Having spent the last three years in prison for unpaid debts, Rahim Soltani (Amir Jadidi) is granted a two-day leave in order to attempt to rectify the situation with his creditor, his former father-in-law Bahram (Mohsen Tanabandeh). Staying with his older sister Malileh (Maryam Shahdaei) and her husband Hossein (Alireza Jahandideh), Rahim plans on paying off part of his substantial debt by selling some gold coins that his lover, Farkhondeh (Sahar Goldoust), discovered in a lost handbag she found at a bus stop.
Circumstances compound and get in the way, however. Upon appraisal, Rahim is disconcerted by the fact that the gold might not be worth as much as he previously thought. It's an ordeal in itself just to get Bahram to tentatively consent to releasing Rahim from his charges against him, dredging up old wounds of Rahim's failed business and his failed marriage. And though Rahim is initially optimistic, reality starts to settle in, not the least because Malileh, unlike her husband, is willing to ask hard, practical questions: Even if Bahram accepts partial payment, how will Rahim ensure the bond checks to make up for the other half? Why didn't he try finding a job first, before coming to an agreement? Surely he won't try going to another loan shark? It's that sort of thinking that got Rahim into trouble in the first place.
Malileh also isn't buying that her brother suddenly came into a gift from a friend. The shame of taking what isn't his begins to weigh upon Rahim's conscience. With only a day left before returning to prison, he decides to leave the handbag and gold with his sister, and posts notices for the missing items around town. Not having access to a cellphone, he places the prison office number as his contact, and shortly thereafter receives a call from a very distraught woman claiming to be the owner of the bag. He checks that she can correctly describe the bag, how many coins as well as the brand of cigarettes inside, and then sends her to his sister to collect it. The prison authorities, impressed by Rahim's act of altruism, invite the news to cover his story, and he is transformed overnight into a local hero. A special leave is granted, a charity is organized to help pay off his debts to Bahram, and he's even offered a job in the local government.
But what seems at first to be Rahim's one-way ticket to freedom and the restoration of his dignity spirals out of control. Bahram is suspicious, of course, and resents the extent to which the man who so offended him is now being touted as a paragon of virtues, whereas he is being made out to be a greedy villain. Our hero, in turn, proves to be a victim of both his own guile and also, ironically, his lack of it. His story becomes the fulcrum of a narrative being spun by the prison authorities and the media for their own benefit, which only amplifies the conspicuous implausibilities of his version of events as they have become embellished over time, for his own convenience as well as for the convenience of others. To make matters worse, the woman to whom Malileh returned the bag has seemingly vanished without a trace. A miracle becomes a scandal, with Rahim at the center of a desperate bid by all parties involved to avoid disgrace.
* * *
Scooped up by Amazon Studios in April of last year, Iranian writer-director Asghar Farhadi's A Hero premiered on streaming yesterday after a two-week limited theatrical run. While the convenience of the home experience is attractive, tristate cinephiles should do themselves a favor and try to catch it before it leaves the Film Forum in New York, or at least hold out for its second run in New Jersey and Pennsylvania's few remaining arthouses. Save perhaps Adam Leon's Italian Studies, more so Clint Bentley and Greg Kwedar's Jockey, or, God forbid, a fifth Scream movie, this week boasts little to compete with Farhadi's latest drama, which is as subtle as it is nerve-racking.
In the last decade or so Farhadi has grown in prominence as one of the leading figures of Iranian national cinema, at least as far as the international community is concerned. Situated somewhere between the poeticism of Abbas Kiarostami and the polemics of Jafar Panahi, his body of work carries on the fraught legacy of a post-revolutionary cinema seeking to explore the ambiguous social, cultural, and political realities of day-to-day life within Iran, all the while creating friction between itself and a political status quo that is all too willing to capitalize on the propaganda victory of Iran's ascendancy on the stage of international art cinema while repressing the progressive potential of such works within its borders. A Hero exemplifies this quality of Iran's realist cinema, subtly touching upon and critiquing contemporary tensions in Iranian life while at the same time offering a vision to international, particularly U.S. audiences, that could not be farther from the demonization of the country as a hostile desert of backwards, medieval zealotry.
Indeed, it is the patience of Farhadi's filmmaking, the way he extrapolates so much drama from scenarios that are relatively simple and lacking in the histrionic or sensational, that makes A Hero particularly evocative when viewed in the context of the United States' own trends of socially realist cinema. Whether we're talking about the works of Josh and Benny Safdie, Sean Baker, or Janicza Bravo, the kind of realist cinema that often seems to excite American filmmaker - blurring the line between fiction and documentary, modernity and postmodernity, preferring regionally-specific storytelling and the strategic casting of non-professional performers - nonetheless tends to be realized in stylistically maximalist terms. And while ostensibly drawing the spectator's eye to the margins and subcultures of our society, this 21st-century neorealism presents highly aestheticized depictions of illicit drug use, sex work, and violence in a manner that betrays its visceral, more than empathetic motives. The Safdie's Uncut Gems, Bravo and Jeremy O. Harris's @Zola, Sean Baker's Red Rocket... These films luxuriate in extremity presented at an amphetamine pace and with the sensibility of a black comedy, their depiction of alienation and desperation occurring in the margins of American life never far from a cathartic freak show at the expense of their precarious characters. Increasingly rare, it seems, is the work of American neorealism that not only presents its subject without a lascivious or mocking tone, but also contrives a scenario that is complicated by more germane foibles of human nature, rather than merely the manic escalation of extreme or antisocial behaviors. A film like A Hero not only underscores the disturbing cynicism of American independent cinema, but also the sheer paucity of its imagination.
Like its U.S. counterparts, A Hero is something of a thriller, albeit one that builds suspense and excitement around the misadventures of our anti-heroic protagonist through relatively modest means. Unlike Adam Sandler's Howard from Uncut Gems, there are no concrete shoes awaiting Rahim if he can't weasel his way out of his financial obligations. Unlike Simon Rex's Mickey in Red Rocket, there are no prurient or exploitative outcomes to Rahim succeeding in his endeavor to reclaim what he's lost. He's just a guy trying to get out of prison, and much of the film's power to draw us in relies on Amir Jadidi's threading a very delicate line in terms of how we perceive this character.
In some ways, Rahim really does live up to Bahram's worst appraisal of him as a person. He's self-serving, irresponsible, and habitually dishonest. He's an acolyte of the American neorealist anti-hero except that American neorealism tends to present such a figure in a detached manner, as if observing a pathological phenomenon. Our capacity to become too uncomfortably involved with them is muted by the clarity of their antisocial tendencies and flamboyant narcissism. In contrast, Jadidi's soft-eyed, shallow smile suggests an inner struggle that is far more sympathetic and, thus, perhaps even worse than if Rahim really were as bad as Bahram wants him to be. It is a moral choice, however imperfectly executed, that incites the thrills of Farhadi's story, not a demonstration of cynical desire or extreme behavior. Farhadi thus structures his more grounded thriller around themes of morality, rather than detached observation of pathology. We become more emotionally involved and invested as we contend with the suspense produced by Rahim's being both a victim of his own decisions, while also being a victim of circumstances that are beyond him.
One is reminded of the classic Groucho Marx joke. Rahim may look like an idiot, and talk like an idiot, but my dear reader should not be fooled. He really is an idiot. He's a rube, a simpleton. He's an allegorical child. And as with a child there's a sense of ambiguity as to whether his behavior is calculated to manipulate others to his personal advantage, or if he is merely naive. A Hero becomes a parable in the most straightforward terms, showing how one flawed individual's drive to save face and restore his dignity makes him the cypher of a society obsessed with the appearance of dignity, charity, and grace rather than the substance.
Is it possible that he used the prison office's number, as opposed to his sister's, because he knew that this would bring his act of altruism to their attention? Of course. But in contrast to that ambiguity, there is the assurance, as one of his fellow prisoners points out, that Rahim's story is being exploited by the officials to distract from the institutions' poor conditions, which recently resulted in the high profile suicide of one of its inmates. For all of the ways that Rahim gladly soaks up the limelight, twisting details of his story to obscure his cynical motives, the prison officials themselves reinforce this false narrative, only to leave him hanging when compromising details he already brought to their attention resurface. Farhadi's script plays so deftly with our sense of the characters' motivations, between what is authentic and what is a put-on, that we question our own apprehension of what has come before. Didn't Rahim tell them that it was Farkhondeh, not he, who found the handbag? Do they really not remember? Are they lying, or do they, like Rahim himself, maintain an all too human vanity with regards to their own sense of honesty? Our anti-hero becomes all the more intimately empathetic, not just because of his flaws, but because his experience expands upon how we are all, essentially, adrift in a world that is constructed not by some objective truth, but by a constellation of subjective understandings of what the truth even is. (Unsurprisingly, Akira Kurosawa's Rashomon was one of Farhadi's selections for Sight & Sound's 2012 poll of the greatest films of all time.)
The melodramatic struggle between Rahim and Bahram, which remains paramount in the former's struggle to establish a sense of dignity and self-worth, and gradually builds into its own kind of paranoia, proves to be a Red herring. For all of Bahram's grievances against Rahim, the extent to which he is repulsed by him, what is revealed is a strange degree of compassion, or at least a patronizing condescension bordering on such. "Poor people who consider you their hero," he tells him. "They build you up to say the country is a paradise... People show you respect? People feel sorry for you." Just as Rahim tells himself a story that he wants to be true about himself, and he wants others to take for granted, so too is he made a cypher of what certain elements of Iran - particularly the political, class, and media elites - wish to be true about about their society, and want everyone to take for granted about its nature. Anchored by Jadidi and Tanabandeh's excellent performances, A Hero subtly builds its moral parable into a social and political critique of a country concerned more with appearances than with what is inside, more with saving face than with any kind of true progress or restitution for harms committed.
Farhadi's vision is not only expressed with an empathetic, moral clarity, but is also socially-grounded to make its thrills all the more moving and impactful. It comes as a breath of fresh air when contrasted with the often superficial, sensational, and hyper-individualist focus of our own realist dramatic thrillers, which may gesture at social circumstances, but rarely reckon with how these can be utilized to tell a more complex story, or to ground us in an emotionally compelling experience.
Comments
Post a Comment