Monthly Archives: February 2025

The Seed of the Sacred Fig           Mohammed Rasoulof  (Iran/Ger; 2024)  Soheila Golestani, Missagh Zareh

Is that a gun in your pocket

Mohammed Rasoulof’s film is a response to the oppression of women in Iran and the regime’s brutal reaction to civil protest against its core theocratically justified laws. However Rasoulof to some extent models the film satirically on the ‘Hollywood Western’ which genre like theocratic Iran, is often marked out by the non-existence of women, or at least their relegation to shadow status.   So ‘The Seed of the Sacred Fig Tree’ is characterised by the theme of the ‘gun’  ‘cabin fever’ and the final ‘shoot out.’

‘The Seed of the Sacred Fig’ (Sacred Fig) is a film made in a spirit of complete defiance of the Iranian Islamic State.  Complete in that Rasoulof makes any film at all in that he has been banned by the Revolutionary Courts from film making (hence the film was shot in secret); complete in that his film is not an oblique or indirect attack on the regime. Both in subject matter and script ‘Sacred Fig’ comprises an uncompromising sustained frontal assault on both the values the Islamic State and the hypercritical bureaucratic apparatus that enforces and sustains them both through intimidation and the promiscuous use of the death sentence.

After ‘Sacred Fig’ is discovered by the authorities to have been produced and subsequently entered into Cannes Festival 2024, there’s no way back for Rasoulof.  He was sentenced to an eight year stretch, sentenced to being flogged, sentenced to the confiscation of all his property. He has managed to escape Iran and find refuge in Europe (using the sort of underground route that in ‘Hit the Road’ Panah Pahani made a film about).  Given the long reach of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard he will always be at risk of assassination by their agents.

This is the film of a brave man, prepared to die for his open hostility and opposition to the regime.  Likewise, unthinkably brave everyone involved in the film, in particular its key players Soheila Golestani, Missagh Zareh, Mahsa Rostami, Setareh Maleki and cinematographer Pooyan Aghababael.  At risk from the vengeful state judiciary they have put life and limb on the line.  As far as is known most of the above are still in Iran.

‘Sacred Fig’ is in two parts which comprise a ravelling of the plot and an unravelling, an intensification and a climax.  In the opening pretitle sequence we see a series of shots: a close shot of bullets rattling down onto a table leading through to Iman (antogonist) driving to a remote shrine where he recites a prayer of thanksgiving.  This section introduces the change in Iman’s work situation from which point the script plays out the forces unleashed by widespread women’s protests consequent on the killing of Mahsa Amini whilst in police custody. 

Iman (sic) has been promoted and he now a judge/investigator for the Revolutionary Courts.  Part of his work will involve signing off the death penalty for ‘politicals’ hence his identity and work are kept secret.  Just in case, he is issued with a gun for self protection.  Cue the vectors of intensification as through their smart phones Iman’s two daughters Razvan and Sana watch the eruption of protest caused by Amini’s death.  These protests also cause a rapid increase in Iman’s workload as he is called on not to investigate incidents arising out of the protests, but rather to rubber stamp the increasing number of death sentences passed by the courts.

To go with his new corporate theocratic status Iman has been given a new spacious apartment in a block reserved for special servants.  Like any employee of a large company or indeed a monolithic dictatorship, those who do the dirty work get well looked after.  But Iman’s new dwelling, which he shares with Najmeh his devout wife   and his two daughters, becomes a strange incubator of all the contradictions and oppositions that riddle contemporary Iran.  As the pressure at work ramps up, the increasing issuance of death warrants starts to exert a toll on Iman, and then something disconcerting happens: HIS GUN DISAPPEARS.

This is Rasoulof’s strategic plot device.  It’s a sort of Hollywood antithesis.  As Raymond Chandler famously quipped when you want to ramp up the action in a movie, get a man with a gun to enter the room: everything changes.  Here the opposite occurs: suddenly a man is without a gun: everything changes.  From becoming a de facto symbol of male authority the gun becomes a defacto symbol of male weakness.  A strange equalisation is premised as Iman supported tacitly by his boss tries to find out what’s going on, which of his family (if any) has the gun. Although the apartment is searched high and low the gun is not found.

Events become more violent. One of Iman’s daughters Razvan, is with her friend who is seriously injured by police buckshot when they are out on the streets of Tehran.  Likewise Iman’s boss increasingly concerned by Iman’s inability to regain possession of his gun, organises a ‘discrete’ interrogation of the women by one of the department’s specialists. But despite this intimidation and being subjected to the tricks of the interrogation trade, the gun continues to elude the men.

The ravelling up section engenders a growing the feeling of claustrophobic paranoia characterising relations between the members of this small family. (a claustrophobic paranoia that perhaps replicates the underlying mood in Iran)  Hermetically sealed in the apartment with only a small uncurtained section of a window out of which to peer at an increasingly unpredictable world, they are trapped between the  violence of the male validation of ‘God’s Law’ and the women’s passive resistance.  The tension evolves out of this power disequilibrium: Iman’s ranting opposed by the tacit silence of the women whose communicative response is mainly mediated through their body language and their eyes.  Iman’s wife plays a pivotal schizo role in this situation.  Although pious and supportive of her husband, she’s torn between her sense of wifely duty and her instinctive desire not just to protect her daughters but to see that the violence they are all experiencing directed against women, can’t always be justified.

For his climactic end section Rasoulof transposes the action.  Iman removes his family from Tehran, drives them to a ruined abandoned city.  At this point the actors are set down in a mythic primal landscape and arriving here the gun ‘issue’ is stripped back to its essence without subterfuge.  It is the male pitted against the women.  Iman finally convinced that one or perhaps all of the women is lying to him and has the gun, drops the mask of polite circumspection and subterfuge, resorting to the unalloyed male capacity for violence.  He assaults his wife and daughters locking them up without food or water. By this stage we have seen that Sana the youngest daughter has the gun, and that perhaps the two girls have been complicit both in taking the gun and successful in their protestations of bemused but affected innocence. Perhaps even Najmeh at some point knew or realised the truth, but kept ‘mum’. 

As Iman’s violent rampage of frustration escalates, Sana escapes and frees her sister and mother.  Following a chase through the ruins, there is finally a ‘high noon’ moment, an absurdist replaying in mock tribute to all such movie tropes, where Sana and Iman (who has been given another gun by his boss) face off against each other with their guns:  the final gun fight.  Slowly approaching her, Iman in classic mode challenges Sana to shoot him. Her guns barks out its defiance but as Sana fires the ground beneath Iman’s feet collapses and he vanishes into the ruins down below. 

So at the last Rasoulof signs off with Marxist-type philisophical observation:

What begins as tragedy ends as farce.

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk 

Three Colours: Blue        Krzysztof Kieslowski (Fr; 1993)  Juliette Binoche, Benoit Regent

viewed Star and Shadow Cinema 2^nd Feb 2025; ticket: £7.

Kieslowski’s opening montage in ‘Blue’ is a finely honed piece of film making.  The first shot, taken from underneath a speeding car, shows the spinning front onside wheel of the car focussing attention on the point of contact between road and tyre. The montage comprising mainly big close-ups has the quality of a classic Eisenstein assembly as it moves between the interior of the car, with its occupants and the exterior as represented by its underside.  The contrast between the close up shots of the riders and the actual mechanical contact that carries them, sets up oppositional tensions, between surface and the latent. It also in film terms, where anticipatory tropes are part of montage language, establishes the disaster that is to come.

After the presaged crash, ‘Three Colours: Blue (‘Blue’) ’ simply runs out of road. Kieslowski is unable to unable to develop his script into any thing beyond a chocolate box melodrama, which is enunciated in the shot following the immediate aftermath of the crash in which we see out of the opened rear door of the wrecked car, a child’s ball spill out of the vehicle and bounce gently away.   This sentimental staged piece of filmic theatre introduces an immediate false note.  It feels like a labourious attempt to re-create the pathos of Lang’s balloon shot in ‘M’ but without Lang’s (and Harbou’s) ability to seamlessly incorporate this kind of signifying symbolism into the flow of their material. 

Perhaps I’m on weak ground in writing about Kieslowski because ‘Blue’ is the first and only film of his that I’ve seen.  What I know is that most of Kieslowski’s career as a film director was in Poland where he worked under a communist regime that ruled through social oppression and artistic censorship.  After Lech Walesa’s rise to prominence, the government became more inconsistent and prevaricative in its enforcement of the rules in the face of prevailing political tensions endemic in the country.  Kieslowski like other directors from Eastern Europe may have functioned better as an oppositional  creative worker. To have to pit one’s work against constraints delimitations and mono-ideological perversities of a dictatorial regime demands creativity intelligence and resilience on the part of those artists who choose to engage in the subversion of the established and condoned ways of thinking.  The purpose of such artists is clear: at some level their work must engage in a critique of the established order, a critique that without overly signing its oppositional nature, points unerringly to the limitations and failure of the ruling regime. 

But once the political tide turns and the ideological straightjacket is removed artists can find themselves at a loss as to how to re-activate purpose in and of their work.    Andrei Tarkovski exemplifies this.  His work was always grounded in a cosmological  metaphysics of life and death. But his metaphysical presentation of ‘time as an instability’ for instance always stood out in contrast to the Communist Party’s obligatory adoption and endorsement of the Marxist understanding of time as a progressive historical force. Tarkovski’s idea of ‘time’ was all the clearer for being contrasted with the pure mechanics of ‘time’ represented as a materialist concept.   Tarkovski’s last two films, ‘Nostalgia’ and ‘Sacrifice’ made when he migrated to the West having left the Soviet Union, seem to me the work of a lost man.  Tarkovsky in his Russian films allied himself with fools and mad visionaries and by default stood against the system. A system which he understood all too well.  But coming to the West, and making his films with a similar psychic alignment but without understanding the destructive forces at work in Capitalism was a different situation.  His films become unconvincing metaphysical expositions that come to look like subjective filmic platitudes lost in a vacuum of meaning.  Having faced out the tyranny of obligatory collective thought he seemed unprepared when he moved West to see the potential disasters endemic in the unrestrained capitalist individual ethos.

Thinking about Kieslowski’s ‘Blue’ I was wondering what purpose lay behind his script.  What’s it all about, ‘Blue’?  It is apparently the first of a trilogy of films that explores the ‘virtues’ of the French flag: le Tricoleur. These virtues I presume to be the mottos of the French Republic: liberty – equality – fraternity.  I have to say that I find it  extraordinary in 1993 that this idea, a fantastical ideological construct, could be seen as anything more that a calculated conceit designed to excite the vanity of the French; but guarantee Kieslowski’s films production money from the big French national money pot. 

As I understand it Kieslowski’s ‘Blue’ perhaps stands for the first of the republic’s virtues: liberty!  But what can the notion of ‘Liberty’ stand for in this flag that fluttered proudly over the destruction of vast swathes of Asia Africa and the Caribbean, murdering millions of colonial subjects who simply demanded the freedom not to have to live under this disavowed discredited flag.  Perhaps blinded by the glamour and freedom of working in the free West, Kieslowski didn’t feel at liberty to ask this sort of question.  He was an individual now.

Even on its own terms ‘Blue’ doesn’t cut the mustard as any sort of representation of any notion of ‘liberty’.

Left alone after a car crash kills her husband and daughter, a wealthy widow (she may have been the actual creative agent behind her husband’s success as a composer) rebuilds her life.  She chooses to cut her self off from her previous society and live alone.  She has adventures, meets new and different people, but in the end returns to the fold where she learns of her husband’s systematic double life with a mistress, who is about to give birth to his child.  The film amounts to little more than shoo through for ‘Juliette Binoche’ who though she walks through the tastefully shot scenery with a certain monopaced aplomb, does little to advance the notion of ‘liberty’.

Of course this may be Kieslowski’s tongue in cheek riposte to the French who were thinking  ‘La Gloire de France’ was somehow refracted in ‘The Colour Blue’. In fact the movie they actually paid for was a satirical rejection the notion of ‘Liberty’ simply imbedded in a vehicle that looked like just any other classy French movie of the era.  The trouble with this is that although possible, no one seems to have read this type of signification into ‘Blue’.

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk