Pop Movies

Iranian cinema is enjoying world-wide success. Nowadays, a film festival without your Iranian movie is almost odd.

Meanwhile, far away in Iran, people are resorting to two different categories: film-e festival and film-e irani. They sometimes overlap, as in Zir-e pust-e shahr. But in general, the former are slow-paced, poetic dramas in rural settings (catering to a foreign audience), while the latter accept the fact that Iran has a predominantly urban population.

In the near future, Bad Jens shall include a new, regular feature — brief, opinionated discussions of recent movies, with an emphasis on local implications.

Arus-e atash ("Bride of Fire")
Things may indeed be very grim in tribal Iran. Even the right honorable Mehrangiz Kar — who grew up in Ahwaz — insists that Arus-e atash is portraying harsh realities, and that her own feminist beliefs were sparked by what she saw inflicted on tribeswomen (cf. Interview with Ms Kar).

But in my humble opinion, "Bride of Fire" is basically "Not without my Daughter" à l’iranienne. This time it’s not Iranians, but an unnamed Arab tribe in southern Iran that abducts the civilized woman, and whom civilized (Persian) men endeavor to rescue: a woman who grew up in a tribe, but studied medicine in the city, wishes to marry her professor, but is forced to marry her cousin according to tribal custom. Even if the entire narrative hinges on her and her story, she is the least developed character in the movie, and it becomes obvious that it all has very little to do with her. Rather, it has to do with drawing lines between respective degrees of civilization, and her role is to serve as a marker.

Arus-e atash is the kind of movie where the natives don’t speak their own language, but resort to heavily accented versions of the audience’s proper tongue. Farsi with an Arabic accent is just as entertaining as English with a Mexican, Russian, or Chinese one. If you walk out of a movie theatre in Tehran thinking, "women do have it good here, thank god we aren’t in Khuzestan", are the issues sexual or racial? In Khuzestan, as it happens, they burnt down a cinema that was screening the film (cf. Newsclips). And I also think it’s worth mentioning that director Khosro Sinaii has two wives.

To be fair, I do have to mention that the film does try fairly hard, and indeed much harder than films such as "Not without my Daughter", to present the members of the tribe as thinking human beings, with their own conflicts, dilemmas, and indecisions. Several members of the tribe — including the brilliantly played husband-to-be, or the bride’s aunt — are utterly opposed to what tradition demands, but find themselves forced to act out what the social structure imposes on them.

TZ

Zir-e Poost-e Shahr ("Beneath the City’s Skin")
Iranian audiences value movies that depict realities of their everyday lives, and Beneath the City’s Skin will be a success precisely for this reason. Despite her uneasiness about being identified as a "woman’s" filmmaker, Rakhshan Bani-Etemad’s latest film yet again revolves around the life of a woman and her struggles. This time around, she is a working class mother and wife, whose difficulties are economical, social, and familial. She is not a "lady" struggling for recognition and fulfillment of her womanly needs. Tooba Khanoum is struggling for recognition as a human being; she’s just having a much harder time because she’s a woman.

We are introduced to her as a factory worker, then a mother, and lastly, a wife. She works out of financial necessity, mothers out of love and devotion, and fulfills her wifely duties out of responsibility. Her husband, handicapped by a beating in a political demonstration in his younger days, is unemployed and out of touch. Rarely venturing out of the house, he alternates between trying to reassert his lost masculinity and authority, and tiptoeing behind Tooba Khanoum’s back to negotiate the sale of their house to a local real-estate developer.

Bani-Etemad is addressing the difficulties of Iranian people to overcome fixed class and gender boundaries. The layers of domination and inequality are numerous, and even though Tooba is the emotional and financial glue that holds the family together, the limits of her power are repeatedly shown. When she visits the real-estate developer in an attempt to get her home back, he tells her to go home and get her husband because he won’t deal with a woman.

Beneath Tehran’s surface there are class divisions, dim economic prospects and exploitation, domestic violence, mistrust among neighbors, runaway girls living on the streets dressed as boys, and political violence. In this environment, Tooba tries to inject a quality of life for her family, while keeping them safe and secure. These two sometimes contradictory desires collide in severe ways. Unable to afford the additional burden of providing for her married daughter, Tooba takes her back to her abusive husband’s home. Watching Tooba suck up to her son-in-law’s unsympathetic mother, while her daughter stands passively aside, bearing a box of pastries in hand and a painful acquiescence to her subservience and powerlessness, we are reminded that systems of violence sometimes force those closest to our hearts into complicity.

In a society where social conditions seem to change daily, sub-generational gaps are forming with as little as 5-year differences. In Tooba’s family, there are striking differences between her older and younger children, the latter for whom there seems to be hope. Born after the Iranian revolution, Tooba’s younger children are young and innocent, and strong-partially by virtue of their defying tradition. If Tooba’s older daughter has no choice but to return to her asshole husband, it is her younger daughter who confronts her best-friend’s abusive brother and smacks him in the face, leaving him on his ass, stunned and paralyzed.

After all the tragedies and misfortunes that beset the family, it is Tooba, despite her limited powers as a working class woman, who is still standing and struggling to keep it all together. Left homeless and penniless by the end of the movie, she is demanding to know when it will be her turn, and presumably that of all Iranians, to get a break. All this, as she is waiting in line to vote.

MS

Shur-e eshq ("The Passion of Love")
Shur-e eshq is basically the story of a young couple running away from home when a spiteful, hot-tempered father won’t let them marry. But beyond that, the film attempts to pack in the highest possible number of headaches and day-to-day issues that young Iranians are currently dealing with, and arguably succeeds in doing so. In the opening scene alone, we see (silhouettes of) people dancing at a techno party, the police showing up, two girls making a getaway, and contacting a boyfriend, then trying to catch a cab home and getting pestered by horny men in a black Nissan Patrol.

In a later scene, the hero and heroine are riding in a bus, in which everyone has long noticed that the relation between the two is not exactly kosher. This leads to a scuffle between a sympathetic majority and a scowling zealot whose only advantage is that he is backed by the State and its official moral directives. Perhaps it is thanks to its strategy of self-kitschification that the movie gets away with blatant critiques. The sunsets, violins, and the teenage touch allow the movie to show the crude workings of social control in Iran in candy-coated, innocent ways.

Incidentally, the ‘woman and man driving frantically around the Iranian countryside’ is something of a leitmotif in local cinema, from the 1970s Hamsafar ["Fellow Passenger"], to Motevaled-e mah-e mehr ["Born in the Month of Aquarius"] last spring. It’s hard to oversee that the cliche has evolved over time. If in Hamsafar, Googoosh fell in love with her hijacker after he slaps her in the face, watching Shur-e Eshq, it becomes obvious that nowadays that sort of thing wouldn’t cut it. But on the other hand, the stakes are still marriage, and the girl keeps stumbling around in that doe-eyed, cutesy way of hers, as her sweetheart barks at her when he wants her to move ("BORO!"). Some things are better, but only just.

TZ