Hey, everyone. “Moriarty” here.
I was traveling last week, visiting a set before joining everyone in Austin for Butt-Numb-A-Thon, and as I was walking quickly through one of the many airports I saw during my trip, I caught a glimpse of the headline of Maclean’s, splashed across the cover: IS IT TIME TO BOMB IRAN?
Wow, that shit scares me. The idea that we think in Western culture that having the conversation about whether or not we are going to “bomb” another culture right there on the cover of magazines like it’s some new diet craze or some celebrity gossip, some trivial little factoid to be quickly digested and discarded... the idea that we don’t all think a headline like that is absolutely insane... well, that scares the hell out of me. Because that is exactly the sort of thing that makes the gulf between us and certain extreme groups of the Muslim world even wider, even harder to breach. That is the sort of thing that leads to eventual war, the sort of thing that makes further aggression and further reprisals inevitable. And that scares me silly.
And, look, I’m not naïve enough to think that watching a couple of movies is going to change anything, but I do think that movies offer something that no other media can match: perspective. The reason I’ve always been drawn to foreign-language cinema since I was young was because I didn’t travel; for me, movies were the way I experienced the world, the way I gained a sense of Spain or France or England or India. Movies were my windows into the lives of other people, my way of being exposed to different culture. And a good film can impart some sense of truth to you, some experiential truth that can go a long way to teaching people empathy and tolerance. And seeing PERSEPOLIS and THE KITE RUNNER in the last few weeks, I feel like I’ve had a paradigm shift in terms of how I think about Iran and Afghanistan.
Afghanistan is pretty much unrepresented in terms of world cinema, but there has been some great Iranian cinema, particularly in the last fifteen or twenty years as several important voices have emerged as part of a sort of Neo-realist movement as aesthetically rigid as mumblecore or the Dogma 95 group. No question. Great cinema.
But does it make me a bad person if I say that most of it leaves me cold? I respect it because I can see the craft and the care and the genuine mastery of film that Kiarostami or Panahi bring to the table. But it’s not something I’m likely to put on or even to recommend to a mass audience.
And right now, it’s obvious that people are trying to make movies that say something about our relationship with the Middle East. And for blindingly obvious reasons, of course. I get why everyone keeps taking a run at it. It’s strange... for some reason, I haven’t reviewed even one of the big Iraq/Middle East films that came out this fall. That wasn’t by design, but for some reason, I kept shaking those films off. GRACE IS GONE... IN THE VALLEY OF ELAH... THE KINGDOM... LIONS FOR LAMBS... I didn’t weigh in on one of them. Saw ‘em all, though. Maybe I’ll get to that at the end of this piece.
But first... all of this is preamble to discussing two films in particular that I feel work well to offer up a new and identifiable window into the life of the average citizen of the region, films that work as Western storytelling that offers up real insight into the Middle Eastern mind. And that is truly valuable at this particular point in time, I think.
I spoke briefly in my recent DVD column about the recent trade paperback edition of THE COMPLETE PERSEPOLIS, by Marjane Satrapi:
”Satrapi’s accomplishment in telling the story of her childhood in Tehran, her adolescence in Vienna, and then her return to Iran as an adult is something above and beyond her individual experience. She offers up a human face on the Middle East that is essential right now, a window into a whole lifestyle and world of experience that is alien to us.
It’s funny. It’s sweet. It’s angry in places. It’s almost embarrassingly frank at times. Satrapi doesn’t make herself look perfect. Far from it. I think the book I would most compare it to is MAUS by Spiegelman. There’s something about the simple rhythms of the book that mask the complex political and moral and social material within. The art itself is almost deceptively simple. Over the span of the full 300-plus pages, I just got lost in Satrapi’s story. I know the story of the Islamic Revolution from the point of view of how we covered it in the West, but reading this, and seeing how it was for normal Iranians living through it, I was sort of knocked sideways. It was a paradigm shift. As much as I always like to tell myself that I believe in a sort of universal commonality of man, it took this book to make me see what it would have been like... the actual minutiae of it... it’s priceless, deeply moving. We can’t imagine living under the sort of widespread political repression that Satrapi and her family live under, and thanks to this remarkable work, we don’t have to.”
Yeah, well, that goes double for the movie.
I’ve read some reactions to Satrapi’s book that are particularly hard on her as an artist, and I think they sort of miss the point. It’s evocative work she does on the page, and perhaps a bit crude in terms of draftsmanship. But in co-directing the film with Vincent Paronnaud (whose only other picture is a short from a few years ago), the art is reimagined, given weight and motion, and it suddenly becomes quite beautiful. PERSEPOLIS is an instant animated classic, an important and perceptive film that manages to avoid being either propaganda for Iran or an attack on it. Satrapi’s gift is how she makes her own very particular and unique and unusual experience seem so immediately accessible and universal. I recognize so much of my own childhood in the way she describes growing up, and that simple connective thunderclap of recognition... that’s enough to render that MACLEAN’S headline obscene. What PERSEPOLIS says most clearly is “Don’t judge me by my government. Don’t judge me by the actions of groups or parties. Judge me by myself. Because that’s plenty of baggage to deal with already.”
It’s the same that I would ask of anyone in the Middle East. I am not my government. I am not my President. Their actions... you can’t judge every American by them. Life for an average Iranian in the ‘70s and the ‘80s appears to be similar to life for an average American at the same time, but without the same expectation of freedoms. What makes this so specifically affecting is that children don’t care about the political world they live in... all they care about is how it affects them personally. They don’t know what the larger forces are that are at work in their lives, and they don’t care. They can’t change them, so worrying about them seems pointless. For children, all they know is what they experience. Marjane’s view of Iran and the changes in it have to do with the sudden imposition of rules about how she has to live as a woman, and the older she gets, the more restrictive her culture becomes. Marjane’s parents send her away to Vienna to live, hoping to spare her the worst of the indignities visited on Iran, and she sort of falls apart from homesickness. When she comes back to Iran, though, she can’t readjust to what’s expected of her. And the more she tries to fit into Iranian culture, even going so far as to get married, the more she realizes she simply doesn’t fit anymore at all. If she just left Iran because she didn’t like being treated poorly as a woman, that would be understandable, but not terribly dramatic. The fact that Marjane struggled with her decision to leave Iran, the fact that even at its worst, she still loved her country and wanted to connect to her culture and her history. The choices she makes are choices she has to make. Nothing is done lightly in Marjane’s life, and if it is, she pays dearly for it.
Set in Afghanistan and the United States for the most part, THE KITE RUNNER also uses the prism of childhood to make its most powerful points about life in Kabul. Whereas PERSEPOLIS makes the case for just how much of Western pop culture had crept into the lives of the average Iranian, THE KITE RUNNER evokes a nostalgia in me for an world that is nothing like my own life. The kite flying contest that is a major centerpiece of the film is one of the most beautiful events I’ve seen recently. There’s some dodgy CGI here and there, but I love the sequences anyway. I love the sense of community and the way it defines the characters. I love the innocence of it all. And above everything, I love the kid who plays Hassan.
Ahmad Khan Mahmidzada is the star of this film. No question. Hassan has to be the best piece of casting in the film, or the film doesn’t work. You have to love the kid. You have to absolutely believe that he is decent and gentle and loyal, and you have to believe that he would do what he does for the right reasons. Hats off to Marc Forster for finding the right kid. Zekeria Ebrahimi plays off him perfectly as Young Amir. My favorite stuff in here plays like an Middle Eastern STAND BY ME, and the way the film is paced for the first hour or so, it’s literate and sweet and I would imagine captures the flavor of Khaled Hosseini’s novel. When the film takes a turn for the worse, when Hassan is cornered and finds that courage and loyalty are not enough to save him, Forster tries to play it safe and still take full advantage of the shock value of the events, and it doesn’t quite pull off any of what it tries to do. To be fair, even David Lean struggled with material like this in LAWRENCE OF ARABIA, and knowing just what to show and how to show it without completely freaking out your audience... it’s a balancing act.
When the film finally returns to modern-day Kabul, things teeter on the verge of melodrama. Forster errs on the side of restraint in a few places, and then can’t resist a touch too much schmaltz in another place. The thing that makes all of this work, though, is the cast in general. The kids are the heart and soul of the movie, but the adults have a lot of weight to carry as well. Amir’s father, Baba (Hamayoun Ershadi) is a hell of a role, and Ershadi is more than up to the challenge. He plays one of the great movie fathers, in my opinion, an icon of strength and integrity. He’s an Persian Atticus Finch in terms of the simple way he imparts his lessons by example. There’s a scene in a truck where he does something dangerous, something that almost costs him his life. And in doing so in front of his son, he shows him exactly how much you have to be willing to sacrifice to do the right thing. It’s pretty great. And like I said... the whole cast is that good. There’s Ali (Nabi Tanha), Hassan’s dad. He’s just this great face that Forster takes full advantage of. There are two different versions of Assef, the bully who tortures young Hassan, who so scares Young Amir that he betrays his closest friend. Elham Ehasas is the young Assef, and Abdul Salam Yusoufzai plays him as an adult. Both are great at what they do, creepy in different ways. Assef is a douchebag from the start, and both actors capture the evolution of his decadence.
Rahim Kahn (Shaun Toub) is a friend of the family when Amir is a child, and he’s the one who encourages Amir’s first efforts at fiction. Amir wants nothing more than to be a writer, and Rahim Kahn is genuinely interested in nurturing that talent in him. It’s well-written, well-played stuff. It’s the sort of likeable supporting role that Graham Greene played in DANCES WITH WOLVES... he gets nothing but great scenes, and he’s really touching and effective.
Finally, there’s Khalid Abdalla as the adult Amir and Atossa Leoni as Soraya, the woman he falls in love with. They’re ostensibly the “stars” of the film, the adult leads. And the resolution of the film is all about Abdalla making his childhood wrongs right somehow. He’s given a pretty huge emotional Band-Aid, practically gift-wrapped. The film builds to some convenient resolutions. But Abdalla and Leoni are both solid, credible leads, and their eventual resolution manages to earn at least some of the power it aspires to.
It’s the perspective of these films that make them stand apart from the pack this year. The fact that they give us Iranian voices on the subject of Iran, or Afghan voices on the subject of Afghanistan, instead of Western voices... that's what makes them invaluable. Like I said earlier, I’ve seen all the Iraqi/Middle Eastern themed films this fall except for one. I did not see De Palma’s REDACTED. Just didn’t manage to get to it, and I haven’t been offered a screener, so I’m afraid it’ll be one of the ones that got away from me for 2007. Of the other films that played variations on the same themes and subjects, I thought GRACE IS GONE was good, a little shameless in its attempts to manipulate, but overall pretty effective and heartfelt. I thought IN THE VALLEY OF ELAH was a non-starter, a long slow burn with a terrible punchline. THE KINGDOM had a great first act, all the way up to the second explosion, and a decent middle, and then a really well-shot ending that hinges on an absolutely insultingly random accident. And LIONS FOR LAMBS was a civics lesson, earnest and overstrident and a little bit obvious once you figure out what points it’s making.
So, yeah, I think PERSEPOLIS and THE KITE RUNNER are a cut above all those others. Both of them deserve your time and attention this holiday season. Perhaps they will inspire in you, as they did in me, thoughts of peace on earth... and goodwill towards men. All men.
Drew McWeeny, Los Angeles
Drew McWeeny, Los Angeles
