Vahid Jalilvand's NO DATE, NO SIGNATURE: The arrival of a fine new filmmaker from Iran

New York City's venerable art house, Film Forum, reopens this coming week with a new screen and a new and most welcome Iranian film entitled NO DATE, NO SIGNATURE. As co-written (with Ali Zarnegar) and directed by sophomore filmmaker Vahid Jalilvand (shown below), the movie is very nearly as good as much of the work of Iran's more experienced filmmaker, Asghar Farhadi. Via its specific, small-scale key incident, the film slowly grows into a hugely compelling situation that encompasses an entire community and culture.

Misters Jalilvand and Zarnegar have created what you might call a "hospital procedural" in which the cause of death is paramount but just slightly unclear.

Responsibility and guilt hover over quite a number of people involved here, but the two main recipients are the husband/father Moosa (Navid Mohammadzadeh, shown below) of a family clearly having some trouble making financial ends meet, and the prominent Dr. Nariman of the local hospital (played by Amir Agha'ee, further below) who seems to be having no financial problem at all.

How these two meet and proceed thereafter is the thread that binds the movie, which is full of Iranian culture and mores, some of which are easily understood, while others may take more consideration by those of us who've not lived in a society such as this. Still, so much that we see and hear in this film is indeed "international."

How the police and judicial system proceed with their investigation, together with the way in which the medical establishment works (or doesn't quite) -- it's all here, woven into the fabric of the film with great skill and subtlety. And the death at the center of the movie is among the most surprising and quietly compelling in cinema.

Without ever raising its voice (though its characters sometimes do), the film manages to be feminist and anti-fundamentalist via the look we get into the thoughts and actions of its two major female characters: Sayeh, the doctor's lover (Hediyeh Tehrani, above), who also works as a doctor at the hospital, and Leila, Moosa's not-so-acquiescent wife (Zakieh Bebahani, shown below).

Both of these women add to the depth and strength of the film by constantly nudging their men toward (or occasionally, as in Sayeh's case, away from) greater responsibility. Class, economics, and reputation come to the fore, and are handled with just as much skill as all else in this arresting movie about ethics, morality, autopsies and chickens.

No Date, No Signature proves a fine way to reopen Film Forum, and should also greatly please fans of the immaculate and thoughtful work of Asghar Faradi. Released by Distrib Films US, running 103 minutes and in Farsi with English subtitles, the movie has its U.S. theatrical premiere this coming Wednesday, August 1, in New York City at Film Forum, and will open on August 10 in Los Angeles at Laemmle's Royal. To view all past and upcoming playdates, cities and theaters, simply click here and then click on Watch Now on the small task bar midway down the page.

THE SALESMAN: Another Asghar Farhadi film, another disturbing, moving thought-provoker

What? They produce plays by Arthur Miller in modern-day Iran? It would seem so (even if the censors may have to delete a few lines here and there); at least, that is what we discover via the new film from Oscar-winner Asghar Farhadi (of A Separation and a flock of even better films). In his newest work, THE SALESMAN, our very attractive and hot young couple are performing the leading roles of Willy and Linda in Death of a Salesman.

Mr. Farhardi, shown at right, is a continuing master at offering up present-day Iran via its bourgeoisie and making the lives shown and problems explored look, to our eyes, remarkably like our own. Except in certain important cultural ways. (I was going to include the word "religious," but what we see seems so deeply ingrained as to have gone well past religion into the country's culture.) The husband here is also a school-teacher, and we see him (and how his mind works) in the classroom with his students, who seem to like and respect him.

One evening, post-performance, as the wife, home alone, is removing her stage make-up, the buzzer to the couple's apartment building rings. Expecting her husband, she buzzes him in, leaves their apartment door ajar and goes back to the bathroom. This will change their life.

From this point on, the movie, which has begun almost as a kind of critique of life in Iran, opens up into so much more. In the opening scene, the couple's original apartment building must be evacuated, as it appears to be literally breaking apart. Much of the city, it seems, has been rather poorly constructed.

Yet from the "event" onwards, the movie becomes a deeper, unsettling exploration of trust and betrayal, love, respect and, as seems true of all of Farhadi's films, a critique of his country's patriarchal/macho grounding, coupled to a look at slowly budding feminism.

The two leads are, as always in Farhadi's films, first-rate, with Shahab Hosseini (above, whom you might recognize as the nutcase hubby from A Separation) again doing a fine job as a man who slowly unravels in the course of events, and Taraneh Alidoosti (below, who played the title character in About Elly) doing an equally fine job as the wife who is "done wrong" not only by the event in question but by what happens afterward.

Farhadi's movie is part mystery, as solved by amateurs (who, for understandable cultural reasons, do not want to involve the police), and the filmmaker's handling of the sleuthing is expert: smart but not too smart, and very believable. Farhadi also, as is his wont, refuses to disclose all that has happened. But unlike some of what was withheld from us in A Separation, this adds to the situation's complexity, rather than seeming to be merely deliberate withholding on the filmmaker's part.

The result of all this quietly explodes into something much larger and more difficult that we (or this couple) could have expected. There is plenty of guilt to go around, along with a try for redemption. But the thirst for compensation/revenge is present, too. How the filmmaker weaves all this together makes for a spectacularly dense and slowly revealing conclusion that will have you feeling and understanding the viewpoint of every character present.

This is major filmmaking, and if Farhadi were to walk away with another Oscar, I would not be surprised. (His film is among the five nominees in the BFLF category). The Salesman forces you to re-consider your priorities: what you would finally allow or not allow, and how much damage you might be willing to inflict on another in order to satisfy your own sense of justice and/or need for revenge.

From Amazon Studios and the Cohen Media Group, in Persian with English subtitles and running a long but never boring 125 minutes, the movie opens this Friday, January 27, in New York City at the Angelika Film Center and the Lincoln Plaza Cinema, and in Los Angeles at Laemmle's Royal. Here in South Florida, it opens February 10 at the Tower Theater, Miami; the Movies of Delray and Lake Worth, and at the Regal Shadowood and Living Room Theaters in Boca Raton. To see the many playdates all across the country, with cities and theaters listed, simply click here and scroll down.

Girls in prison, Iranian-style, in Mehrdad Oskouei's surprising STARLESS DREAMS

It begins with the usual, as the perp is fingerprinted and then those "felon" photos are quickly taken, as we follow that prisoner through the process. Except that here, the felon is a girl in her late-teen years, and the location is Iran. Uh-oh. But wait. After viewing STARLESS DREAMS, the new documentary from Iranian filmmaker Mehrdad Oskouei, rather than experiencing the usual "isn't-prison-awful!" sense you get from so many incarceration movies, you are more likely to feel that this may be the safest, kindest place for these girls in all of Iran.

Mr. Oskouei, shown at right, was evidently given extraordinary access to the prison and its inmates, and he was also able to gain the trust of both the girls and their guards in a rather extraordinary way. Consequently, his documentary is full of what certainly seems like "real life," as the girls chatter and laugh and play games and enjoy what seems -- against their experience in the outside world, either at home with their families or as runaways -- a comparatively idyllic existence.

We meet this gaggle of girls piecemeal and learn only haltingly about each one and her previous-to-prison life. It is not even clear exactly why some of these girls are here -- perhaps for simply running away or being on the outs with their blood family. In other cases we do learn why (patricide is one reason), and yet the details for even this render the murderer at the very least a kind of self-defense victim.

The documentary is often gorgeously filmed: sharp, clear, colorful and with an eye for both detail and beauty (where the latter can be found, at least). Oskouei also offers some lovely compositions and framing.

What makes the film so special, however, is the friendship the girls clearly feel for each other (they share such similar dreadful family backgrounds) and the liveliness and high spirits they so often exhibit.  Which point up even more strongly that the place of Iranian women, in both society and the family, is simply awful.

"Why are you crying, 651?" asks the filmmaker at one point. "Because her story is the same as my story," the girl answers, adding that she is called 651 because, "that is the number of grams they found on me." "How will your family welcome you home? another girl is asked. "With chains and a beating," she answers.

Many of the girls (perhaps most) want to stay in prison. Once you've heard their "family" stories, you'll understand why. They put on a sort of puppet show (below) during which they can hide behind those puppets/masks and say what they think. Yet, they do not seem at all shy about saying this even to a cleric who comes to visit, to whom they deliver some hard questions about god and justice. What we hear of his answers does not in the least suffice.

The movie cannot help but be ultra-feminist against the all-encompassing patriarchy that is Islam and Iran. As to her future, one young woman predicts that she will die in the gutter one day. "Don't you want to fight for a better life," the filmmaker asks? "Society is stronger than I am," she answers him.

One girl, at last reunited with her family (one of the few that seems even halfway bearable), tells us, "I'm just so happy: It feels strange." What happens to the couple of girls who actually go back to their families? We never learn the outcome of this or about what happens to any of the other girls. And the fact that the filmmaker was given such access to the prison does make me wonder if perhaps he was not expected to portray that prison in a good light.

Still, what he has given us in this portrait of Iran's younger generation of females is, while deeply disturbing, also something to cherish. From The Cinema Guild and running a brisk 76 minutes, the documentary opens this Friday, January 20, at the Museum of the Moving Image in Queens, New York. On Jan. 26 & 28: it will play the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; on February 10 it opens at the University of Wisconsin Cinematheque in Madison, and on April 14 at the Colorado State University/ACT Human Rights Film Festival in Fort Collins, Colorado. 

Asghar Farhadi's FIREWORKS WEDNESDAY gets U.S. theatrical premiere at Film Forum

The more movies I see from Iranian filmmaker Asghar Farhadi, the more impressed I am. This is true even though the films I've lately seen were made years before his Oscar-winning A Separation and his following film, The Past. Opening this week is a ten-year-old movie titled FIREWORKS WEDNESDAY, which is almost as fine a film as About Elly, from 2009, which opened here only last year and is, in TrustMovies' estimation, the pinnacle of Farhadi's work so far.

The Iranian filmmaker, shown at right, is the only one I know of who gives us Iran's bourgeoisie in all its troubling, fascinating, gee-they're-kinda-like-us entirety. It is difficult to view the first three of these films, in fact, without being stuck by how little fundamentalist religion appears to rule. The key word here is appears, of course, because, fundamentalist ideals do penetrate and control. And yet -- ah, the endearing/disconcerting predilection of human beings toward denial and hypocrisy -- Iranians do seem to circumvent fundamentalism when they need or want to.

This is why I suspect that Farhadi has mostly circumvented the censors. He manages with almost amazing consistency and honesty to show us Iranians living within their cultural and religious boundaries while at the same time struggling to rise above them.

Yet his characters never give voice to anything negative about their culture/religion. No -- they simply show us their specific situations and how they handle these. So we can watch them struggling to be human, while the censors can see them as moving outside their restricted lives and having to paying the price of unhappiness.

This is quite the tightrope walk, but Mr. Farhadi manages it beautifully, unlike his countryman Jafar Panahi, who is more vocal and open in his criticism -- and has paid for it by, so far as I know, still being under some weird form of house arrest. (Though he did manage to make the great film Taxi while in this "subdued" state, so maybe this sort of "somewhat-censorship" agrees with him by forcing him into the kind of alternating submission, insistence and pretzel twists that lead to humanitarian movie masterpieces.)

In any case, back to Fireworks Wednesday, the plot of which entwines a middle-aged couple's marital troubles (two photos above) with a young bride-to-be cleaning lady (seated, above, and at left, below) and the not-so-young woman (standing above, left) who lives across the hall. The movie takes place within a single day and night, during which we learn everything we need to know about these people to understand what they're going through and why. As usual, Farhadi identifies with all his major characters, and so, eventually, do we.

His film begins with a simply priceless scene (above) that works symbolically and realistically -- involving a chador and a motorcycle -- and manages, without raising its voice (or even suggesting this) to question tradition, fundamentalism, patriarchy, and a whole lot more. From there we bounce from one event to the next, as the movie becomes a surprisingly suspenseful tale of possible adultery, friendship and several instances of help and betrayal.

Before the film is finished, that chador has gotten up to all kinds of odd things, and our sympathies have been tossed back and forth among the various characters and their friends. By the end, the filmmaker has given us yet another amazing, in-depth tale of middle-class life in modern Iran.

A Grasshopper Film release and running 104 minutes, Fireworks Wednesday opens this Wednesday, March 16, at Film Forum in New York City, where it will have a two-week run. As for other playdates and cities, I am not sure, Perhaps the distributor -- a newcomer in the field of foreign, independent and documentary films -- will see fit to tell us soon.

One of the world's smartest, most talented provocateurs is back: Jafar Panahi's TAXI

In his home country of Iran, filmmaker Jafar Panahi, who has given us some of the best Iranian movies -- hell, best from anywhere movies -- has, for some time now, been banned from making them by his country's powers-that-be. Still, he soldiers on. His latest provocation, and perhaps his most charming/scathing/endearing endeavor is called TAXI, and in it, Mr. Panahi plays (or maybe is) a taxi driver in downtown Tehran.

Panahi (shown at left with what looks like maybe his Golden Bear award from this year's Berlin International Film Fest, where he also won the FIPRESCI Prize) usually uses a documentary style, and his films often look like they are indeed documentaries (especially his last one, This Is Not a Film). Hardly. They are planned and plotted as tightly as the best of mysteries, making use of everything from irony to subtlety to quiet drama and on-the-fly humor. Yet they appear to be near improvisation, spinning outward into greater meaning and importance as they cleverly unfurl.

The movie begins with a panorama of Tehran traffic. Hey, we're just driving around; what's wrong with that? We'll soon see, as Panafi's new movie adds another link to the chain of work from this talented, put-upon man. (Under house arrest for some time, he is still banned from filmmaking.) Slowly, the soundtrack offers some music (the first notes of which may put you in mind of I Love Paris) and then dialog begins, as the taxi driver picks up passengers, one of whom is a blowhard whose dialog about the need for capital punishment for thieves causes the other passenger, a woman, to argue heatedly against this idea.

By the time the man has left the taxi, the first of many ironies to come has made itself plain -- and surprising, even funny.When at last we are allowed to see Panafi -- who's driving that cab, the effect is terrific. What a face this guy has! He might have become an actor (well, he is one, here), his visage is such an effective tool. In fact, this movie ought to have rightly been called Taxi Driver -- had that title not already been commandeered.)

Panafi's next fare recognizes him -- it's an black-market video dealer (above, left) from some time back, who used to provide the filmmaker with banned movies he craved to see. The guy is still up to those same old tricks, and we learn something of Panafi's taste in film (Once Upon a Time in Anatolia and Midnight in Paris). A wounded man and his wife must suddenly take over the cab -- and Panafi's cell phone -- for a video of the guy's last will and testament. Later two middle-aged ladies carrying fish in a glass bowl (below) plead for and receive a ride -- until the needs of the filmmaker's own niece (in the penultimate photo) supersede.

These little vignettes and those that follow -- all staged brilliantly to effect a reality that stings -- take in everything from politics to economics, crime, culture, tradition, belief, age, maturity, "rules" for movie-making, law (in the form of a lovely lawyer, below), prison, torture, voice recognition, and so much more. Further, these incidents seem to mirror each other in ironic ways, and while the movie looks like simplicity itself, its content is anything but.

Taxi is Panafi's most charming, plaintive, complex and inventive work to date. This man ought to be considered a national treasure rather than some kind of criminal. But there you go. How he has been getting away with these provocative little gems of cinema -- in Iran, yet! -- without losing his license, if not his life, is troubling to consider. (You fear for, not just the well-being of the filmmaker, but also for any of the actors/people he uses in his films.) This is "heroic" cinema of the highest order, every bit as entertaining and well-crafted as it is righteous.

Panahi's finale proves a mitzvah filmed with rare sweetness and subtlety -- which is then immediately leavened with an ironic touch of exactly the opposite. If Taxi isn't a cinematic masterpiece (and that's a word I almost never use), I sure wouldn't know what is.

The film -- from Kino Lorber, in Farsi with English subtitles and running just 81 minutes -- opened yesterday, October 2, in New York City at the IFC Center and Lincoln Plaza Cinema, and will grace Los Angeles next Friday, October 9, at various Laemmle theaters. In the weeks to come, TAXI will have opened in 25 cities across the USA.  Click here and scroll way down to see all currently scheduled playdates. 

"Rights," wrongs, and a welcome salvage: Asghar Farhadi's early gem, ABOUT ELLY

Those of us who do not travel to film festivals have been waiting to see ABOUT ELLY since 2009, when the film won the Silver Bear at the Berlin Film Festival. Thanks to issues of "rights," this movie has remained in "American limbo" since then. Written and directed by Asghar Farhadi, who went on to give us the Oscar-winning A Separation and then The Past, the film is at last being distributed by The Cinema Guild and hits the U.S. with its theatrical premiere this Wednesday, April 8, here at Film Forum in New York City, before arriving in another 16 cities across the country, beginning in May.

In addition to being, for this viewer at least, the best of Farhadi's three films that I've seen, About Elly also gives us further clues as to why this filmmaker, shown at right, is so able to work seemingly unmolested by censorship, house arrest and the like -- unlike, say, Jafar Panahi. Farhadi is one hell of a lot subtler than Panahi, as well as much more dramatically compelling in his stories.

The filmmaker shows us what look like middle-class (tending toward the upper) characters, who rarely if at all appear to be religious and who would -- except for their language and the headdress of the women -- be nearly indistinguishable from those of many European countries and, hell, even from us here in the USA. No wonder Farhadi's films are so popular with the cinematic elite of the western world.

Further, the concerns of these characters mirror so many of our own -- from the usual man/ women relations to child-rearing and -schooling to setting up one of their good friends with a possible "significant other." More important, where fundamentalism is concerned, whatever problems these people have can easily be attributed to their own faults and misdeeds, particularly those of the women on view -- something that would of course appeal to a fundamentalist/ patriarchal society like Iran (and OK, a few other countries, too.)

And yet I don't believe for a minute that Farhadi truly feels this way himself. Look at what happens in A Separation or About Elly (The Past is set in France and so wiggles out a bit from my theory), and you see people so constricted by their society and its mores that they have no genuine control of their lives -- except by towing the party line.

When something mysterious and possibly fatal happens in About Elly -- the sudden disappearance by the sea of one of the main characters, which will put movie buffs in mind of L'Avventura -- watch what occurs between a husband and his wife, the latter of whom turns out to know much more than he (or we) realized about Elly, and who has kept these facts from the rest of the group. What we get is sudden anger, then verbal and physical abuse. To us this may be shocking, but you just know it will please those religious censors.

About Elly seamlessly weaves its exposition into smart, believable dialog between these friends as they head out and arrive at their seaside week-end away. We learn tons of information about all of them, piecemeal, and over the long haul. What we learn about Elly makes us concerned and uneasy, though we won't understand why for quite some time.

How these people handle themselves, their friends, their children, smacks so thoroughly of the way we all do the same -- with affection and hypocrisy, lies both white and black, trying to balance self-interest with reputation. The big difference here is the society under which the characters must live. And that, to Farhadi's great credit, changes everything -- for everyone, including especially Elly.

Finally it seems, almost everything here is a lie, thanks to a culture based on them -- due of course to that exquisite combination of faith, religion and political power. If the shy school-teacher Elly at first seems to be the outsider, by the finale it is difficult  not to see every character as somehow "outside" the norm -- or would be, if the truth were to come out.

As a filmmaker, Farhadi balances visuals and dialog extremely well. He gives his cast all the room they need, and each comes across with a beautifully specific performance, while blending seamlessly into the ensemble. I am not going to list them all because each is as good as the next. And several cast members -- women and men -- are exquisitely beautiful, to boot. The filmmaker's final image, by the way, is a great one.

About Elly -- running almost exactly two hours, in Persian (with a bit of German) and translated with English subtitles -- opens this Wednesday, April 8th at New York City's Film Forum. You can see all currently scheduled playdates, with cities and theaters listed, by clicking here and scrolling down a bit.