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Iranian Films: The Mirror   (June 10, 2006)


With Iran's unapologetic desire for nuclear weapons in the news, it's a good time to explore what's available to us about the Iranian people. One place to start is films. Many recent Iranian films have received critical acclaim, and I will highlight a few of my favorites over the next few weeks.

First, a word on Iranian politics. My Iranian friends tell me that the current regime makes no bones about their goal when speaking in Farsi: they are playing the West for fools, buying time with phony negotiations in order to get The Bomb, which will give Iran the leverage it needs to become the premier regional player and perhaps the leading light in the Muslim world community. How Persian Shi'ite Iran expects the Sunni Arab world to respond to their nuclear dominance is unclear.

But not all Iranian citizens back the regime or their goals; many disagree but are silenced by threats or worse; many others, I am told, support the regime only because they, like most citizens of most nations, have known no other.

Rather surprisingly, given the repressive nature of the Iranian theocracy, Iranian films open a window onto Iran which is not entirely positive. For example, consider The Mirror, a deceptively slight tale of a little girl trying to find her way home after her Mom inexplicably fails to pick her up after school. By Hollywood's (or Bollywood's) obsessively plot-driven standards, this is not enough to hang a movie on, but there is much more going on beneath this seemingly simple surface.

Part of the pleasure of non-blockbuster non-genre films is to watch the movie unfold without the expectations of a plot point at minute 20 and all the other artifices of Hollywood script doctors. Nothing wrong with genre films (romantic comedies, thrillers, mysteries, etc.) but they take us on a route we've already traveled before. Not so this film.

Did you ever become lost as a young child? This movie captures that anxiety and the confusion of partially remembered clues in an uncaring, distracted adult world. We feel the girl's worry, and fear for her amidst the traffic and the indifference of the adults. We cheer on the occasional adult who offers to lend a hand, and fall back to worry when the help leads to another blind alley.

Much of the film's charm lies in the naturalistic "acting" (or shall we say non-acting?) of the lead character, the adorable little girl, while the unadorned street scenes of Tehran give us a "real life" window into everyday life of the Iranian people: bus drivers changing shifts, an old woman complaiing that her son ignores her, several adults' half-hearted attempts to help the little girl recongize her pathway home, and the constant flow of autos which seem to ignore traffic signals. (The Iranian street police are shown in a positive light; while most of the adults seem indifferent to the child's plight, the policeman does try to help the girl.)

Perhaps the girl's unsettled, disjointed journey home is a metaphor for the entire Iranian experience. Given the cultural constraints (many Iranian films focus on children, no doubt partly as a mechanism for bypassing censorship), what better way to illustrate the journey of the Iranian people from the repression of the Shah's reign through the tumult of the Revolution to the discord and disappointment of the present than a child's uncertain, half-remembered search for the way home? Why call a film "The Mirror" unless it mirrors something larger than a little girl's heartstring-tugging journey home?

This interpretation is reinforced by the radical break which occurs halfway through the film. I won't spoil the movie by describing this surprise in detail, but the pulling aside of the veil between reality and film has a long history--usually in comedy. Bob Hope's asides to the viewer in his 40s-era comedies no doubt inspired Woody Allen's similar aside in Annie Hall (while waiting in line to see a movie, he turns to "us" and excoriates a blowhard intellectual standing behind him), and Mel Brook literally broke down the wall between movie and "reality" in Blazing Saddles, when his film crew burst through a soundstage wall into a Busby-Berkeley-type musical being filmed next door.

The break in The Mirror is more disturbing, for it suggests the artifice of film as a metaphor for an Iran which has lost its way cannot be maintained, that real emotion cannot be constrained by the process of filmmaking. The "mirror" of the title is not only a mirror held up to Iranian society, but to the viewer of the film. Once the suspension of belief which is integral to movies has been torn aside, we enter an entirely new movie, one which challenges our understanding both of film as a medium and of Iranian culture.

This film is an experience you won't easily forget.


For more on this subject and a wide array of other topics, please visit my weblog.

                                                           


copyright © 2006 Charles Hugh Smith. All rights reserved in all media.

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