The Fish Fall In Love

Directed by Ali Rafii

The main theme of The Fish Fall In Love is so familiar to the Iranian viewer that few of them may complain about its plot making no sense. Or if the viewer is not Iranian, he/she may adopt a post-modern disregard for plot logic and concentrate on the clearest message of the film: suspicion destroys our best hopes.

Newly freed political prisoner Aziz (Reza Kianian) sneaks back to his Caspian hometown to find his fiancée, Atieh, has been married off. Philosophical about life, he sneaks back out to roam the planet doing we know not what. These events happen years before the movie begins. In the opening scene Aziz drifts back into his hometown again, seeking nothing in particular. But a purpose finds him when he discovers he is in a position to help his ex-fiancée’s beautiful daughter, Touka (Gholshifteh Farahani). In a parallel between the generations, Touka’s fiancée has also been jailed, and she too has been misled to think her man has frivolously abandoned her.

The reasons for the deceptions are different. Touka is misinformed by her fiancee’s best friend because he wants her for himself. Atieh on the other hand took the word of Aziz's father who lied to save face. Her own father probably accepted this lie “for her own good.” He wouldn’t want her wasting her youth waiting for Aziz. How they got away with this lie in a tiny town where Aziz has close friends, we are not to question.

The characters, however, are free to indulge in outrageous skepticism. Touka’s jailed fiancée for instance, thinks Aziz has hired him a lawyer just to botch the criminal case against him. He suspects the middle-aged Aziz has fallen in love with young Touka and wants to eliminate rivals. Aziz in turn frustrates us with his stoic silence against this accusation.

The most frustrating moment of Aziz’s stoicism, however, happens on the occasions when Aziz and Atieh (Roya Nonahali) meet. He says nothing to clarify why he disappeared from her life. In fact he says nothing at all, because Atieh yells at him to shut up and listen while she guilt trips him about showing up after all these years to ruin her restaurant business. After her husband’s death, she has moved into the property abandoned by Aziz’s family, and set up a restaurant. Now, she thinks, Aziz is there to reclaim the property and evict her. The presence of a lawyer in the picture convinces her of this.

Atieh’s suspicion is unfounded. Aziz had no idea anyone was squatting in his property, or even seemed to care, but he is in no hurry to make this clear, or to explain about the lawyer. Nor does he ask Atieh what went on with her during all these years. Instead he asks a friend who tells him Atieh’s husband beat her senseless one night then took a rowboat out to sea never to return.

The domestic quarrel and the suicide are not explained, but this revelation along with subtle line deliveries by Reza Kianian invites us to guess what directions the plot may have taken if censors hadn’t been watching. Aziz and Atieh had premarital sex. Touka may be Aziz’s daughter. This is why Atieh’s husband went nuts, and this is why Aziz and Touka hold each other in such deep affection.

Now that the characters’ behaviors have found a sensible basis, we see that Atieh’s father had no choice but to quickly find a husband for his pregnant daughter. Atieh’s moving into Aziz’s house with her child, and the issue over property rights suddenly picks up considerably more logical as well as social and dramatic substance.

Reza Kianian’s artistry helps cut through some of the fog. In the scene where he and Touka first meet, he is multifaceted with his line delivery. “Are you Touka?” he says, and we can't be sure if he's responding to Touka's flirtatiousness or enjoying getting to know her after all these years. At a later dinner table scene, his line delivery of “Now that we are all together,”has a strong flavor of paternity. The sense of this alternate plot is strongest when Aziz confides in a friend, “Atieh acts as though we never…”

But director Ali Rafii (Fined by IRI in 2002 for "promoting immoral conduct" in a play ) knows such a film would never see the light of the projector. Instead censorship has left him with a confusing movie vulnerable to banal panderings to the male-bashing market. This has resulted in inaccurate film descriptions such as:

“Atieh’s singular passion is food, and her small but popular restaurant on the sleepy Caspian coast is her pride and joy. But when Aziz, a former lover, appears after a twenty-year absence with the intention of closing the restaurant, Atieh prepares his favorite dishes, one after the other, in a desperate effort to convince him otherwise. Loosely based on the Persian fable of Shahrazad and the Thousand Myths (A Thousand and One Nights), director Ali Raffi uses the language of food to paint a richly textured portrait of life and love on the Southern coast of Iran [sic].”

Never mind that the above description has a Google sense of geography [see note 1] ; it also gives no clue that the Shahrzad theme and the pretty food is just the marketing candy. Yet, despite the silent compromises Rafii has has made to censorship and international marketing, his message about the destructiveness of groundless suspicion comes through, and makes a powerful emotional impact.

Reza Kianian’s interpretative skill as an actor encourages us to be patient with the film’s frustratingly stoic compromises, and view it as a visually delightful post-modern work. After one thousand and one such films, the censors may relent.

Note 1: The Caspian is to the north of Iran, not on her southern shores. Many Iranians are miffed with Google Earth for calling the Persian Gulf "Arabian Gulf."

Note 2: For a historical snapshot of the politics of pious film censorship in the US, see this absorbing 1965 essay by Judy Stone, 'The Legion of Decency: What's Nude?'

Persepolis

Directed by Vincent Paronnaud and Marjane Satrapi

A handful of ordinary lives caught in the storms of civilization inspired Charles Dickens’ Tale of Two Cities, and Boris Pasternak’s Dr. Zhivago. Recently Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis has rendered the Iranian revolution in intimate terms, approaching what Dickens accomplished for the French revolution and Pasternak achieved for the Russian revolution. While History is a satellite photo of a forest, this autobiographical narrative is a single leaf which you can rub between your fingers and bring to your nose.

The graphic novels, Persepolis and Persepolis 2, now combined into a movie, do not look back to the classics. Satrapi’s self mocking style is ultra-modern. It combines a Disneyesque cuteness with the author’s Hedayat-like anguish. At first the work appears to lack subtlety, protesting the Islamic Regime’s repressions too directly. Later we realize this straight shooting is just another manifestation of the no-nonsense way in which the artist conducts her life. Satrapi’s uninhibited tendency to speak her primal mind has been the driving force in the events of her life.

After she slugged her school principal in Iran and trashed the Islamic Regime in the classroom, Satrapi’s parents hurriedly dispatched their fourteen-year-old daughter to a Catholic school in Europe. There she got herself expelled by calling the nuns whores. Later she made herself homeless by telling her Austrian landlady to go fuck herself. The nuns had dared suggest Iranians had no manners, and the crypto-racist landlady had accused Satrapi of theft.

In the humorous movie, some of the laughter comes from the character’s obliviousness to authority, and some from her breaking personal taboos such as showing us her hairy legs. One of the best moments happens in a scene where she combines the two techniques. Her Jedi master of a grandmother passes on to her granddaughter the secret of having firm breasts in old age. I won’t reveal the trick here, enough to say Yoda himself would shrink from the mind control it demands.

The humor sweetens the profound bitterness of the events. As in Sound of Music and Cabaret, where sugary melodies simultaneously mask and highlight the creep of fascism in Europe, Satrapis’ self-deprecating jokes expose the modern dissonance between individual concerns and social forces. Ominously, Satrapi’s Europe is as purposeless as Iran was in its pre-revolutionary times.

European youth, drugged, disappointed and mistrustful of their leaders, shout their aimless rage out-screaming electric guitars. In a scene stunningly effective for its graphics and sound, a club musician swears incomprehensibly at air while giving the finger to the emptiness of existence. The scene is also quite funny, which is why--for me--it best captures the bi-polar psychology of Persepolis.

Meanwhile, back in Satrapi’s Iran the youth have become focused by the war. With their existential angst soothed by arbitrary ideas of righteousness, they have become brutal enforcers of correct Islamic behavior. Much as Charles Dickens warned and criticized English society by dangling the French revolution in front of English eyes, Persepolis drags our attention to the possibility that the upheaval in Iran is just one expression of the global rationality crisis: the rising suspicion that Western Enlightenment has lost its appeal.

In Persepolis we find warmth and satisfaction only in the love between family members. In a departure from Disney charm, even the pure love between a dog and its European master is lampooned as a sign of loneliness and alienation. Family love is something Iranians have had in abundance for as long as we have been mammals. What does modernity offer that is worth the price of giving up family for a mutt?

A frame of mind which extends our caring for immediate family to include all of society was an implicit promise of modern humanism, to replace the explicit promise of the religions we outgrew. In Satrapi’s Europe, socialism cures her pneumonic, cigarette damaged lungs, but it is also why this smart, educated youth spent days homeless in the cold seeking cigarette butts on the sidewalk.

Satrapi constantly reminds us that she comes from a family of progressive liberals. Her uncle, who wrote his thesis on Marxist-Leninism, a program to reverse alienation, was jailed and eventually executed for his efforts. Yet there’s a scene in which an innocent conversation between Satrapi’s parents brings a heartbreaking disappointment.

The well-to-do parents discuss moving away from Iran--to America perhaps. Satrapi’s father tells her mother, “Why, so I can become a taxi driver and you a maid?” After years of risking their lives preaching that everyone’s function in society merits dignity, these “somebodies” still can’t shake their traditional disdain for “nobodies.”

Purposefully or not, Satrapi’s work goes to the heart of why our liberals and leftists were so roundly trounced by the Islamists. The intellectuals saw themselves as an aristocracy by virtue of their Western education and professional expertise. Like a piece of breakfast stuck to the lips, their internalized colonialism was seen by everyone but the intellectuals themselves.

Tellingly, numerous times in the graphic novel and in the movie, God appears to the young Satrapi as the Christian father figure, a leap Westward from the eerily abstract Semitic entity, Allah, who according to the Koran is “lam yalad va lam yoolad”: begets not, nor is begotten. In the book, this child raised among Marx fans self-critically reminds us of how Karl Marx looks so much like God to her--except with curlier hair. The mostly Muslim Iranian nation could not have overlooked what was obvious even to a child.

Meanwhile the movie shows us that the Islamic Republic has put a window washer in charge of administering a hospital. An asinine expression of Islamic affirmative action, but a gesture nevertheless, not unlike the ugly punk musician, this time giving the finger to the old order.

But social insightfulness aside, Persepolis is above all a living account of a young woman who has courageously invited us into her personal life, to share how she was affected by a pivotal period in world history. Our hostess is a punk version of Anastasia, the last surviving princess from a sophisticated class, executed, exiled and suppressed into oblivion by the boorish crowds. She is strong, but also prone to bouts of depression and self doubt. Unlike the fictional Dr. Zhivago or Sydney Carton of The Tale of Two Cities, Marjane Satrapi is real and lives among us today. So her story is not over, and we continue to worry for this character as her sudden celebrity status brings new adventure to her life.

Precisely because Persepolis is world-class art, it has set off political bickering, and triggered ideological opportunism. This is nothing new. Boris Pasternak’s Nobel prize in literature was helped along by the CIA in order to embarrass the Soviets (Pasternak knew nothing of this). The Iranian government has already protested Persepolis’ winning of the Prize of the Jury at the Cannes film festival:

"This year the Cannes Film Festival, in an unconventional and unsuitable act, has chosen a movie about Iran that has presented an unrealistic face of the achievements and results of the glorious Islamic Revolution…"

Since the US quarrel with Iran intensified, many Iranian women activists, writers and artists have received significant attention in Western media, Shirin Ebadi, Azar Nafisi, Firoozeh Dumas, Nahid Rachlin, Shahrnush Parsipour, Shirin Neshat, Azadeh Moaveni... To varying degrees, these Iranian women condemn the abuse of their heartfelt protests to justify Western aggression against Iran. But among them, the foul mouthed Princess Satrapi may have the most eloquent advice for both sides of the propaganda war. As she once instructed her dog-loving landlady, Frau Doctor Heller, “Go fuck yourself!”

A Kiarostami Day

At the Berkeley Art Museum a fan blew at one Kiarostami photograph. The rest of his works remained still--like the audience in a theater-- while this projected video of branches and leaves apparently swayed in the turbulence created by the fan. The famed film director had broadened me forever with awareness of the very air between the projector and the screen. Beware, those who would walk blithely into Abbas Kiarostami’s mind, the door you entered through will be too small to let you back out.

I was late for a rendez-vous with friends to see some of Kiarostami’s early films being shown across the street, so I hurried past his photographs of trees in the snow, promising to return while their winter still hung on the walls.

“I have a ticket waiting for me,” I announced at the will-call booth.

“Excuse me, sir,” came an irked voice from behind me, “but there’s a line here?”

How did I miss seeing all the people in the queue, when my eyes could now see invisible air? "Sorry ma’m,” I said to her. And almost confided, “I thought I was ignoring a row of trees planted in the snow.” Beware!

Kiarostami looked on with amusement as I trudged to the back of line. Not Abbas, but his son Ahmad, who had labored to make the event happen. He welcomed us, then sat one row behind us with a couple of his artist friends. We chatted each other up with such good natured Iranian cinema banter that I nostalgically wished I had brought some pistachios and tohkmeh to share. It would not have been out of place. Abbas Kiarostami’s signature is never to let go of his earthy humor, even when his protagonist is on a mountain talking to God--on a cell phone. Even when she is losing her son to patriarchal insensitivity, while the kid wonders if the cream puffs she bought are for the guests.

Kiarostami uses comedy to constantly slap awake the upper layers of consciousness fatigued by the tragedies he frames before us. A sense of humor is a big part of what enables this artist to create aesthetics out of misery.

For example, So Can I, released when Abbas was in his mid thirties, already predicts the future authority of his signature seal of humor. In this cartoon short, a child realizes he can ludicrously jump like a kangaroo, laughably crawl like a worm, and passably swim like a fish. But when he ponders whether he can fly like a bird, he is stumped. As adults we laugh at the child’s charming dilemma, but how many times have we been confronted with the tragedy of human limitations? How many times have we wept helplessly as death took away a loved one? The film ends with a magnificent shot of a jet plane taking off, engines screaming louder than thirty simorghs.

Decades later, in The Wind Will Carry Us, Abbas’ formidable flight of humorous intellect challenged the tragic limitations of Iran’s censorship laws. Juxtaposing the simple milking of a cow with a sensuous Farrokhzaad love poem, he dared the pious censors to make the dirty-minded connection to ejaculation, putting them in a damned-if-you do, damned-if-you-don’t checkmate.

It is unwise, however, to be too confident of having discovered the elements of Kiarostami’s craft. Bread and Alley (1970) another short film insightfully included in the day’s lineup, shows that the genius director is often steps ahead of his critics. In this ten minute directorial debut, a vicious guard dog blocks passage in an alley leading to a boy’s home. The solution to the quandary seems obvious at the outset. The boy is on his way home from buying bread for his family, all he has to do is make friends with the animal by giving it a scrap of the bread. We Iranian adults, versed in the poet Sa’di’s didactic morality watch the boy arrive at the classically proper solution. But Kiarorstami has a surprise for us that transcends the 13th century poet by centuries. After the boy buys his passage with that scrap of bread, the dog begins to guard the alley the boy lives in, making us understand what the hungry animal was protecting in the first place. All along, the deeper subject of the story had been the human animal and our post-Darwinian-psychology, not the boy and his medieval predicament. Checkmate!

Therefore, I feel wary of the grandmaster as I critique the last work in that day’s Kiarostami lineup, a filmmaking masterpiece called The Traveler.

Released five years before Iran’s Islamic Republic came to power, The Traveler has turned out to be an oracular study of fanatic passion. The plot revolves around Ghassem, a poor teenager from the small town of Malayer. He worships the seventies’ national soccer hero, Ghelichkhani. In his resolve to make a pilgrimage to Tehran’s Amjadieh soccer stadium he balks at nothing, however unethical, to come up with his ticket and travel money.

Kiarostami makes us laugh when the resourceful boy goes around with a filmless camera conning his vain but destitute classmates into paying for portraits. Later, we watch more soberly as Ghassem secretly sells his own soccer team’s equipment to the rival team. We discovered the boy’s frightening zeal earlier when he endures torture at the hands of his headmaster rather than give up the few Tomans stolen from his own mother. For Ghassem, the soccer match in Tehran is not just a teenage dream, it is the heartless stuff of religious fanaticism. It is not just an ambition of admirable intensity, it is a quest for fulfillment of spiritual lust. The aesthetic allure of his purpose transcends friendship, compassion, love, all the gentle elements of human morality.

There are scenes in which the mother blames the father, and the headmaster blames the mother for not intervening early enough. But their powerless mannerisms show clearly that no one is a match for Ghassem’s innate single-mindedness.

Yet, like a nature film on the Discovery channel, Kiarostami makes us root for this beautiful natural predator. We adore scruffy little Ghassem for his precocious determination. We sigh at his disappointments and cheer as he emerges triumphant after each crisis. From the film’s view, Ghassem’s opponent is not the society he victimizes, but the Universe that gave him desire without the means. Posed in this way, it is impossible not to give heart and soul to the boy who commands into the Void, “let there be justice for me.” The rest of humanity, queued up to receive their rights, might as well be a row of trees planted in the snow.

Relentlessly raising the stakes, Kiarostami now embarrasses us in our willingness to be led astray. In an ironic scene, Ghassem is victimized by his future self. The stadium ticket office runs out just before our hero’s turn to finally buy his passage to the game. A scalper--who is responsible for the shortage--makes the desperate boy pay four times as much for that ticket. Just what Ghassem will do when he grows up. We thought we were thick as thieves with Abbas, giving our approving wink to Ghassem’s machinations. It turns out the director was putting us to the test all along. Beware!

Kiarostami’s devastating critique of our sense of fairness falters, however, in the scenes just before the final shot. He knows something important is still left unsaid. Redemption is the piece of the jigsaw puzzle that an artist from a Christian culture may have snapped into place. But for Kiarostami redemption is not a jigsaw piece, it is a chess piece. The black and white squares of morality are just the background to vastly more complex subtleties.

Sidestepping a naive resolution in salvation, the young Kiarostami clumsily twists the plot towards retribution. Ghassem inexplicably falls asleep just before the soccer match begins, missing union with his divine. A dream sequence suggesting the weight of subconscious guilt felled our hero is uncharacteristically heavy handed. The sudden transmutation of Ghassem’s mettle seems beneath Kiarostami’s savvy. Is the director still taunting us towards a better understanding of ourselves? Or was this just a blunder by a young director with a small budget for editing and rewrites?

Fortunately, The Traveler is a still portrait of Ghassem, it is not his story. As in some other Kiarostami photographs presented in motion picture format, what evolves is the viewer, not the image. The story is in the frustrations he leaves behind that continue to add reels in our minds. What will happen to the heartbroken Ghassem now that he is marooned penniless in a metropolis? Will he fall prey to his own kind? If he outsmarts them, will he grow up to be an unscrupulous leader who would lie to mire his nation in unjust wars? Or by some rare transcendence, will he become a great director with sharper insight into right and wrong than those who have never grappled with passion and its dishonest ways?

After the show, we stepped out to happier frustrations. The restaurant we like gets booked up at night. Chopin’s #20 nocturne, was left unfinished on a friend’s piano from earlier in the day when we had to hurry for the theatre.

In between the sun and the night, Kiarostami’s still frames, and air.

Dr. Homayoun at Berkeley

“We all made mistakes,” confessed one member of an audience of fifty or so that had gathered at UC Berkeley to see Dr. Daryoosh Homayoun. The former Pahlavi era minister was there to talk about Iran’s historic struggles with modernity, but many had showed up hoping to confront the intellectual with his Pahlavi past and to dispute his controversial call for a constitutional monarchy in Iran.

The highlight of the energetic and sometimes noisy exchange was the moment following that sadly introspective, “We all made mistakes.” The room went quiet, like a daycare center where children fighting over a rag doll had torn off a limb, and now stood in shocked remorse, each holding a piece.

If Shiism hadn’t won the day, we wondered, and our Leninist/Maoist/Stalinist naiveté had inherited Iran’s revolution, would the country be any better off today? And Homayouni, perhaps remembering the cruel tactics of the Pahlavi dynasty nodded in apparent acknowledgment. Was he admitting the moral errors, or did he simply regret the political miscalculations of the regime he was part of? His praise for Reza Shah and Ataturk, who tried to secularize by force, suggests the latter.

“The Turks worship Ataturk,” he pointed out authoritatively. When confronted with the human cost of this reform, the strikingly tall 78 year old statesman displayed the pain of wisdom on his still charismatic face, as though to say, “if only you understood the responsibilities of power.” Having once walked the corridors of power, Homayoun’s lanky stride still echoes marbled floors. The slight bend of his shoulders appears less a sign of aging than the burden of his critics’ adolescent idealism.

Watching Homayoun’s composure, I would have guessed--incorrectly--an aristocratic military background. He declined to drink his lecturer’s bottled water without a glass. Looking around, he spotted some plastic cups near the coffee pot, then directed the organizers to bring him one. There was no “thank you,” just in case this breach in hospitality was not simply American informality but an Iranian sign of disrespect.

During his lecture Homayoun seemed to talk down to his audience. Too many of his statements appeared as asides for tutoring rather than information supporting his case. This misunderstanding occurs because his presentation lacks modern linear structure. Like passengers on a Tehran bus, some of his points dangle off the sides of the discourse waiting for a proper seat. At one point he asked the audience to let him know when to stop talking.

Homayoun was quite succinct, however, when it came to clarifying the difference between modernity and modernization. The straight forward argument boils down to this: handing a scalpel to a butcher doesn’t transform him into a surgeon. Modernity is not the same as industrialization or better financial institutions. It is a mindset of humanism, secularism and rationalism. The Iranian culture does not have this mindset, therefore Iran is not a modern nation.

His solution: toss the culture. A nation’s identity, he believes, is in her history, not in her culture. As to how any Iranian would submit to this cultural lobotomy, leaving only memories of facts, Homayoun offered no guidance. Nor did he develop a theory as to what is really meant by culture. Having correctly handed the scalpel to the surgeon, we now wonder if the doctor plans to kill the patient. Was the butcher safer after all?

There were indications in Homayoun’s discourse that he isn’t really suggesting a lobotomy but an Islamectomy. Yet even there we find that Dr. Homayoun misunderstands the function of the organ he is planning to remove. This is apparent in a partial autobiography where he remembers spending time in jail with an Iranian Muslim during the chaos of the revolution. The man was studying one of the many Islamic advice books titled, Explanation of Problems (towzih-ol-masaael). Here is what Homayoun says:

“A couple of times we asked him to read parts of the book for us. He stopped reading for us when he saw our uncontrolled laughter. After that, every evening we would force him to give us the book and entertained ourselves by reading it. Never before did we have time to make the acquaintance of such things [bold typeface emphasis mine]. We could not believe that these were the people who had defeated us, and how was it possible for our nation, under the leadership of their intelligentsia, to long for the government of such characters in preference to us.”

What Homayoun found funny was likely the books straight faced Dr. Phil responses to questions like, If I have sex with my goat, is the meat still halaal? The answer: The meat is haraam to you but halaal to others. What we may observe-- after we’re done laughing--is that this well-reasoned answer provides a disincentive for romancing ones livestock, and at the same time makes sure the meat is not wasted. It is also mindful of the economy as it averts a possible panic in the community for certified virgin meat. Note the adeptness of the ayatollah in tackling the problems of sexuality and poverty in a rural environment. While Homayoun et al. ridiculed the simple peasant as being beneath their sympathy, the religious scholar took the time to understand the man as a sexual being. In this autobiographical passage Homayoun has answered his own question as to why his accidental cellmate chose “the government of such characters in preference to us.”

Homoayoun goes on to say that he spent the dull waiting times during his prison escape reading Moby Dick and the works of Saul Bellow. Fully devoting their minds to understanding the West, the Iranian elite found themselves intellectually unprepared to take on the Mullahs.

And perhaps the ayatollahs better understand even the West. Does modernity give us a ladder to climb out of the vulgar irrationality of human sexuality? Sure, but marketing experts, film directors and the artistic elite of the West more often use the ladder to go farther down, not up. There is research to inidcate that pornography played a central role in the the development of Western civilization. Ertoic imagery was one of the earliest uses of the printing press, advancing its development. Today it is a common belief among mass media professionals that the course of technologies such as the internet and DVDs are often determined by the porn industry. The obscene amount of energy generated around the Hejab issue both by its Muslim supporters and its Western detractors is as clearly explained by the ayatollahs' comedic obsession with genitalia than by Captain Ahab’s tragic obsession with his Moby Dick.

Ironically, Homayoun’s most controversial idea, his support for a constitutional monarchy is a well calculated concession of intellect to lowly instinct. Our herd instinct in particular. Common people love royalty, and will rally around the symbol. Getting past my gag reflex, I nibbled a little on his monarchy idea and found it actually palatable. In a crisis of divisiveness a throne is a handier piece of furniture than seats in the parliament. In harmonizing our ethnic diversity chanting “Jaavid Shah” compares well with chanting “death to America." Unified under a crown, perhaps we won't need unification under dangerous slogans. In the alphabet of our daily concerns Zionism can go back where it belongs with Zulbia and Zereshk polo.

Taking his cue from Homayoun’s political philosophy, Iran’s handsome new king would distance Iran from the filth and fury of the third world, allying us instead with the cream of civilization, the West. I would quite enjoy living in the happy kingdom of Iran.

But when I step out of Disneyland, I see a world where the disparity between rich and poor nations has created an empty niche of power. This particular niche has been exploited ever since Jesus Christ found he could get a following by saying “blessed are the poor.” The only trouble with Iran preaching rebellion to destitute nations is that the Islamic regime itself has only a primitive concept of human rights, democracy, and non-violence. Otherwise it is well within the mandate of the Iranian revolution to confront injustice in world affairs, and once again have our philosophies, culture, and management style affect the course of History. The limits of our national ambitions are farther out than Homayoun would allow. During audience exchanges we spent much time arguing about the limits of scope of the 1906 revolution and had only unspoken despair for the vastly larger, global scope of our 1979 revolution. Yet in its degree of activism--though not in methods--Iran's revolution is not only alive but thriving in the Islamic Republic.

Despite the many instances when I thought Homayoun was wrong, there was a moment when he touched my soul. With a sense of plea that his proud voice could not hide, he reminded us that he was at the helm of affairs for only one year in Iran, but for sixty other years his service to the country was unquestionable. He mentioned being the publisher of the popular paperback series Ketaab Jeebee. I remember as a youth delighting at every new release, saving money for the next one. The fatherly figure adeptly defending himself from our reproach had helped give us the very tools of the intellect we were using to disagree with him. As he had destroyed, so had he built, and along the way he had made mistakes. We all made mistakes.

300

Directed by Zach Snyder
Based on a graphic novel by Frank Miller

In one scene of this movie two women can be seen openly kissing each other in the court of Xerxes, the Persian monarch. A few cuts later, a man with a disability is welcomed into the Persian court by the great king himself. Even though Persians are a Caucasian race, they have chosen a king who appears to be of African descent. In the movie 300 the Persian Empire seems overrun by American liberal ideology. I half wondered if the bloody battles weren't really over universal health care and gay marriage.

The neo-cons in this allegory are the Spartans. Their king, Leonidas, has taken his troops to war despite opposition from virtually every wise counsel in his land. Like his modern counterpart Leonidas says he is going to battle in the cause of freedom and reason. But 300 shows us that Leonidas is not a reasonable man. In a fit of rage the Spartan king executes Xerxes’ messengers--a deed the reasonable Xerxes seems to have forgiven when Leonidas himself stands vulnerable before the Persian king. And anyone who has read even a little about Spartan society would know that Leonidas couldn’t possibly be fighting for freedom. The slaves in Sparta outnumbered free citizens by seven to one. A common initiation rite for a young Spartan male was to sneak up on local slaves and massacre them. No wonder Leonidas and his 300 braves would rather have died than become part of the Persian Empire: ever since the time of the Persian king Cyrus the Great, such human rights abuses had been against the law of the empire.

On a clay cuneiform cylinder made 25 centuries ago Cyrus declares, “I will never let anyone take possession of movable and landed properties of others by force or without compensation. As long as I live I prohibit unpaid, forced labor. Today I announce that everyone is free to choose a religion. People are free to live in all regions and take up a job provided that they never violate others’ rights… I prohibit slavery and my governors and subordinates are obliged to prohibit exchanging men and women as slaves within their own ruling domains. Such a tradition should be exterminated the world over.” The return to Israel of the Jews held in Babylonian slavery was a consequence of this legislation. Historically, King Leonidas and his 300 Spartans died to prevent freedom, not to preserve it.

So how does director Zack Snyder take these obvious facts in favor of ancient Persia to deliver a pro-Spartan message? The trick is infuriating in its simplicity, and perhaps not an undeserved insult to the members of the audience who carelessly empathize with the 300. Snyder presents the Spartans as a good-looking bunch with chiseled faces, bulging pectorals, and abs that even a computer graphics body would need megahertz crunches to accomplish. None of the Spartan's adversaries on the other hand look like they have seen the inside of a health club except Xerxes himself--and even this character has disfigured himself with unsightly piercings. Persians and other nay-sayers to the war have ugly skin, whereas the hawkish Spartans have manly sex appeal. Also, using swaggering language such as “come and get us,” and “We’ll fight in the shade,” the Spartans establish a locker room camaraderie between themselves and among susceptible members of the audience. The Persians on the other hand have obviously never drank beer in front of the TV on a Monday night.

300 is worth studying because it reflects the cognitive dissonance of American society under the Bush administration. Like the Nazi propaganda footage sometimes aired on the History Channel, one wonders just how much it will take for a human to think black is white and white is black. 300 reiterates the frightening lesson we learned during the heyday of fascism: it takes very little to manipulate the human mind. The simple ingredients are smart uniforms, and pats on the back for enjoying violence. And of course talented film directors with no scruples.

Cafe Transit

Director/Screenwriter Cambuzia Partovi

Having already won best screenplay at Iran’s Fajr Film Festival, Café Transit is now that country’s official entry for the Oscars. How did director/screenwriter Kambuzia Partovi go from having his works banned in Iran to becoming the artistic pride of his country? The answer is that Café Transit is cleverly written so that its domestic message says one thing while its foreign message says the opposite. The Western audience sees a romance between a sensuously forthright European truck driver and an enterprising Iranian widow. We are heartbroken as their love is made impossible by a nightmarish, apparently Islamic custom. Native Iranian audience, on the other hand, know that the practice of widows having to marry their dead husband’s brother isn’t particularly Islamic or Iranian. In their view, the lovers are battling against the absurd anachronisms of a backward Turkic speaking village. Western critics tend to applaud movies that authenticate the “clash of civilizations,” while Iranian cultural authorities reward movies that favorably compare their nation’s regressive gender policies against even lower—possibly fictitious--standards. Café Transit is a well crafted piece of international filmmaking that makes Iran appear developmentally stunted to the Western viewer at the same time that it makes the country’s mainstream values look culturally superior in the eyes of its domestic audience.

Catering to diverse political agendas assures wider acceptance, but a film does not become a contender for Fajr and the Oscars unless its point of view is expressed with artistic merit. Café Transit is a strong candidate for international filmmaking prizes mostly because the protagonist, Reyhan, is a refreshing twist to the standard determined-woman-struggling-against-tradition persona.

Even before we meet the charismatic heroine, the plot reveals that her real name is not Reyhaneh, but Reyhan (basil)--the same name with the feminine suffix deleted. Thus Kambuzia Partovi prepares us for a story about a woman who will transgress gender barriers. The film fulfills this expectation when Reyhan refuses to close down her late husband’s truck stop, choosing instead to use her extraordinary cooking skills to grow the business. Soon truck drivers from all over Europe and Asia are eating at her café on the border of Iran and Turkey. Reyhan’s brother in law, Nasser-- to whom truck drivers queuing up for a home cooked meal look no different than men waiting in line at a bordello--urges the widow not to dishonor the family. She should close the café, follow local custom and marry him so that he can provide for her and her two children. Reyhan, who is not a local, refuses to bend to this bizarre custom. She does not love Nasser, moreover he already has a wife. The jilted brother in law’s campaign to close down Reyhan’s business creates much of the suspense and indignation in Café Transit, particularly since Reyhan’s attraction to a Greek truck driver has made her vulnerable to gossip.

For the Iranian viewer, Reyhan’s breach of local custom is not a rebellion against the country’s mainstream Islamic values. Even though she manages a busy truck stop, she tries to avoid scandal by staying in the kitchen at all times, letting a trusted old male employee deal with her hungry customers. To the Western viewer the need for such precaution is a symptom of life in an intrusively misogynistic society. It creates sympathy for Reyhan. To the traditional Iranian, however, this is proof of the heroine’s sense of decorum. It generates respect for her and convinces the audience that the brother in law’s concern for the honor of the family has no justification.

Despite her conflict with her brother in law, Reyhan remains as respectful to him as possible. Is this because her patriarchal society punishes protest, or is Reyhan’s forbearance a sign of Iranian culture’s wisdom and humility? Fereshteh Sadr Orafaiy, who plays Reyhan, does a superb job of disallowing a straightforward answer. Instead, the Reyhan she portrays seems to understand people by way of their needs, not their threat level. The character’s natural mastery of the universal language of need is why her café has become home away from home for so many travelers from so many distant cultures.

Though Café Transit is unmistakably feminist, it subscribes to the brand of feminism that presupposes a female intuition for nurturing, specifically homemaking. Reyhan’s ability to use flavors, colors, and aromas to create an atmosphere of caring and rootedness is her main ally throughout the movie. This strength gives her success in business, a sense of independence, and a feeling of accomplishment. It also helps her in love. She flirts with Zacharias--the Greek truck driver with whom she falls in love--by sending out plates of food to him, watching him secretly from the kitchen window as he eats. Orafaiy fashions a potent feminine allure out of Reyhan’s passivity. When Zacharias finally tells Reyhan he loves her, she can only walk away without a word, but after a while her widow’s black mourning headscarf is gone, replaced with colorful ones. The heroines actions are as quietly forceful as the colors that affect our moods. Art director Hassan Farsi highlights this “feminine touch” very effectively, not only in the sets and costumes but in the amazing food presentations.

As a strong female character, Reyhan also has the power to protect. Besides enhancing the film’s feminist credentials in the West, this protectiveness serves a domestic function. The parallel between the outdated customs of this village and the reactionary gender policies of the Islamic Republic, is obvious even to the Iranian viewer, so Partovi mitigates this subversive allegory with a moralizing subplot about a young Russian woman whose Western values have led to a life of vagrancy and sex for favors. In a proselytizing gesture, Partovi’s screenplay has some unscrupulous men dump the homeless Russian woman in front of the café where her dignity is nursed back to health under Reyhan’s virtuous and motherly sheltering. There is an emotional scene where both women—neither of whom understand one another’s language—cry upon each other’s shoulders. In this touching invocation of international sisterhood, the sisters are actually grieving over the devastations of war, not the unfairness of patriarchal systems.

Crediting a female role model with special instincts for nest building, passive influence, and motherliness seems a hackneyed consolation for lack of gender equality, but that is what Café Transit offers its domestic audience. Mindful of Islamic cultural biases, Partovi never argues against a woman’s place being in the home; his feminism lies in his expanding the traditional concept of home, not in expanding the traditional concept of woman. Feminists in Iran can only hope the audience will see that the vector of progress from managing a home to managing a café may eventually point to managing a country. Beyond that Partovi knows he cannot go, unless he wants his work banned yet again.

This self censorship is not without artistic penalty. In a scene where Reyhan’s Greek admirer dances in front of her, we are not permitted to see the desire in her face. The resulting absence of information is as annoying as a hole in the canvas or a harsh skip on a music CD. A Global Film Initiative discussion guide diplomatically explains away one such scene claiming that the character is being given her privacy. One wonders why in a feminist movie it is not left up to the actress to decide how much privacy she wants to claim in displaying the inner feelings of her character.

The busy truck traffic of goods flowing north and south in front of Reyhan’s café constantly reminds us that Iran cannot isolate itself from outside influence. The Oscar committee will be flattered to see an Iranian film’s respectful nod to Western feminism, perhaps unaware that Partovi has given Iran’s traditional culture the last word in the movie. In the final sequence, the Russian girl which Reyhan rescued, is somewhere outside of Iran preparing a dish for her male friends.

“What is this? It’s great,” the men ask.

“Mirza Ghasemi*,” she replies.

When it comes to culture or ideology, there’s no such thing as one-way traffic.

*An Iranian dish.

Borat

Screenplay by Sacha Baron Cohen.

I heard Sasha Baron Cohen’s mother was of Jewish Persian origin, so I went to see his movie to find out what this "son of Persia" has accomplished. I was instantly struck by how familiar the main character seemed. The disarmingly innocent ignoramus lost in a civilization with a superior attitude took me back to all the Tork jokes I grew up with.

Tork jokes are a form of bragging, an insecure boasting of the Persian cultural dominance. During the centuries that Turkic speaking people held military and executive power in Persia, the Persian speakers consoled themselves with the notion that they were the dominant wit. Here’s a common recipe for a Tork joke: One savvy Persian observer, one illiterate village Tork, throw in a situation, gloat until funny. Borat replaces the savvy Persian observer with the American movie audience--who seem to enjoy laughing at Khazakhs even more than Persians like to make fun of Torks. But what consolation is the American audience seeking? Why did they pay 68 million dollars at the box office to be disgusted into laughter by Borat’s exotic toilet habits, guiltless sexuality, and overly libidinous courtship behavior?

The answer is partly in the cake Cohen has, and partly in the cake Cohen eats. In a commercially brilliant sleight of hand this artist panders shamelessly to America’s post 9-11 xenophobic arrogance, and at the same time delivers a scathing commentary on the nation’s imbecilic state of mind. While we lounge in our theatre seats complacently laughing at the loose morals and crude anti-Semitism of a clueless semi-Islamic character, we are also led to ask whether that last superior laugh isn’t really on us. In one scene Cohen --who does not let his film subjects know he is really an actor--returns to the dining room holding his excrement in a plastic bag, asking what he should do with it. The victim of this Candid Camera joke is a polite Southern hostess who recovers gracefully, and to my great admiration, shows Borat how civilized people use the toilet. So far this is America the beautiful. But later during the party when Borat’s after-dinner guest turns out to be an African-American call girl, Borat is thrown out of the house, along with his guest. Tolerance has limits.

Based on audience response, if I were to divide Borat’s 68 million dollar early box office take between distinct camps of Borat aficionados, this would be my guess,
Brilliant commentary on American hypocrisy : $10 million
I live in the greatest country in the world; supersize my sex and scatology jokes: $58million

As a member of the smaller group, the funniest scene for me was when thousands of rodeo fans held their right hands over their hearts while Borat performed Khazakhstan’s “national anthem” to the tune of “The Star Spangled Banner.” All the time Borat bleated the fake words to this petty and childishly belligerent “national anthem,” the camera panned the proud faces of American patriots who still cheer as their president continues to shred their constitution, desecrate their bill of rights, and disgrace their country in the eyes of the world. This gag made me chuckle more cathartically than any bad Persian joke about how dumb Torks can get