Asghar Farhadi

A HERO: Kafka, Iran-style

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Photo caption: Mohsen Tanabandeh, Saheh Karimai and Amir Jahidi in A HERO. Courtesy of Amazon Studios.

In A Hero, the latest from Iranian auteur Asghar Farhadi, Rahim (Amir Jahidi) finds himself entangled in a Kafkaesque web of Iranian law and social convention. To start with, Rahim is in debtor’s prison. That’s right – Rahim’s creditor has him incarcerated so he can’t work to pay off his debt. Of course, the creditor is Rahim’s ex-brother-in-law (Mohsen Tanabandeh), who seems to prefer ruining Rahim’s life to being repaid.

Rahim gets a two-day pass, so the clock is ticking – Rahim must get his creditor’s sign-off in his 48 hours of freedom, or he goes back to the slammer. Rahim’s secret girlfriend Farkondeh (Sahar Goldust) happens on a lost purse with gold coins, but fluctuations in the gold market mean that the trove isn’t enough to pay off the debt anyway.

[MILD SPOILER IN THIS PARAGRAPH}. In any case, Rahim feels sorry for whoever lost the gold coins, so he finds a way to return them. The absurdity of a guy in debtor’s prison returning some gold that he found fair and square is noted by the prison authorities, who call in the TV news crews for a Feel Good story. In his 15 minutes of celebrity, everything is lining up to help Rahim to collect donations and pay off enough of his debt to avoid reincarceration..

Unfortunately, the creditor ex-brother-in-law is so bitter that he won’t play along. Then Rahim’s luck turns bad and things start spinning out of control. Traditional family honor makes things worse.

Rahim’s young son (Saheh Karimai ) accompanies him throughout much of Rahim’s two-day dash and witnesses his dad’s indignities and desperation – a particularly poignant aspect of A Hero.

Jahidi delivers a fine performance as the lead, and excels at portraying Rahim’s sense of resignation. 

Farhadi, perhaps the world’s leading master of the family psychological drama, does not make Feel Good movies. That’s because he makes the audience care so much about his characters that we ache along with them. The payoff is that Farhadi delivers genuine human behavior and authentic human emotion.

I summarized his Oscar-winning film A Separation, which as “brilliant film/tough to watch”. That movie and his The Past and The Salesman all reflect life at its messiness – especially how life resists our desire to make everything tidy and symmetrical. 

Those previous Farhadi films are more universal than A Hero, which is very specific to Iranian institutions and customs that Farhadi is criticizing. There would be no plot at all if this were set in a Western nation – Rahim would just get an on-line loan to refinance his debt – and he would never see the inside of a prison. I found A Hero two steps down from his other work – the payoff doesn’t justify the squirming.

Farhadi is highly admired by the Academy of Motion Pictures, which loves to jab at the oppressive Iranian government by praising Farhadi, so it is telling that A Hero was NOT nominated for the Best International Picture Oscar.

A Hero is streaming on Amazon (included with Prime).

THE SALESMAN: an authentic slow burn with very high stakes

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Taraneh Alidoosti and Shahab Hosseini in THE SALESMAN. Photo: Cohen Media Group
Taraneh Alidoosti and Shahab Hosseini in THE SALESMAN. Photo: Cohen Media Group

The Salesman is another searing and authentic film from Iranian writer-director Asghar Farhadi. Set in contemporary Iran, a young educated, middle class couple (Shahab Hosseini and Taraneh Alidoosti) has to change apartments in a rush. He’s a literature teacher by day, and the two are starring in a production of Death of a Salesman. The new apartment is sketchy, and something traumatic happens to the wife, something that she says she can’t fully remember. He embarks on a whodunit while doing everything he can to support her – but it turns out that he’s not equipped to keep up with her reactions to events. By the end, the two must determine the fate of a third character, and the stakes are very high.

Farhadi is perhaps the world’s leading master of the family psychological drama. The two Farhadi films that have received wide release in the US are the award-winning A Separation and The Past . Those two films are constructed with astonishing brilliance and originality, and the audience shifts allegiance between the characters as Farhadi reveals each new layers of his stories. The story in The Salesman is more linear than in its sister dramas, but it is compelling nonetheless. Both A Separation and The Past can be rented on DVD from Netflix and Redbox and can be streamed from Amazon, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.

Farhadi does not make Feel Good movies; his dramas are challenging. That’s because he makes the audience care so much about his characters that we ache along with them. The payoff is that Farhadi delivers genuine human behavior and authentic human emotion.

The Past: how life resists our desire to make everything tidy

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bejo In the French movie The Past, a French woman has requested that her estranged husband return from Iran to expedite their divorce; he obliges and walks into a family life that gets messier by the minute.  Why does she suddenly want the divorce right now? Can she marry her current boyfriend?  Who are the fathers of all of her kids?  What happened to her current boyfriend’s wife – and why?  As the answers are revealed one-by-one, our understanding of the events and characters evolve.

This shifting viewpoint is similar that into writer-director Asghar Farhadi’s Oscar-winning Iranian film A Separation, which I summarized as “brilliant film/tough to watch”.  Farhadi’s art reflects life at its messiness – especially how life resists our desire to make everything tidy and symmetrical.  It all makes for a compelling drama – we care about each character and what’s going to happen.  Each development further complicates the story – all the way up to the movies final shot, which adds another pivotal complication.

The Artist’s Berenice Bejo won Best Actress at Cannes for playing the woman completely overstressed by the pressures that her own choices have brought upon her; (her careworn character is just about 180 degrees from Peppy Miller in The Artist).  The acting is uniformly excellent, and especially by the child actors.

One more thing – in writing and directing the part of the teenage daughter, Farhadi shows that he has a superb understanding of teenage girls.  He captures the mix of self-absorption, volatile unpredictability and the paradoxical yearning for both independence and parental protection, while avoiding turning the character into a sitcom brat.  Indeed, he’s done it before, having directed his own teenage daughter to an excellent performance in A Separation.  This is one of his most notable gifts as a filmmaker.

The realism of The Past may cause some viewers to reflect on their own family drama, so not everyone will find it enjoyable.  Nevertheless, it’s an admirable and thought-provoking story told so very well – right up to that final shot.

DVD of the Week: A Separation

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A contemporary Iranian couple had planned to leave Iran for a better life in the West, but, by the time they have wrangled a visa from the bureaucracy, the husband’s father has developed Alzheimer’s. The husband refuses to leave his father and the wife leaves the home in protest. They are well-educated and secular. The husband hires a poor and religious woman to care for his father (and she does not tell her husband about her job). Then there is an incident which unravels the lives of both families.

This is a brilliant film. Writer-director Asghar Farhadi has constructed a story in which the audience sees and hears everything that happens, but our understanding of the events and characters evolve.  We think we know what has happened, but then other narratives are revealed.  Likewise, the moral high ground is passed from one character to another and to another.  It’s like Rashomon, but with the audience keeping a single point of view.

Much of that point of view is shared by the ever watchful teenage daughter of the educated couple.  She desperately wants her parents back together, views everything through this prism and is powerless to make it happen.  She is played by Farhadi’s real life daughter.

Religion towers above the action – and not in a good way.  It guides the actions of the religious couple into choices against their interest.  The Iranian theocracy restricts the choices of the secular couple and of the judges trying to sort everything out.  Almost every character is a good person who is forced to lie to avoid some horrific result otherwise required by the culture.

One final note:  it will be a lot harder to make an easy joke at the expense of American lawyers after watching the Iranian justice system in A Separation.

The realistic angst of the chapters makes this a difficult film to watch – not a light date movie for sure. But the payoff is worth it, and it’s a must see.

This film was on the top ten list of over 30 critics and is Roger Ebert’s top-rated film of 2011.  It won the 2011 Foreign Language Picture Oscar.  Because regular folks like us could only see it in 2012, it made my list of Best Movies of 2012 – So Far.

A Separation: brilliant film, tough to watch

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A contemporary Iranian couple had planned to leave Iran for a better life in the West, but, by the time they have wrangled a visa from the bureaucracy, the husband’s father has developed Alzheimer’s. The husband refuses to leave his father and the wife leaves the home in protest. They are well-educated and secular. The husband hires a poor and religious woman to care for his father (and she does not tell her husband about her job). Then there is an incident which unravels the lives of both families.

This is a brilliant film. Writer-director Asghar Farhadi has constructed a story in which the audience sees and hears everything that happens, but our understanding of the events and characters evolve.  We think we know what has happened, but then other narratives are revealed.  Likewise, the moral high ground is passed from one character to another and to another.  It’s like Rashomon, but with the audience keeping a single point of view.

Much of that point of view is shared by the ever watchful teenage daughter of the educated couple.  She desperately wants her parents back together, views everything through this prism and is powerless to make it happen.  She is played by Farhadi’s real life daughter.

Religion towers above the action – and not in a good way.  It guides the actions of the religious couple into choices against their interest.  The Iranian theocracy restricts the choices of the secular couple and of the judges trying to sort everything out.  Almost every character is a good person who is forced to lie to avoid some horrific result otherwise required by the culture.

One final note:  it will be a lot harder to make an easy joke at the expense of American lawyers after watching the Iranian justice system in A Separation.

The realistic angst of the chapters makes this a difficult film to watch – not a light date movie for sure. But the payoff is worth it, and it’s a must see.

This film is on the top ten list of over 30 critics and is Roger Ebert’s top-rated film of 2011. It is a lead pipe cinch for the Foreign Language Picture Oscar.