THE WILLOW TREE: Imagine not knowing which woman is your wife. |
If it’s time to take the pulse of the Iranian new wave, from a distance, with all sneaky Western prejudices accounted for, and almost two decades after the initiation of Abbas Kiarostami’s Koker trilogy, then the prognosis suggests a hardening of the arteries — complaisance, exhaustion, even a touch of Alzheimer’s. No surprise: cultural spurts have a life expectancy, and because they aren’t truly ever unified, they tend to dissipate. (The French tsunami of Godard, Truffaut, et al. could be said to have receded once Godard joined an anonymous Marxist collective and Truffaut starred in a Steven Spielberg film; the Polish and Czech waves were each quickly squished by Iron Curtain oppression.) The Iranian masters upon whom we’ve come to depend seem for the moment to be indulging in their global fame; the bulk of other exportable filmmakers, toiling in the Persian mainstream, may have learned more about the meaning of cinema from Harvey Weinstein than from Kiarostami or Godard or the Italian neo-realists.
Still, you wouldn’t want to be the one who decides that this Promethean, post-postmod movement has crested, seething as it does beneath a battery of political obstacles that include a tirelessly censorial government, a battery of Sharia dictums, and now an international face-off over Iran’s right to enrich uranium. (That last gout of media yowling ignores the fact that Iran would be the 22nd or so country to perform such enrichment, though it is the most resource-rich.) The movement’s godfather, Kiarostami has always hovered above the Islamic by-laws with his hyper-real metafictive constructs, but FIVE (2004; November 11 and 25 at noon) is something else, an ascetic hibernation in the minimalist caverns of undergrounders Andy Warhol and Michael Snow. (AK dedicated it to Yasujiro Ozu, who wouldn’t be impressed.) Actually, it’s more like Aleksandr Sokurov’s atmospheric morphs, five individual sequences/shots unfolding in real time: surf toying with a piece of wood; a seaside boardwalk; a beach inhabited by a pack of wild puppies; a procession of ducks; a moon reflected in a noisy pond. Your blood pressure might dip, and the process of real time slowly altering your perception can be hypnotic, but it’s hard not to suspect that one of the world’s most perceptive cinematic identities is withdrawing into his own snail shell.
Kiarostami’s opposite number, the dynamo behind the secularized Makhmalbaf Film House and the culture’s most tempestuous major voice, Mohsen Makhmalbaf has made his own kind of detour. Disgusted with the ayatollahs’ rules, Makhmalbaf has been exiling himself to freer Asian regions since 1998, shooting in Tajikistan, post-Taliban Afghanistan, and now India. THE SCREAM OF THE ANTS (2006; November 11 at 5 pm) is a bizarre, free-associative pickle of a film, the narrative of which follows a Persian couple (he’s older and a philosophical atheist, she’s younger, gorgeous, and spiritually needy) on an Indian trek to meet a holy man. Along the argumentative way Makhmalbaf treats us to ripe parodies of the messiah syndrome (a crowd of worshippers keep an old cripple unwillingly sitting on train tracks, believing him capable of stopping trains with his eyes), and of middle-class faith tourism. But he’s not strictly farcical, and though the stiff-limbed acting and multi-lingual dialogue muddy the characters’ conflicts (Makhmalbaf has never been a dramatist), politics dominate the film’s reality. Having one bystander ask (given that 99 percent of the Indian population is in abject poverty) “How can there not be a revolution?” is one thing, but violating every law about the depiction of women — including nudity — may well put the filmmaker in danger of finally being arrested for culture crime back home.
Two other grand lions are included in this year’s fest. Rakhshan Bani-Etemad, the 52-year-old feminist veteran of documentary and fiction best known for 1992’s Nargess and 2001’s Under the Skin of the City, has like Kiarostami defected to digital video, and her MAINLINE (2006; November 11 at 1:40 pm), directed with Mohsen Abdolvahab, is an intimate and committed, if finally familiar, melodrama in which a discontented heroin addict attempts to go clean before her wedding. As always, Bani-Etemad’s concerns are social, not psychological; the stress cracks belong to a generation of troubled Persians.
Bahman Farmanara, the once-suppressed filmmaker who made his late-in-life comeback with 2000’s meta-autobio-pic Smell of Camphor, Fragrance of Jasmine, returns with a tamer fairy tale. A LITTLE KISS (2006; November 19 at 5:45 pm) trails after two aging writers with differing political perspectives but similarly serious terminal illnesses who take a road trip together with Death (personified by luminous Iranian movie star Hadieh Tehrani). The movie is stodgy and naive but also sincere and no-nonsense, depending on how old you are and to what degree you’re plagued with hipness.
