Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice stopped the cars at intersections, ordering the women out of the drivers' seats. Soon, regular police arrived, and the women asked them to see that they weren't taken off to the mutawain headquarters. There was a scuffle between the mutawain, who yelled that the women had committed a religious crime, and the traffic police, who said the matter was their affair. In the end, the police drove the women's cars to police headquarters with a mutawa in the passenger seat and the women in the back.
The women who had taken part in the demonstration were all from what Saudis call 'good families' -- wealthy, prominent clans with close ties to the ruling al-Saud dynasty. All the women who actually drove were mature professionals who had international drivers' licenses they'd acquired overseas. Many of them were from the faculty of the women's branch of Riyadh university, such as Fatim al-Zamil, a professor of medicine. Others were women of achievement such as Aisha al-Mana, who had a doctorote in sociology from the University of Colorado and headed a consortium of women-owned businesses from fashion to computer-training centers. Even though some of these women didn't normally veil their faces, for the demonstration all wore the covering that leaves only eyes exposed.
Before the demonstration, the women had sent a petition to the governor of Riyadh, Prince Salman bin Abdul Aziz, who was thought to be a fairly progressive member of the ruling family. The petition begged King Fahd to open his "paternal heart" to what they termed their "humane demand" to drive. They argued that women of the prophet's era had ridden camels, the main mode of transportation of their day. The evidence, they wrote in their petition, was there in Islam, "such is the greatness of the teacher of humanity and the master of men in leaving lessons that are as clear as the sunlight to dispel the darkness of ignorance."
While the women were held at the police station, Prince Salman summoned a group of prominent religious and legal experts to discuss what they had done. The legal scholars concluded that no civil violations had occurred, since the women all had international drivers' licenses recognized by Saudi law. The religious representatives found that no moral issues were at stake, since the women were veiled and the Koran says nothing that could be construed as forbidding an act such as driving. The women were released.
In Jeddah and Dhahran, women gathered to plan parallel demonstrations, encouraged by the what they saw as tacit support from the ruling family. But then came the backlash.
Word of the demonstration spread quickly, despite a total blackout of coverage in the Saudi media. When the women who had taken part arrived for work the next day at the university, they expected to be greeted as heroines by their all-women students. Instead, some found their office doors daubed with graffiti, criticizing them as un-Islamic. Others found their classes boycotted by large numbers of conservative students. Soon denunciations spewed from the mosques. Leaflets flooded the streets. Under a heading "Names of the Promoters of Vice and Lasciviousness," the demonstration participants were listed, along with their phone numbers, and a designation of either 'American secularist" or 'communist' after each name. "These are the Roots of Calamity", the leaflets shrieked. "Uproot them! Uproot them! Uproot them! Purify the Land of Monotheism." Predictably, the women's phones began ringing off the hook with abusive calls. If their husbands answered, they were told to divorce their whorish wives, or berated for being unable to control them.
The royal family immediately caved in to the extremists' pressures. Prince Salman's committee's findings were quickly buried. Instead, the government suspended the women from their jobs and confiscated their passports. The security police also arrested a prominent, well-connected Saudi man accused of leaking word of the protest to a British film crew. He was given a grueling interrogation, including a beating, and thrown in jail for several weeks.
The ruling family could have stood by the women on Islamic grounds. What the extremists were doing was entirely contrary to the Koran, which excoriates anyone who impugns a woman's reputation and sentences them to eighty lashes.
But a week after the demonstration Prince Naif bin Abdul Aziz, the interior minister, joined the slanderers. At a meeting in Mecca he denounced the demonstrations as "a stupid act", and said some of the women involved were raised outside Saudi Arabia and "not brought up in an Islamic home." He then read out a new fatwa, or ruling with the force of law, from Saudi Arabia's leading sheik, Abdul Aziz bin Baz, stating that women driving contradicted "Islamic traditions followed by Saudi citizens." If driving hadn't been illegal before, it was now. Naif's remarks got front-page coverage, the first mention of the driving demonstration that had appeared in the Saudi press.
Although I had been in touch with some of the women drivers before the demonstration, none of them would take my calls afterward. They all had been warned that any contact with foreign media would lead to rearrest. All were sure that their phones were tapped and their homes watched. I did get a sad letter, signed simply, "A proud Saudi woman" detailing the "witch hunt" under way. "Fanatics," she wrote "are forcing students to sign petitions denouncing the women." They were "using this incident to demonstrate their strength and foment antiliberal antigovernment and anti-American feelings." Another woman sent me a simple message: "I did it because I want my granddaughters to be able to say I was there."
From Ryszard Kapuscinski's book Shah of Shahs (about the last Shah of Iran):
Kapuscinski was in Iran when the American hostages were taken. He had a front-row seat for the entire revolution. On New Year's Eve, 1979, he takes a stroll at night through Teheran, and walks by the US Embassy.
I'd made up my mind to go to the US Embassy on New Year's Eve. I wanted to see what this place the whole world was talking about would look like that night.I left the hotel at eleven. I didn't have far to walk -- a mile and a half, perhaps ... The cold was penetrating, the wind dry and frigid; there must have been a snowstorm raging in the mountains. I walked through streets empty of pedestrians and patrols, empty of everyone but a peanut vendor sitting in his booth in Valiahd Square, all wrapped and muffled against the cold in warm scarves like the autumnal vendors on Polna Street in Warsaw. I bought a bag of peanuts and gave him a handful of rials -- too many; it was my Christmas present. He didn't understand. He counted out what I owed him and handed back the change with a serious, dignified expression.
Thus was rejected the gesture I'd hoped would bring me at least a momentary closeness with the only other person I'd encountered in the dead, frozen city.
I walked on, looking at the decaying shop windwos, turned into Takhte-Jamshid, passed a burned-out bank, a fire-scarred cinema, an empty hotel, an unlit airline office.
Finally I reached the Embassy. In the daytime, the place is like a big marketplace, a busy encampment, a noisy political amusement park where you come to scream and let off steam. You can come here, abuse the mighty of the world, and not face any consequences at all. There's no lack of volunteers; the place is thronged.
But just now, with midnight approaching, there was no one. I walked around what would have been a vast stage long abandoned by the last actors. There remained only pieces of unattended scenery and the disconcerting atmosphere of a ghost town. The wind fluttered the tatters of banners and rippled a big painting of a band of devils warming themselves over the inferno. Further along, Carter in a star-spangled top that was shaking a bag of gold while the inspired Imam Ali prepared for a martyr's death. A microphone and batteries of speakers still stood on the platform from which excited orators stirred the crowds to wrath and indignation. The sight of those unspeaking loudspeakers deepened the impression of lifelessness, the void.
I walked up to the main entrance. As usual, it was closed with a chain and padlock, since no one had repaired the lock in the gate that the crowd broke when it stormed the Embassy.
Near the gate, two young guards crouched in the cold as they leaned against the high brick wall, automatic rifles slung over their shoulders -- students of the Imam's line. I had the impression they were dozing.
In the background, among the trees, stood the lighted building where the hostages were held.
But much as I scrutinized the windows, I saw no one, neither figure nor shadow. I looked at my watch. It was midnight, at least in Teheran, and the New Year was beginning. Somewhere in the world clocks were striking, champagne was bubbling, elaborate fetes were going on amid joy and elation in glittering, colorful halls. That might have been happening on a different planet form this one where there wasn't even the faintest sound or glimmer of light. Standing there freezing, I suddenly began wondering why I had left that other world and come here to this supremely desolate, extremely depressing place. I didn't know. It simply crossed my mind this evening that I ought to be here. I didn't know any of them, those fifty-two Americans and those two Iranians, and I couldn't even communicate with them.
Perhaps I had thought something would happen here. But nothing happened.
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From Ryszard Kapuscinski's book Shah of Shahs (about the last Shah of Iran):
Dissent soon broke out in the revolutionary camp. Everyone had opposed the Shah and wanted to remove him, but everyone had imagined the future differently. Some thought that the country would become the sort of democracy they knew from their stays in France and Switzerland. But these were exactly the people who lost first in the battle that began once the Shah was gone. They were intelligent people, even wise, but weak. They found themselves at once in a paradoxical situation: A democracy cannot be imposed by force, the majority must favor it, yet the majority wanted what Khomeini wanted -- an Islamic republic.When the liberals were gone, the proponents of the republic remained. But they began fighting among themselves as well. In this struggle the conservative hardliners gradually gained the upper hand over the enlightened and open ones. I knew people from both camps, and whenever I thought about the people I sympathized with, pessimism swept over me.
The leader of the enlightened ones was Bani Sadr. Slim, slightly stooping, always wearing a polo shirt, he would walk around, persuade, constantly enter into discussions. He had a thousand ideas, he talked a lot -- too much -- he dreamed incessantly of new solutions, he wrote books in a difficult, obscurre style. In these countries an intellectual in politics is always out of place. An intellectual has too much imagination, he tends to hesitate, he is liable to go off in all directions at once. What good is a leader who does not know himself what he ought to stand up for?
Beheshti, the hardliner, never behaved in this way. He would summon his staff and dictate instructions, and they were all grateful to him beause now they knew how to act and what to do. Beheshti held the reins of the Shiite leadership, Bani Sadr commanded his friends and followers. Bani Sadr's power base lay among the intelligentsia, the students, and the mujahedeen. Beheshti's base was a crowd waiting for the call of the mullahs. It was clear that Bani Sadr had to lose. But Beheshti too would fall before the hand of the Charitable and Merciful One [Khomeini].
From Ryszard Kapuscinski's book Shah of Shahs (about the last Shah of Iran):
Revolution attaches great importance to symbols, destroying some monuments and setting up others to replace them in the hope that through metaphor it can survive. And what of the people? Once again they had become pedestrian citizens, going somewhere, standing around street fires warming their hands, part of the dull landscape of a grey town. once again each was alone, each for himself, closed and taciturn. Could they still have been waiting for something to happen, for some extraordinary event? I don't know, I can't say.Everything that makes up the outward, visible part of a revoltuion vanishes quickly. A person, an individual being, has a thousand ways of conveying his feeligs and thoughts. He is riches without end, he is a world in which we can always discover something new. A crowd, on the other hand, reduces the individuality of the person; a man in a crowd limits himself to a few forms of elementary behavior. The forms through which a crowd can express its yearnings are extraordinarily meager and continually repeat themselves: the demonstration, the strike, the rally, the barricades. That is why you can write a novel about a man, but about a crowd -- never. If the crowd disperses, goes home, does not reassemble, we say that the revolution is over.
From Ryszard Kapuscinski's book Shah of Shahs (about the last Shah of Iran):
[The Shah] also perished because he did not know his own country. He spent his whole life in the palace. When he would leave the palace, he would do it like someone sticking his head out the door of a warm room into the freezing cold. Look around a minute and duck back in! Yet the same structure of destructive and deforming laws operates in the life of all palaces. So it has been from time immemorial, so it is and shall be. You can build ten new palaces, but as soon as they are finished they become subject to the same laws that existed in the palaces built five thousand years ago. The only solution is to treat the palace as a temporary abode, the same way you treat a streetcar or a bus. You get on, ride a while, and then get off.And it's very good to remember to get off at the right stop and not ride too far.
From Ryszard Kapuscinski's book Shah of Shahs (about the last Shah of Iran):
The Shah's vanity did him in. He thought of himself as the father of his country, but the country rose against him. He took it to heart and felt it keenly. At any price (unfortunately, even blood) he wanted to restore the former image, cherished for years, of a happy people prostate in gratitude before their benefactor. But he forgot that we are living in times when people demand rights, not grace.
From Ryszard Kapuscinski's book Shah of Shahs (about the last Shah of Iran):
A despot believes that man is an abject creature. Abject people fill his court and populate his environment. A terrorized society will behave like an unthinking, submissive mob for a long time. Feeding it is enough to make it obey. Provided with amusements, it's happy. The rather small arsenal of political tricks has not changed in millennia.Thus, we have all the amateurs in politics, all the ones convinced they would know how to govern if only they had the authority.
Yet surprising things can also happen. Here is a well-fed and well-entertained crowd that stops obeying. It begins to demand something more than entertainment. It wants freedom, it demands justice. The despot is stunned. He doesn't know how to see a man in all his fullness and glory. In the end such a man threatens dictatorship, he is its enemy,. So it gathers its strength to destroy him.
Although dictatorship despises the people, it takes pains to win their recognition. In spite of being lawless -- or rather, because it is lawless -- it strives for the appearance of legality. On this point it is exceedingly touchy, morbidly oversensitive. Morever, it suffers from a feeling (however deeply hidden) of inferiority. So it spares no pains to demonstrate to itself and others the popular approval it enjoys. Even if this support is a mere charade, it feels satisfying. So what if it's only an appearance? The world of dictatorship is full of appearances.
From Ryszard Kapuscinski's book Shah of Shahs (about the last Shah of Iran):
It is authority that provokes revolution. Certainly, it does not do so consciously. Yet its style of life and way of ruling finally becomes a provocation. This occurs when a feeling of impunity takes root among the elite: We are allowed anything, we can do anything. This is a delusion but it rests on a certain rational foundation. For a while it does indeed look as if they can do whatever they want. Scandal after scandal and illegality after illegality go unpunished. The people remain silent, patient, wary. They are afraid and do not yet feel their own strength. At the same time, they keep a detailed account of the wrongs, which at one particular moment are to be added up.The choice of that moment is the greatest riddle known to history.
Why did it happen on that day, and not on another? Why did this event, and not some other, bring it about? After all, the government was indulging in even worse excesses only yesterday, and there was nor eaction at all.
"What have I done?" asks the ruler, at a loss. "What has possessed them all of a sudden?"
This is what he has done: He has abused the patience of the people.
But where is the limit of that patience? How can it be defined? If the answer can be determined at all, it will be different in each case. The only certain thing is that rulers who know that such a limit exists and know how to respect it can count on holding power for a long time. But there are few such rulers.
From Ryszard Kapuscinski's book Shah of Shahs (about the last Shah of Iran):
History knows two types of revolution. The first is revolution by assault, the second revolution by siege.All the future fortune, the success, of a revolution by assault is decided by the reach of the first blow. Strike and seize as much ground as possible! This is important because such a revolution, while the most violent, is also the most superficial. The adversary has been defeated, but in retreating he has preserved a part of his forces. He will counter-attack and force the victor to withdraw. Thus, the more far-reaching the first blow, the greater the area that can be saved in spite of later concessions. In a revolution by assault, the first phase is the most radical. The subsequent phases are a slow but incessant withdrawal to the point at which the two sides, the rebelling and the rebelled-against, reach the final compromise.
A revolution by siege is different; here the first strike is usually weak and we can hardly surmise that it forebodes a cataclysm. But events soon gather speed and become dramatic. More and more people take part. The walls behind which authority has been sheltering crack and then burst. The success of a revolution by siege depends on the determination of the rebels, on their will power and endurance. One more day! One more push! In the end, the gates yield, the crowd breaks in and celebrates its triumph.
I love that - this book was written in 1982 - and he was basically describing what would eventually happen in his home country (and had already begun happening in the early 80s) - with Lech Walesa and the Solidarity movement - a revolution by siege.
From Ryszard Kapuscinski's book Shah of Shahs (about the last Shah of Iran):
Every revolution is preceded by a state of general exhaustion and takes place against a background of unleashed aggressiveness. Authority cannot put up with a nation that gets on its nerves; the nation cannot tolerate an authority it has come to hate. Authority has squandered all its credibility and has empty hands, the nation has lost the final scrap of patience and makes a fist. A climate of tension and increasing oppressiveness prevails. We start to fall into a psychosis of terror. The discharge is coming. We feel it.
From Ryszard Kapuscinski's book Shah of Shahs (about the last Shah of Iran):
Revolution must be distinguished from revolt, coup d'etat, palace takeover. A coup or a palace takeover may be planned, but a revolution -- never. Its outbreak, the hour of that outbreak, takes everyone, even those who have been striving for it, unawares. They stand amazed at the spontanaeity that appears suddenly and destroys everything in its path. It demolishes so ruthlessly that in the end it may annihilate the ideals that called it into being.
From Ryszard Kapuscinski's book Shah of Shahs (about the last Shah of Iran):
The indispensable catalyst is the word, the explanatory idea. More than petards or stilettoes, therefore, words -- uncontrolled words, circulating freely, underground, rebelliiously, not gotten up in dress uniforms, uncertified -- frighten tyrants.
From Ryszard Kapuscinski's book Shah of Shahs (about the last Shah of Iran): Transcript from another interview with an Iranian man:
He was reading a lot now and translating London and Kipling. When he remembered his English years, he thought about the differences between Europe and Asia and repeated Kipling's formula to himself: "East is east, and West is west, and never ... " Never, no, they will never meet, and they will never understand each other. Asia will reject every European transplant as a foreign body. The Europeans will be shocked and outraged, but they will be unable to change Asia. In Europe, epochs succeed each other, the new drives out the old, the earth periodically cleanses itself of its past so that people of our century have trouble understanding our ancestors. Here it is different, here the past is as alive as the present, the unpredictable cruel Stone Age coexists with the calculating, cool age of electronics -- the two eras live in the same man, who is as much the descendant of Genghis Khan as he is the student of Edison ... if, that is, he ever comes into contact with Edison's world.
From Ryszard Kapuscinski's book Shah of Shahs (about the last Shah of Iran):
When thinking about the fall of any dictatorship, one should have no illusions that the whole system comes to an end like a bad dream with that fall. The physical existence of the system does indeed cease. But its psychological and social results live on for years, and even survive in the form of subconsciously continued behavior.A dictatorship that destroys the intelligentsia and culture leaves behind itself an empty, sour field on which the tree of thought won't grow quickly. It is not always the best people who emerge from hiding, from the corners and cracks of that farmed-out field, but often those who have proven themselves strongest, not always those who will create new values but rather those whose thick skin and internal resilience have ensured their survival. In such circumstances history begins to turn in a tragic, vicious circle from which it can sometimes take a whole epoch to break free..
And yet how do we build [the Great Civilization] here, where there are no experts and the nation, even if it is eager to learn, has nowhere to study?
In order to fulfill his vision, the Shah needed at least 700,000 specialists immediately. Somebody hit upon the safest and best way out -- import them...Tens of thousands of foreigners thus began arriving. Airplane after airplane land at Teheran airport: domestic servants from the Philippines, hydraulic engineers from Greece, electricians from Norway, accountants from Pakistan, mechanics from Italy, military men from the United States...
This army of foreigners, byb the very strength of its technical expertise, its knowing which buttons to press, which levers to pull, which cables to connect, even if it behaves in the humbles way, begins to dominate and starts crowding the Iranians into an inferiority complex. The foreigner knows how and I don't. This is a proud people, extremely sensitive about its dignity. An Iranian will never admit he can't do something; to him, such an admission constitutes a great shame and a loss of face. He'll suffer, grow depressed, and finally begin to hate. He understood quickly the concept that was guiding his ruler: All of you just sit there in the shadow of the mosque and tend your sheep, because it will take a century for you to be of any use! I on the other hand have built a global empire in ten years with the help of foreigners.
This is why the Great Civilization struck Iranians as above all a great humiliation.
From Ryszard Kapuscinski's book Shah of Shahs (about the last Shah of Iran):
This essay is on the Shah's frantic push towards modernization:
From a logical point of view, anyone who sets out to create a Great Civilization ought to begin with people, with training cadres of experts in order to form a native intelligentsia. But it was precisely that kind of thinking that was unacceptable. Open new universities and polytechnics, everyone a hornets' nest, every student a rebel, a good-for-nothing, a freethinker? Is it any wonder the Shah didn't want to braid the whip that would flay his own skin? The monarch had a better way -- he kept the majority of his students far from home. From this point of view the country was unique. More than a hundred thousand young Iranians were studying in Europe and America. This policy cost much more than it would have taken to create national universities. But it guaranteed the regime a degree of calm and security.The majority of these young people never returned. Today more Iranian doctors practice in San Francisco or Hamburg than in Tebriz or Meshed. They did not return even for the generous salaries the Shah offered. They feared Savak and didn't want to go back to kissing anyone's shoes. An Iranian at home could not read the books of the country's best writers (because they came out only abroad), could not see the films of its outstanding directors (because they were not allowed to be shown in Iran), could not listen to the voices of its intellectuals (because they were condemned to silence).
The Shah left people a choice between Savak and the mullahs. And they chose the mullahs.
From Ryszard Kapuscinski's book Shah of Shahs (about the last Shah of Iran):
The following is an essay on SAVAK, the Shah's brutal secret police force:
Savak had a good ear for all allusions. One scorching afternoon an old man with a bad heart turned up at the bus stop and gasped, "It's so oppressive you can't catch your breath." "So it is," the Savak agent replied immeditaely, edging closer to the winded stranger. "it's getting more and more oppressive and people are fighting for air." "Too true," replied the naive old man, clapping his hand over his heart, "such heavy air, so oppressive." Immediately the Savak agent barked, "Now you'll have a chance to regain your strength," and marched him off.The other people at the bus stop had been listening in dread, for they had sensed from the beginning that the feeble elderly man was committing an unpardonable error by saying "oppressive" to a stranger.
Experience had taught them to avoid uttering such terms as oppressiveness, darkness, burden, abyss, collapse, quagmire, putrefaction, cage, bars, chain, gag, truncheon, boot, claptrap, screw, pocket, paw, madness, and expressions like lie down, lie flat, spreadeagle, fall on your face, wither away, gotten flabby, go blind, go deaf, wallow in it, something's out of kilter, something's wrong, all screwed up, something's got to give -- because all of them, these nouns, verbs, adjectives, and pronouns, could hide allusions to the Shah's regime, and thus formed a connotative minefield where you could get blown to bits with one slip of the tongue.
For a moment, for just an instant, a new doubt flashed through the heads of the people standing at the bus stop: What if the sick old man was a Savak agent too? Because he had criticized the regime (by using "oppressive" in conversation), he must have been free to criticize. If he hadn't been, wouldn't he have kept his mouth shut or spoken about such agreeable topics as the fact that the sun was shining and the bus was sure to come along any minute? And who had the right to criticize? Only Savak agents, whose job it was to provoke reckless babblers, then cart them off to jail.
The ubiquitous terror drove people crazy, made them so paranoid they couldn't credit anyone with being honest, pure, or courageous...
Fear so debased people's thinking, they saw deceit in bravery, collaboration in courage. This time, however, seeing how roughly the Savak agent led his victim away, the people at the bus stop had to admit that the ailing old man could not have been connected with the police. In any case, the captor and his prey were soon out of sight, and the sole remaining question was: Where did they go?
Nobody actually knew where Savak was located. The organization had no headquarters. Dispersed all over the city (and all over the country), it was everywhere and nowhere. It occupied houses, villas, and apartments no one ever paid attention to...Only those who were in on the secret knew its telephone numbers...Whoever fell into the grip of that organization disappeared without a trace, sometimes forever. People would vanish suddenly and nobody would know what had happened to them, where to go, whom to ask, whom to appeal to. They might be locked up in a prison, but which one? There were six thousand. An invisible, adamant wall would rise up, before which you stood helpless, unable to take a step forward.
Iran belonged to Savak.
It was Savak that banned the plays of Shakespeare and Moliere because they criticized monarchical and aristocratic vices. Savak ruled in the universities, offices, and factories. A monstrously overgrown cephalopod, it entangled everything, crept into every crack and corner, glued its suckers everywhere, ferreted and sniffed in all directions, scratched and bored through every level of existence...
The people waiting at the bus stop knew all this and therefore remained silent once the Savak agent and the old man had gone. They watched each other out of the corners of their eyes, for all they knew the one standing next to them might have to inform...Without wanting to (even though some of them try to hide it so as not to provoke any aggressive outbursts), the people at the bus stop look at each other with loathing. They are inclined to neurotic, disproportionate reactions. Something gets on their nerves, something smells bad, and they move away from each other, waiting to see who goes after whom, who attacks someone first. This reciprocal distrust in the work of Savak...This one, this one, and that one. That one too? Sure, of course.
Everybody.
What I LOVE about this excerpt is that you can see how Kapuscinski - in focusing on life under Savak in Iran - he is criticizing the life he grew up in - life in Poland under the thumb of the Soviet Union. By writing about these other totalitarian regimes, he was able to freely criticize the USSR.
From Ryszard Kapuscinski's book Shah of Shahs (about the last Shah of Iran):
Kapuscinski interviews an Iranian about the beginnings of the revolution:
Every pretext, he says, was good for rising up against the Shah. The people wanted to get rid of the dictator, and they flexed their muscles whenever they had the chance.Everybody looked toward Qom. [Ed: Qom is a religious center in Iran.] That's the way it had always been in our history: Whenever there was unhappiness and a crisis, people always started listening for the first signals from Qom.
And Qom was rumbling.
This was when the Shah extended diplomatic immunity to all US military personnel and their families. Our army was already full of American experts. And the mullahs came right out and said that the Shah's move offended the principle of sovereignty.
Now, for the first time, Iran would hear Ayatolla Khomeini. Before that, no one knew of him -- nobody but the people of Qom, that is. He was already over 60, old enough to be the Shah's father. later he would often call the ruler "son", but of course in an ironic and wrathful tone. Khomeini attacked him ruthlessly. My people, he would cry, don't trust him. He's not your man! He's not thinking of you -- he's only thinking of himself and of the ones who give him orders. He's selling out our country, selling us all out. The Shah must go!...
Now I wonder just what conditions created Khomeini. In those days, after all, there were plenty of more important, better-known ayatollahs as well as prominent political opponents of the Shah. We were all writing protests, manifestos, letters, statements. Only a small group of intellectuals read them because such materials could not be printed legally and, besides, most people didn't know how to read. We were criticizing the monarch, saying things were bad, demanding changes, reform, democratization, and justice.
It never entered anyone's head to come out the way Khomeini did -- to reject all that scribbling, all those petitions, resolutions, proposals. To stand before the people, and cry, The Shah must go!
That was the gist of what Khomeini said then, and he kept on saying it for fifteen years. It was the simplest thing, and everyone could remember it -- but it took them fifteen years to understand what it really meant. After all, people took the institution of the monarchy as much for gratned as the air. No one could imagine life without it.
The Shah must go!
Don't debate it, don't gab, don't reform or forgive. There's no sense in it, it won't change anything, it's a vain effort, it's a delusion. We can go forward only over the ruins of the monarchy. There's no other way.
The Shah must go!
Don't wait, don't stall, don't sleep.
The Shah must go!
The first time he said it, it sounded like a maniac's entreaties, like the keening of a madman. The monarchy had not yet exhausted the possibilities of endurance.
From Ryszard Kapuscinski's book Shah of Shahs (about the last Shah of Iran):
Kapucinski interviews an Iranian - these are the notes from that interview:
Because the man has to be superior, the woman must be inferior. Outside the home I might be a nonentity, but under my own roof I make up for it -- here I am everything. Here my power admits of no division, and the more numerous the family, the wider and mightier my authority. The more children, the better: They give a man more to rule over. He becomes the monarch of a domestic state, commanding respect and admiration, deciding the fate of his subjects, settling disputes, imposing his will, ruling. (He stops to see what sort of an impression he is making on me. I protest energetically: I oppose such stereotypes. I know many of his fellow countrymen who are modest and polite, who have never made me feel inferior.) Quite true, he agrees, but only because you don't threaten us. You're not playing our game of seeing whose I is superior. This game made it impossible to create any solid parties because quarrels about leadership always broke out immediately and everyone would want to set up his own party.
From Ryszard Kapuscinski's book Shah of Shahs (about the last Shah of Iran):
The following essay on Oil always struck me as particularly insightful:
Oil kindles extraordinary emotions and hopes, since oil is above all a great temptation. It is the temptation of ease, wealth, strength, fortune, power. It is a filthy, foul-smelling liquid that squirts obligingly up into the air and falls back to earth as a rustling shower of money. To discover and possess the source of oil is to feel as if, after wandering long underground, you have suddenly stumbled upon royal treasure. Not only do you become rich, but you are also visited by the mystical conviction that some higher power has looked upon you with the eye of grace and magnanimously elevated you above others, electing you its favorite.Many photographs preserve the moment when the first oil spurts from the well: people jumping for joy, falling into each other's arms, weeping.
Oil creates the illusion of a completely changed life, life without work, life for free. Oil is a resource that anesthetizes thought, blurs vision, corrupts. People from poor countries go around thinking: God, if only we had oil! The concept of oil expresses perfectly the eternal human dream of wealth achieved through lucky accident, through a kiss of fortune and not by sweat, anguish, hard work. In this sense oil is a fairy tale, and like every fairy tale, a bit of a lie. Oil fills us with such arrogance that we begin believing we can easily overcome such unyielding obstacles as time. With oil, the last Shah used to say, I will create a second America in a generation! He never created it.
Oil, though powerful, has its defects. It does not replace thinking or wisdom.
For rulers, one of its most alluring qualities is that it strengthens authority. Oil produces great profits without putting a lot of people to work. Oil causes few social problems because it creates neither a numerous proletariat nor a sizable bourgeoisie. Thus the government, freed from the need of splitting the profits with anyone, can dispose of them according to its own ideas and desires.
Look at the ministers from oil countries, how high they hold their heads, what a sense of power they have, they, the lords of energy, who decide whether we will be driving cars tomorrow or walking.
And oil's relation to the mosque? What vigor, glory, and significance this new wealth has given to its religion, Islam, which is enjoying a period of accelerated expansion and attracting new crowds of the faithful.
From Ryszard Kapuscinski's book Shah of Shahs (about the last Shah of Iran):
2 excerpts here, having to do with Dr. Mossadegh (or Mossadeq) - the Prime Minister of Iran in the 50s. I have a couple of friends from Iran, and sometimes I enjoy getting them talking about Mossadegh, to watch their passion. In addition - the first time I said to my Iranian friend Fred (yes, his name is Fred - oh, and he insists on being called "Persian" - hates the word "Iran") - Anyway, I asked him, "So ... how do you feel about what Mossadegh did, and what was done to him?" Tears flooded his eyes and he put his arms around me. Basically, it was because - I knew who Mossadegh was, and it moved Fred so much to hear his name coming out of MY mouth. It would be, for me, like meeting an Uzbek in Tashkent who said to me, "So talk to me about John Adams. How do you feel about him?"
Mossadegh is a figure for the exiles - at least that's how I see it. A man who took risks, and promoted self-sufficiency - and ended up paying a huge price for it. Iranians in exile love Mossadegh.
First excerpt: (Kapuscinski looks at a photograph of Mossadegh - and writes the following observations):
This is undoubtedly the greatest day in the long life of Doctor Mossadegh. He is leaving parliament high on the shoulders of an elated crowd. He is smiling and holding up his right hand in greeting to the people. Three days earlier, on April 28, 1951, he became Prime Minister, and today parliament has passed his bill nationalizing the country's oil. Iran's greatest treasure has become the property of the nation. We have to enter into the spirit of that epoch, because the world has changed a great deal since. In those days, to dare the sort of act that Doctor Mossadegh just performed was tantamount to dropping a bomb suddenly and unexpectedly on Washington or London. The psychological effect was the same: shock, fear, anger, outrage. Somewhere in Iran, some old lawyer who must be a half-cocked demagogue has pillaged Anglo-Iranian -- the pillar of the Empire! Unheard of, unforgiveable! In those years, colonial property was a sacred value, the ultimate taboo. But that day, whose exalted atmosphere the faces in the photograph reflect, the Iranians do not yet know they have committed a crime for which they will have to suffer bitter painful punishment. Right now, all Teheran is living joyous hours of its great day of liberation from a foreign and hated past. Oil is our blood! the crowds chant enthusiastically. Oil is our freedom! The palace shares the mood of the city, and the Shah signs the act of nationalization. It is a moment when all feel like brothers, a rare instant that quickly turns into a memory because accord in the national family is not going to last long. Mossadegh never had good relations with the Pahlavis, father and son. Mossadegh's ideas had been formed by French culture: A liberal and a democrat, he believed in institutions like parliament and a free press and lamented the state of dependence in which his homeland found itself. The fall of Reza Khan presented a great opportunity for him and those like him.The monarch, meanwhile, takes more interest in good times and sports than in politics, so there is a chance for democracy in Iran, a chance for the country to win full independence. Mossadegh's power is so great and his slogans so popular that the Shah ends up on the sidelines. He plays soccer, flies his private airplane, organizes masked balls, divorces and remarries, and goes skiing in Switzerland.
The 2nd Excerpt about Mossadegh - Kapuscinski interviews someone about Mossadegh. Kapuscinski rightly felt that the story of Mossadegh was one of the keys to the tragedy of what happened in Iran. The revolution, which had begun as a revolution for more freedom, more democracy - had been hijacked by the mullahs. And it was all over from there. Anyway, this is a bit of the transcript from that interview:
Do you know that for twenty-five years it was forbidden to utter his name in public? That the name "Mossadegh" was purged from all books, all history texts? And just imagine: Today, young people, who, it was assumed, should know nothing about him, go to their deaths carrying his portrait. There you have the best proof of what such expunging and rewriting history leads to. But the Shah didn't understand that. He did not understand that even though you can destroy a man, destroying him does not make him cease to exist. On the contrary, if I can put it this way, he begins to exist all the more. These are paradoxes no tyrant can deal with. The scythe swings, and at once the grass starts to grow back...Mossadegh! The English nicknamed him "Old Mossy". He drove them crazy, and yet they respected him in a way. No Englishman ever took a shot at him. In the end it was necessary to summon our own uniformed goons. And it took them only a few days to establish that kind of order! Mossy went off to prison for three years. Five thousand people went up against the wall or died in the streets -- the price of rescuing the throne. A sad, bloody, dirty re-entry.
You ask if Mossy was fated to lose? He didn't lose. He won. Such a man can't be erased from the people's memories; so he can be thrown out of office but never out of history. The memory is a private possession to which no authority has access.
Mossy said the land we walk on belongs to us and everything we find in that land is ours. Nobody in this country had ever put it that way.
He also said, Let everybody speak out -- I want to hear their ideas. Do you understand this? After two and a half millennia of tyrannical degradation he pointed out to the Iranian that he is a thinking being. No ruler had ever done that! People remembered what Mossy said. It stayed in their minds and remains alive to this day. Words that open our eyes to the world are always the easiest to remember. And so it was with those words.
Could anyone say that Mossy was wrong in what he did and said? Today everyone says that he was right, but that the problem is he was right too early. You can't be right too early, because then you risk your own career and at times your own life. It takes a long time for a truth to mature, and in the meantime people suffer or blunder around in ignorance. But suddenly along comes a man who speaks that truth too soon, before it has become universal, and then the ruling powers strike out at the heretic and burn him at the stake or lock him up or hang him because he threatens their interests or disturbs their peace.
Mossy came out against the monarchical dictatoriship and against the country's subjugation. Today monarchies are falling one after the other and subjugation has to be masked with a thousand disguises because it arouses such opposition. But he came out against it thirty years ago, when nobody here dared say these obvious things.
"You can't be right too early." Truer words.
From Ryszard Kapuscinski's book Shah of Shahs (about the last Shah of Iran):
The Iranians resented the fact that, for security reasons, only foreigners were invited to certain celebrations in which the Shah took part. His compatriots also said bitingly that since he traveled almost exclusively by airplane and helicopter, he saw his country only from a lofty vantage point that obliterated all contrasts. I don't have any photographs of Khomeini in his early years. When he appears in my collection, he is already an old man, and so it is as if he had never been young or middle-aged. The local fanatics believe Khomeini is the Twelfth Imam, the Awaited One, who disappeared in the ninth century, and has now returned, more than a thousand years later, to deliver them from misery and persecution. That Khomeini almost always appears in photographs only as an aged man could be taken as confirmation of this belief.
From Ryszard Kapuscinski's book Shah of Shahs (about the last Shah of Iran):
Kapuscinski describes being in Teheran during the revolution:
I walk back upstairs, through the empty corridor, and lock myself in my cluttered room. As usual at this hour I can hear gunfire from the depths of an invisible city. The shooting starts regularly at nine as if custom or tradition had fixed the hour. Then the city falls silent. Then there are more shots and muffled explosions. No one's upset, no one pays attention or feels directly threatened (no one except those who are shot). Since the middle of February, when the uprising broke out in the city and the crowds seized the army muitions depots, Teheran has been armed, intensely charged, while in streets, houses, under cover of darkness, the drama of assassination is enacted. The underground keeps a low profile during the day, but at night it sends masked combat squads into the city.These uneasy nights force people to lock themselves in their own homes. There is no curfew, but getting anywhere between midnight and dawn is difficult and risky. The Islamic Militia or the independent combat squads rule the looming, motionless city between those hours. Both are groups of well-armed boys who point their guns at people, cross-examine them, confer among themselves, and occasionally, just to be on the safe side, take those they've stopped to jail -- from which it is difficult to get out. What's more, you are never sure who has locked you up, since no identifying marks differentiate the various representatives of violence whom you encounter, no uniforms or caps, no armbands or badges -- these are simply armed civilians whose authority must be accepted unquestioningly if you care about your life. After a few days, though, we grow used to them and learn to tell them apart. This distinguished-looking man, in his well-made white shirt and carefully matched tie, walking down the street shouldering a rifle is certainly a militiaman in one of the ministries or central offices. On the other hand, this masked boy (a woolen stocking pulled over his head and holes cut out at eyes and mouth) is a local fedayeen no one's supposed to know by sight or name. We can't be sure about these people dressed in green US Army fatigue jackets, rushing by in cars, barrels of guns pointed out the windows. They might be from the militia, but then again they might belong to one of the opposition combat groups (religious fanatics, anarchists, last remnants of Savak [Ed: Savak was the secret police of the Shah]) hurrying with suicidal determination to carry out an act of sabotage or revenge.
But finally it's no fun trying to predict just whose ambush is waiting for you, whose trap you'll fall into. People don't like surprises, so they barricade themselves in their homes at night. My hotel is also locked (at this hour the sound of gunfire mingles with the creaking of shutters rolling down and the slamming shut of gates and doors). No friends will drop by; nothing like that will happen. I have no one to talk to. I'm sitting alone looking through notes and pictures on the table, listening to taped conversations.
From Ryszard Kapuscinski's book Shah of Shahs (about the last Shah of Iran):
All over the world, at any hour, on a million screens an infinite number of people are saying something to us, trying to convince us of something, gesturing, making faces, getting excited, smiling, nodding their heads, pointing their fingers, and we don't know what it's about, what they want from us, what they are summoning us to. They might as well have come from a distance planet -- an enormous army of public relations experts from Venus or Mars -- yet they are our kin, with the same bones and blood as ours, with lips that move and audible voices, but we cannot understand a word. In what language will the universal dialogue of humanity be carried out? Several hundred languages are fighting for recognition and promotion; the language barriers are rising. Deafness and incomprehension are multiplying.
As I'm sure everybody knows by now, the students in Iran canceled today's planned protests, for fear of a Tienamen-like response.
OxBlog has a great post up about demonstrations today (maybe in your area) - to show your support to the people of Iran.
All I can think of to say is: I remember seeing this photograph everywhere, during the demonstrations in 1999, and then hearing later that this boy was eventually found and jailed as a result of this photograph - and I remember how helpless I felt. Frustrated. Look at his face. The humanity there, the strength. The loss. The anger.
Again, I say: I truly believe that none of this, even today's thwarted strike, will be in vain.
The mullahs won this round. They won by utilizing the normal tactics of tyrants. They arrested people. They confiscated satellite dishes. They jammed the phone lines. They closed the university. They restricted access to the student organization's website. They cracked down, and cracked down hard. So whatever. They won. Today.
But yesterday's column Pooya Dayanim in the National Review, entitled "Judgment Day: July 9 and Beyond", strikes a ringing tone of triumph, strength and certainty:
Judgment Day is approaching for those who have shed the blood of tens of thousands of innocent Iranians. Judgment Day is approaching for those who have ordered the stoning of women. Judgment Day is approaching for those who ordered the bombing of the Jewish community center in Argentina. Judgment Day is approaching for those who ordered the bombing of the Marine barracks in Lebanon and the Khobar Towers in Riyadh. Judgment Day is approaching for those who started the chant: "Death to America" and everything America stands for. Judgment Day is approaching for the Islamic Republic of Iran. It may not be tomorrow, but soon this evil regime will join the other evil regimes in the dustbin of history. Judgment Day will come.