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.

Bavo Defurne's NORTH SEA TEXAS explores the boy next door, Flanders-style

The first few scenes of Bavo Defurne's new Belgian film NORTH SEA TEXAS may put you in mind of another popular Belgian film from 1997, Alain Berliner's Ma vie en rose. The reference, I suspect, is quite intentional. In Berliner's movie, a very young boy explores his feminine side as he increasingly insists on dressing like, acting like, perhaps even becoming a girl. M. Defurn, who is shown below, begins his movie, too, with the hallmarks of this fixation but allows them to mix with some other fixations -- you might call this a kind of childlike OCD behavior, where numbers and letters become important guides in getting through life. His main character, whom we see first as a cherubic five-year-old platinum-blond boy named Pim, soon jumps ahead a full ten years to become a still-cherubic but now dirty-blond adolescent learning how to work those fixations into some kind of manageable life.

Those of us who grew up "different," eventually coming to learn that we were gay, will readily identify with Pim. We'll also wish that we were ever as cute as actor Jelle Florizoone (below, left, and on poster, top right), who plays him. He's a quiet kid who would rather draw pictures than play games, and who has, as we see from scene one, an attraction to dark-haired males. One of those is his best-friend and boy-next-door, Gino (played by Mathias Vergels, below, right and on poster, top left). We don't learn the full extent of this attraction nor its cause until nearly the end of the film, and this information is handled as subtly as much else of the exposition in this quiet, slow-to-build movie.

The time frame of the film is, I think, deliberately unclear. But it is not set in present-day (maybe the late 1970s, early 80s?). This is smart because, rather than heading down the path to nostalgia, the time-frame allows us to better understand the reluctance on the part of the participants to admit or even discuss homosexuality.

The film takes a look at much of the small-town society of this coastal village -- from Gino's kindly family (a sister and mother, but no father) to Pim's good-natured but rather slutty mother, who works in the local bar called Texas (see photo at bottom), and her current boyfriend (above). There is also a kind of mystery man -- dark-haired, of course -- named Zoltan, below, right, a would-be gypsy seen at film's beginning and again toward the end.

Mostly though, this one's a love story -- at least on Pim's end, Gino is in it for the sex -- and a kind of coming-of-age tale about a boy who must come of age a little earlier than usual. He does, and in the process he learns how to reject. Whether or not you see the ending as a happy one will depend on how you view the behavior of these two young men and how set in their ways they may already be.

In any case, the film -- very well made: written, directed, acted and photographed -- is a shoo-in for gay audiences and for any straights who can handle a problematic but honest-to-goodness love story. Between young men.

North Sea Texas, from Strand Releasing, opens this Friday, November 2, in New York City at the Clearview Chelsea Cinema (if Chelsea has its electricity back, post-Sandy) and in the Los Angeles area at the Laemmle Playhouse 7. And elsewhere, eventually, we hope.

Mia Hansen-Løve's GOOD-BYE FIRST LOVE tracks youthful passion over the early years

What's in a name -- or more to the point, in a title? The original French title of Mia Hansen-Løve's third feature (after the OK All Is Forgiven and the much better Father of My Children) GOOD-BYE FIRST LOVE, is the much simpler Un amour de jeunesse, which translates to Young Love, or maybe A Love in Youth. The point of this talented writer/
filmmaker's latest movie -- if TrustMovies is anywhere close to understanding it -- concerns how difficult it is for her heroine, Camille, to say good-bye to this first love. Instead she allows herself to become utterly obsessed with it and its vessel, the hunky young man named Sullivan (Sebastian Urzendowsky), who keeps telling her, by word and deed, to cool it. But she can't. Not, at least, until the two have undergone what looks like a permanent separation.

The filmmaker, shown at left and looking hardly past her own time of "first love," captures the thrill, lust, fright and instability of this exquisite torture like few filmmakers have, from the female point of view, that is -- and in the process puts to shame a piece of (most likely unintentional) tripe like the upcoming Elles, that purports to explore female sexuality while shoveling a ton of standard male fantasy down our throats. Ms Hansen-Løve's males, as the gender most often does, exhibit self-preservation above all -- pretty much the opposite of Camille's go-for-broke attitude. When deeper feelings threaten to sidetrack Sullivan's immediate needs, the young man simply dispenses with the relationship.

In her selection of actress (Bluebeard's Lola Créton), the filmmaker has chosen an interesting specimen. Ms Créton embodies single-mindedness very well, and if she has a harder time appearing only 15 years old, so firmly does she grab the emotions of the moment that, for the most part we're convinced. She's even more interesting as her character ages, becoming an architectural student (with clear talent that she may not yet fully understand: she gets a lovely and fair-minded critique on her student housing project that is a pleasure to hear) and then falling into an affair and then a permanent relationship with her married instructor (played by Magne Håvard Brekke, at right, below), who is soon divorced. Eventually Camille becomes an integral part of this fellow's architecture business.

Moral judgments regarding right and wrong have no particular place in this universe, and if you are given to these, you'll be hard put to find someone with whom to identify as "good." People here follow their strongest needs. Most else (including other people's needs) be damned. This gives the film a particularly European flavor; when any kind of punishment arrives, it is generally self-inflicted via one's own obsession/neurosis.

Goodbye First Love is a beautiful film to view; the French countryside has seldom looked lovelier, and the excitement and drama of the city is captured well, too (the cinematographer is Stéphane Fontaine). If the movie does not quite scale the heights of Father of My Children, this may be because the subject matter is not nearly as all-out dramatic and encompassing. But as a character study (in which the character is as much obsession as flesh-and-blood), the movie fascinates.

Opening theatrically in New York on Friday, April 20, at the Lincoln Plaza Cinemas and IFC Center, and in the Los Angeles area at Laemmle's Royal, Playhouse 7 and Town Center 5 -- with a national roll-out to follow -- Goodbye First Love will then become available nationwide the following Friday, April 27, via Sundance Selects’ video-on-demand platform. Click the SS link (above) for further information.