Director Mohammad Shirvani walked up to the stage before the beginning of the film and, speaking through an interpreter told us to watch this film as though it were one long masturbation. He stressed it must be a male masturbation, because American and Iranian males all do it in the same way. He also told us we could walk out of the theater whenever we wished. Everyone in the audience seemed a bit confused, but he's a funny man and we accepted what he said.
This is avant-garde filmmaking at its most peculiar and I will say that I was not terribly overwhelmed, though I was never bored for an instant. Describing its plot is a difficult thing to do for it was rambling and rather aimless, but that seemed to be the entire point of the film, not that I necessarily agree with the approach. However, we were reminded before the movie began that this film was entered in the "New Frontier" category of the Sundance, and therefore the rules of film construction were expected to be rewritten or completely disregarded. He certainly took some liberties and I'm sure he caught the eyes of several people watching.
We are introduced to a father and a son, and some sort of woman whose significance is ambiguous. The father is a hulking, shapeless, morbidly obese mountain of a man, who waddles and wheezes across the screen, his eyes half-closed and his smell practically emanating through the screen. This first-time actor was obviously chosen for is ability to be fat, and the vilest creature they could capture on screen. His talents in that respect are abounding.
His son is a gorgeous young man, chosen for his youth and modelesque beauty. But the boy is deaf and suffering under the hand of his cruel and overbearing father. He tries to meet girls or to escape and is each time pulled back to the sameness of his home by his hair. It is a repetitive occurrence that he is smothered and kept from life, unable to communicate with anyone but the "Iranian Monster".
He is a tolerant boy, who tends to his father in a strange ritual of sucking the fat out of his back with glass cups, and bleeding him with leaches. The strange woman is both would-be guardian and slave of the family, who wants to help the boy but is perpetually asleep. There are a great many components to this film which lead it down a bizarre route to nowhere. There is little development in the characters or the plot and some things seem to contradict themselves.
I have to admit that I did not understand this film one bit until after the screening was over and we had a Q&A with Shirvani. After he talked to us for some time it became clear that this was a metaphor for the state of Iran and the conflict between what he called the "real Iran" and the bloated, dying Iran that we Americans see on the television. Through his eyes we see an ineffectualness of how the people are suppressed and how the state itself is collapsing in on itself, crushed under its own weight.
Shirvani said to watch this film as a masturbation, but that implies an orgasm which I couldn't find. In a sense, the boy does assert some agency towards the end, but it was too subtle to be considered a climax. I was disappointed that his film didn't make a louder statement. The woman, it turns out, represents liberty, but she stood idly by and helped only when it was convenient for her. I think this film failed in the end because I needed to have it explained for me. This filmmaker from Tehran was trying to make a loud, political statement, but only managed to confuse me with impossible visual metaphors. Shirvani is obviously a disgruntled activist with a message to impart, but with no real call to arms and a muddled narrative it was difficult to know what to make of it. He is a clever man with startling ideas as a director, but if he wants people to think about his message he needs to tone down the surrealist qualities to his work.
2/4
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