UNDER THE SHADOW (2016)

If two films make a category, here's a new one: the Iranian diaspora horror film. At first, there was Ana Lily Amirpour's dystopian vampire film A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, filmed in the U.S., and now there is Great Britain's official entry for the Academy Awards' Foreign Language film competition, written and directed by Babak Anvari. Unlike A Girl, Under the Shadow is actually set in Iran, specifically during the 1980s war with Saddam Hussein's Iraq, and addresses some of the Islamic Republic's repressive policies. Shideh (Narges Rashidi), is a medical student (her mother was a doctor, and so is her husband) with two strikes against her, and in Iran it's two strikes and you're out. Being a woman might be problematic in the first place, but her worst offense is that during the 1979 revolution she took part in some secular leftist demonstrations. That disqualifies her from resuming her medical studies, according to the government. Until she thinks up a new career within the new bounds, she's stuck being a housewife and mother to Dorsa (Avin Manshadi), who's fixated on her rag doll Kimiya. In angry resignation she consigns her medical books to the trash, with the meaningful exception of a textbook inscribed by her mother.

The war is intensifying. Saddam is firing missiles into Tehran and Shideh's husband is called to military service in a combat zone. Their neighbors are moving out of their apartment building and out of town after an Iraqi missile crashes through the roof. It doesn't explode but it gives an old man a fatal heart attack, Shideh's CPR efforts notwithstanding. Her husband urges her to evacuate, but she's reluctant to abandon the big city. Meanwhile, Dorsa is acting strangely. She tells her mom about talking to a new boy in the building who's supposed to be mute. She also talks to disembodied voices, while neighbors talk about djinn to Shideh's sophisticated dismay. She keeps trying to live like a liberated woman, sweating to her clandestine Jane Fonda exercise tape but tossing on the required modest coverings whenever someone rings the doorbell.

Family life deteriorates further after Kimiya the doll goes missing after the missile attack. A persistently feverish Dorsa insists that the doll must be in the closed-off upper floor, and she won't leave until Shideh finds it. Then Shideh's workout tape goes missing. Mother and daughter exchange recriminations after Shideh finds the casette in the garbage with the tape pulled out, and Kimiya eventually turns up mutilated in the locked desk drawer where Shideh keeps her medical textbook. It becomes increasingly apparent to Shideh that there's a third presence, at least, in the apartment that wishes them ill.

While the depopulated apartment building grows more menacing, the djinn increasingly appearing as a sort of animated chador that finally swells to the dimensions of a malevolent tent, Anvari makes clear that it's hardly less dangerous for Shideh outside. At one point she's so spooked that she runs out into the street with Dorsa, barefoot and without her public wrappings, until she's inevitably picked up by Tehran's roving morality police. "Are we in Switzerland now?" they ask her mockingly. Fortunately Shideh gets off with a strict reprimand ("We have values now," a cleric lectures her), but a larger point has been made. Shideh's building may have a specific djinn problem -- that becomes all too obvious during an inventive but overblown climax -- but the real challenge for our heroine is overcoming her stubborn hope of reclaiming her pre-revolutionary past on hostile ground. When she finally takes Dorsa out of the city it's only to move in with her husband's parents in the story, but metaphorically Under the Shadow's message is that the Islamic Republic itself has no place for her. To leave Tehran, and to leave behind relics of the past like the textbook and part of Kimiya, is symbolically to leave Iran, where horrors of different sorts persist. For those simply looking for chills, the film should entertain without seeming preachy, though some Americans might complain about a feminist message being forced down their throats. Anvari has a sure hand for the most part, and I liked how he was able to maintain a running gag about a garage door throughout his horror show and make it pay off at the climax. Another point in his film's favor is that, given how circumstances compel some filmmakers in Iran to stay indoors, it's easy to sustain the illusion of this British-made picture taking place in Iran. But while Shadow has obvious political relevance it also fits in to a global cycle of mother-child horror films (The Babadook, Goodnight Mommy, etc?) that may have something more to tell us about the wider world.

TAXI (2015)

On some level I think the Iranian government realizes that the country's filmmakers are its best ambassadors, but I don't think they really like that fact. They realize that Iranian directors show the world an Iran very different from whatever dystopian caricature is invoked by the words "Islamic Republic" and the dire legacy of Ayatollah Khomeini -- a nation of recognizable, relatable, modern human beings rather than stereotypical religious fanatics or medieval throwbacks. But it's not exactly the Iran the rulers, particularly the clerics, want the world to see or believe in, and they're the sort of people on whom the distinction between criticism and criminality often seems lost. Yet even they could do worse. Consider Jafar Panahi. Several years ago he was sentenced to house arrest and banned for 20 years from directing movies. Since that verdict, he has released three feature films to the outside world. If the Iranians really wanted to enforce that ban, they could so so easily enough by putting Panahi in prison -- but they haven't done so. Just to show how mixed up the Iranians are, their national film board simultaneously congratulated Panahi for winning the Golden Bear for Taxi at last year's Berlin Film Festival and criticized the festival jury for honoring the film and thus, according to Wikipedia, "spreading misunderstanding." That sounds like they resent any attention paid to Panahi that makes him out to be a martyr, while still taking a sort of nationalistic pride in a countryman's achievements.

 

It may be that Taxi gets more attention than it deserves aesthetically because of the circumstances under which it was made. Panahi has some freedom of movement within Iran and used it to drive a taxi cab around Teheran in order to shoot his film. He leaves the car occasionally, but the camera stays inside, mounted on the dashboard but maneuverable enough to look inside the car, shifting from driver's side to passenger side. Playing himself as probably Teheran's least-knowledgeable cabbie, Panahi deploys actors through town to pick up for little eccentric episodes that serve as slices of life in Iran. He tries to present a cross-section of Iranian society, from a dwarfish video store clerk who tries to sell bootleg DVDs to the director, a past customer whom he, a film buff himself, recognizes instantly, to a couple of batty old ladies whose lives seem to depend superstitiously on getting their pet fish into the Pool of Ali. The Iranian authorities probably resented the emphasis on the seamier side of life, particularly the burgeoning black market in media the government censors. Censorship itself becomes the film's subject when Panahi picks up his precocious niece -- obnoxiously precocious as precocious kids everywhere often become -- who's trying to shoot her own movie for a junior film school class. She recites the rules for making a releasable film in Iran, including the avoidance of controversial subjects and such chickenshit as not allowing your hero to wear a necktie. Panahi manages to make comedy out of this potentially (and somewhat actually) heavyhanded material by having the niece argue with a street kid she filmed picking up money that fell out of a bridegroom's pocket during a photo shoot. She browbeats the boy into returning the money so he can appear morally upstanding and her film will be releasable, but everyone ignores him as she kvetches like the global stereotype of the exasperated filmmaker.

Since Panahi seems forced into making himself the subject of his films, there's a certain self-referentiality to Taxi that may be meant to hide the film's more obvious debt to someone else's picture, Abbas Kiarostami taxi-bound Ten. The passengers who recognize the director, and assume almost unanimously that he must be shooting a movie, comment on how certain incidents resemble scenes from previous Panahi pictures. Inevitably also, Panahi's own sense of persecution asserts itself at the end when, after a scene with a human-rights lawyer who faces a ban of her own, he and the niece go to Ali's Pool to return a pocketbook one of the old ladies left in the car. As uncle and niece leave the car and disappear, the government spies some viewers probably expected to see all along finally show up to break into the cab and grab the camera. It can be argued that Panahi overstates his case here, since the world has seen and honored Taxi and, to my knowledge, he still isn't in jail. But given his circumstances a certain angry overstatement is understandable, just as all the film's limitations can be excused in light of the risky ingenuity that's gotten his most recent films made and released. Whatever Taxi's shortcomings -- derivativeness, narcissism, heavyhandedness -- like all the best Iranian films it's still a breath of fresh air for us foreigners, a window into an Iran that's not defined by its own or its enemies' propaganda. The taxi-ride format automatically appeals to the virtual tourist in me, and despite any limitations you perceive you can tell that it's the work of a brilliant, resilient filmmaker whose filmography has more historic value already than those of most living directors. Taxi is certainly open to criticism, but it deserves celebration as well.

Jafar Panahi in THIS IS NOT A FILM (2011)

The director Jafar Panahi made two of my favorite Iranian movies: the small-time crime drama Crimson Gold (2003) and Offside (2006), an impressive bit of guerrilla filmmaking about female soccer fans sneaking into a men-only stadium. Since then, Panahi has been at increasing odds with what seemed an increasingly reactionary government during the Ahmadinejad administration. During the turmoil following the disputed 2009 election, Panahi was arrested but quickly released with an apology. After making public his sympathy with the opposition at the Montreal Film Festival, he was arrested again in 2010. This time he was accused of making propaganda against the Islamic Republic, apparently for working on a documentary about the recent unrest. The verdict amounted to a blacklist with the force of law. Panahi was sentenced to six years in prison; beyond that, he was forbidden to direct movies or communicate with foreigners for twenty years. Iran does allow appeals, and the prison part of his sentence appears to amount to a loose form of house arrest. But it's the ban on directing that hurts -- not that he's taken it lying down.

 

Mojtaba Mirtahmasb is the credited director of This Is Not a Film, but it's plainly Panahi's show. Shot on a camcorder and iPhone, it's a document of Panahi's isolated existence during the appeal process. Confined to his pretty nice apartment, with his family out visiting relatives and only his pet iguana for company, Panahi can have visitors and so summons Mirtahmasb to film his musings on frustrated projects. Close to his heart now understandable reasons is a screenplay he was denied permission to film about a young woman imprisoned by her parents to prevent her attending art school. He believes he can tell the story and even demonstrate how he would have shot it by using tape on his carpet to lay out the girl's apartment. The inadequacy of it all gets to him, however, and he flees to his balcony to brood. Fortunately, he has a very picturesque view of a massive construction project across the street.

 

Panahi's impulse is to protest and struggle, but his humane storytelling instincts gradually take over in the second half of the 78-minute film. A neighbor from another floor shows up to ask the director to take care of her dog Micky while she goes out. He initially agrees but gives the dog back before the girl is out the door because it scares his iguana. In the final act of the movie, Panahi takes an elevator ride with a college student who takes out everyone's garbage. In a bright moment of comic unity, they end up on the girl's floor and she tries to inflict Micky on the student, who proves even more reluctant than Panahi to deal with the animal. At last they reach the ground floor and go into the courtyard, the student cautioning Panahi not to venture out with his camera. As we'd seen earlier from the balcony, this is "Fireworks Wednesday," a periodic show of dissent denounced on the news that day as having no religious basis. It's almost too perfect a visual summation of the life of the street and the vein of protest from which Panahi has been isolated. At the same time the spontaneous moments of comedy he captures tie in to his reflections (illustrated by an American DVD of Crimson Gold, among others) on the virtues of casting amateur actors in his movies.

Since then, it turns out, Panahi has managed to make another clandestine film that premiered at the 2013 Berlin Film Festival. I don't know whether he's suffered any reprisal for doing this, and one might expect (or at least hope for) an amnesty (should it be in his power) from the new administration of President Rouhani. For the most part, This Is Not a Film is for Panahi fans only, or for people interested as much in Iranian politics as in Iranian cinema. Still, even those who know Panahi only as a kind of martyr, an Iranian counterpart to the Hollywood Ten, may see in it the qualities that make movie fans around the world hope he can make movies without Dada disclaimers in the near future.

THE CYCLIST (Bicycleran, 1987)

Introducing the great Nasim! The name means a breeze but he comes on like a storm! He's the man who stopped a train in India by staring at it! Who picked up two bulls in Pakistan with one finger! Actually, as Mohsem Makhmalbaf explains, he's a poor Afghan refugee in Iran desperate to raise money for his sick wife's hospital treatment. In his position there aren't many options. Makhmalbaf claims that the man's stunt -- seven days riding a bicycle non-stop in a public square hastily transformed into a mini-circus -- is based on a real event he saw as a youth. He also openly acknowledges his debt to the American movie They Shoot Horses, Don't They?, showing a dubbed clip from the picture on a local TV set. There may also be a less obvious debt to Masaki Kobayashi's Harakiri, given that Nasim's earlier attempt to raise money is a kind of suicide bluff. He's seen an old beggar put himself under the wheels of an idle truck, expecting to be noticed before it starts. The bum takes a bit of a beating but also gets some money for his trouble. Nasim just gets the beating. A more promising inspiration is the motorcycle stuntman who entertains crowds daily riding the walls of his dugout velodrome. In one of the movie's most impressive shots we see a spectator holding out paper money as the motorcyle man races around the walls, parallel to the ground, trying at every lap to snatch the money. He manages it but wipes out soon afterward. Nasim does nothing so dangerous, but his is a taxing endurance test, and one confused observer asks at his venue whether this is the place where someone's going to kill himself.

There's something half-neorealist, half-Capraesque about Bicycleran as Nasim's stunt becomes an international controversy calling attention to the plight of jobless Afghan refugees in Iran. Different forces exert pressure to stop the stunt or draw crowds away -- employment agencies raise the daily wage offered to Afghan laborers from day to day -- while shadier characters wager on whether Nasim will finish and try to influence the result with firecrackers, nails under his tires, drugs, etc. In fact, he doesn't quite finish -- he collapses one night while the official observer is dozing off and an hooded ally takes his place for a while -- and finally doesn't quite know when to finish. In a bleak finish, the race seems to have obliterated Nasim's personality, while his original motive for the stunt has been rendered moot.

Bicycleran is most Capraesque in its melodramatic episodes when villains try to sabotage the stunt and in its elevation of Nasim into an Afghan-Iranian cinderella man, and is perhaps more evocatively than actually neorealist, insofar as neorealism as a cinematic movement had much to do with poor people and bicycles. But in a land where dance contests are probably illegal, Makhmalbaf has succeeded, for what it's worth, in translating the mock-epic despair of They Shoot Horses into an Iranian idiom. He also succeeded in making an often visually striking picture on an obviously limited budget. All the laps around tracks succeed as spectacle and symbol, and while this isn't exactly one of the great Iranian character studies, Makhmalbaf again proves that Iran's filmmakers, however disrespected by the clerico-political elite, are the country's best ambassadors, simply by portraying it, warts and all, as a modern nation of human beings.

On the Big Screen: ARGO (2012)

After three films Hollywood seems ready to proclaim Ben Affleck the next Clint Eastwood, the latest star to show true career-worthy talent as a director. Comparisons with Eastwood seem apt because Affleck is getting praise for an unpretentious, meat-and-potatoes narrative style in the classical tradition. I missed his two previous film but the historical subject matter of Argo attracted me. The film recounts the stranger-than-fiction story of how a CIA agent smuggled six fugitive Americans out of Iran at the height of the Hostage Crisis by posing as a movie producer scouting the country for locations. As the publicity emphasizes, Tony Mendez (Affleck) worked with known Hollywood talent, most notably Oscar-winning Planet of the Apes makeup artist John Chambers (John Goodman), who had collaborated with CIA in the past. Mendez and Chambers realize that they first have to convince Hollywood that they intend to make a movie before the Iranians will believe them. With help from a crusty old producer (Alan Arkin) they craft an elaborate pre-production publicity campaign, including a public read-through of a script by actors in fantastic costumes. In early 1980 Iran is still in the early throes of revolution, but the country still wants to do business with foreigners, so Mendez can get his foot in the door. He somehow bamboozles the Iranians into believing that he has a six-person production team following him, but those six will actually be the Americans hiding in the Canadian embassy, whom he must rapidly train for their new roles. Meanwhile, the Revolutionary Guard is close to realizing that they're short six Americans at the captured embassy, while the skeptical Americans are poised to shut down the Argo operation at any moment....

From what I've read, part of what made the actual Argo operation stranger than fiction was how easy it was. It was too easy for fiction, it seems, since Affleck and screenwriter Chris Terrio do everything in their power to turn the story into a race-against-time thriller. The proverbial clock is set ticking right at the start when a mob storms the American embassy. Diplomats shred documents identifying embassy personnel, but the Revolutionary Guard sets children to work carefully pasting pages together so that it'll only be a matter of time before the Iranians realize that six people got away. So of course the kids finally piece together a picture of one of the fugitives just as Mendez is herding them onto a Swissair flight, and just after the Iranians acquire reference photos of Mendez's production team from their visit to the Tehran bazaar. The timing is just too neat, too conveniently suspenseful, and Argo's efforts to juice up the story only make everything seem less plausible. By the time a Revolutionary Guard goon is placing a call to Mendez's alleged Hollywood office while Chambers is held up by a film shoot from returning from his lunch break to answer the phone and "verify" the existence of Mendez's production company, the Argo viewer is either uncritically captivated by it all, or he is grumbling, "Oh, give me a break!" The overdramatization of events undermines the climax by making it too climactic. Since the Iranians in this account actually realize that fugitive Americans are on that plane, they send jeeps and cop cars after the jet in a futile (but impressively shot) attempt to stop its takeoff. But if the Iranians knew then what was going on, and felt so strongly about Americans trying to escape, why didn't they send some fighters up to force the plane to land? They can't because we know the Americans made it home; the script can't change that.

But if Argo errs in overdramatizing some parts of the story, it may have been too reticent about fictionalizing other parts. One of the big selling points of the film was the idea of using Hollywood tactics against the Iranians, and that makes it disappointing to see the Goodman and Arkin characters relegated to the sidelines as worried cheerleaders once Affleck is off to Iran. If the film is going to deviate from what actually happened to any extent, why not go broad and entertain us with the oldschool Hollywood hucksters going head-to-head with gun-toting religious fanatics? But Argo ultimately takes itself too seriously as a life-and-death historical drama to be comfortable with the inherent humor of the Argo conspiracy. The uncertainty of tone comes through most clearly in a montage crosscutting between the in-costume read-through in Hollywood and a mock execution of American hostages at the embassy in Tehran. There's an irrepressible absurdity in the juxtaposition, but Affleck tries to smother it by having composer Alexander Desplat score the scene with lugubrious, lamenting music, foregrounding the agony of the hostages rather than the heroic ridiculousness of the Argo reading. When Affleck goes wrong, it's nearly always when he tries to humanize his characters with moments of feeling and sharing. None of it does much to make the fugitive Americans interesting characters. Affleck treats it as a big deal when the fugitive most skeptical toward the scheme and scared of exposure and execution proves the most adept and enthusiastic deceiver at the airport, but it only comes across as another arbitrary plot twist.

Affleck does a good job evoking 1980 with everything from hairstyles to Star Wars toys to the authentic period Warner Bros. logo, but it would go too far to say that he successfully imitated Seventies thrillers -- too many of those turn out badly for this happy-ending true story to fit the paradigm. As an actor Affleck is solid if not stolid as a stalwart agent, but as a director he can't make the scenes with Mendez's family seem more than obligatory yet superfluous.  Apart from Desplat's limpid score the film has an interesting soundscape dominated by the authoritative voices of the TV anchormen of yore. Affleck has a good pictorial instinct but his pacing is transparently mechanical and risks awakening viewers to awareness of being manipulated. Yet I heard people in the multiplex theater with me responding just as Affleck would want, so at least he knows how to push the right buttons -- which is more than might be said for many more experienced directors. But let's not rush to label Argo a masterpiece. It's no more and no less than an entertaining journeyman entertainment with more than the average political conscious and a touch of political correctness (taking pains to note anti-Iranian violence in the U.S.) as well. It's too soon to say that Affleck has fulfilled the promise he'd already shown as a director, but despite its faults Argo proves that the promise is still there.

A SEPARATION (2011)

For several minutes, as the end credits rolled up the screen in untranslated Farsi, nobody got up to leave the theater. American audiences have been taught to expect some extra bit of plot during or after the credits, so as long as Nader and Simin remained waiting on screen for word from their daughter, most of the audience stayed in their seats. Was their wait rewarded? I won't spoil things for anyone, but I will say that Asghar Farhadi's Oscar winner earned that moment. If no one cared, no one would stay if they couldn't read the credits.

The Islamic Republic of Iran has been a power of arthouse cinema for at least a quarter-century now, but A Separation is the first Iranian film to win the Best Foreign-Language Film Oscar. I think that's because, despite sharing many of the general traits of modern Iranian cinema, Farhadi's film is more accessible in its presentation -- more editing rather than long takes, for example -- and has a subject of arguably universal interest. The major Iranian directors tend to take a neorealist approach, avoiding stylization in framing and inhuman camera movement and sticking to material that would seem hopelessly mundane when handled by American filmmakers. Speaking for myself, I'm probably more likely to watch an Iranian film than an American film on the same subject, because the Iranian film offers the bonus of a window into Iran. The Iranian directors are their country's best ambassadors in a way that their government most likely doesn't fully appreciate. For instance, Farhadi was initially refused permission to shoot Separation, though the government obviously relented, and the Iranian media seems to have reacted with ambivalence to the film's global success. But you can find people in any country who complain when a director appears to air the country's dirty laundry for the world to see. However, Separation isn't a particularly political film, though politics does loom in the background and may be present symbolically. There's really one early moment of implicit political menace, and it could well pass unnoticed. That's when Simin (Leila Hatami) insists that her daughter should leave the country with her because she has no future in Iran. Why do you think that? a judge asks -- but he lets the matter drop and there's no hint afterward that Simin is in political peril. Yet the fact remains, and forms the basis of the plot, that she wants to leave Iran.
The reason there's a separation is that her husband, Nader (Peyman Moaadi) wants to stay. In fact, he feels he has to stay to take care of his Alzheimer's-afflicted father (Ali-Ashgar Shahbazi). He bristles during that initial court hearing (the judge remains unseen and the spouses address the camera) when Simin suggests that the father doesn't know Nader's his son anymore; "I know he's my father!" he protests. His insistence is admirable, but there's also a streak of self-righteousness to it that will emerge in other ways later. But the worst thing about their disagreement at first, from Simin's standpoint, is that Nader is willing to let her go if she wants -- doesn't seem to care if they don't stay together. So even though the judge won't grant them a divorce -- he considers their disagreement a minor one -- they separate informally, Simin moving back in with her mother. That obliges Nader to hire someone to take care of his father during the day, while Nader works in a bank and his daughter Termeh goes to school. This is where the real plot kicks in, as Nader hires Razieh (Sareh Bayat) to look after the old man on Simin's recommendation. Razieh, who takes her young daughter to work with her, quickly finds herself over her head, unable and unwilling to deal with changing the father after he wets himself. Religion complicates matters -- she calls some sort of theological hotline to ask whether changing the old man is permissible -- but we'll see that class complicates religion even more.

Razieh wants to quit after that rough first day, but recommends her husband Hojjat (Shahab Hosseini) to take over the job. Nader agrees, but Razieh ends up coming back when her deadbeat hubby is arrested by a creditor -- they still have debtors' prisons in Iran, apparently. She's still not very good at the job, but the situation seems to stabilize until Nader comes home early with Termeh one day and finds Razieh and her daughter out and his father on the floor unconscious, his wrist tied to a bedpost. When Razieh reappears as if nothing had happened -- and as far as she knew, nothing had, Nader flips out, accusing her not only of neglect but of stealing money. Her offer to swear on "our martyrs" that she didn't steal doesn't impress Nader, who finally shoves her out the door. He finds out the next day that Razieh is recovering in a hospital from a miscarriage that she blames on his physical abuse.

A Separation now becomes a kind of courtroom drama that showcases Iran's intriguingly informal criminal justice system. There's little of the "majesty of the law" we associate with American courts; each judge holds court in a modest, bureaucratic office, minimally refereeing a free-for-all of competing testimony. The judge's biggest problem is the recently-freed Hojjat, a hothead piece of trash who constantly threatens Nader and goes extra-ballistic when Nader countersues Razieh for her neglect/abuse of his father. There's a defensiveness to Hojjat that underscores the class difference between the two families. He protests that people like Nader think "we" are animals, and we're reminded of the cosmopolitan environment Nader and Simin live in. Their apartment is decorated with a print of Leonardo da Vinci's self-portrait, a copy of Andrew Wyeth's Christina's World, and other icons of western culture, while Hojjat and Razieh's home is a ramshackle affair with cracked walls all around, and Razieh is religious to the point of hysterical superstition at a critical moment. I get the feeling that the class factor would leap out for Iranian audiences but might be missed by American observers who might be looking for signifiers of religion or political tyranny -- pretty much in vain. Separation left me with the impression that, as long as you're not a political dissident, the Iranian legal system gives you a fair shake. The judge handling the case seems firm and evenhanded, ready to consider every bit of evidence. The stakes aren't as high for the state, after all, as they are for the litigants. Nader is potentially liable for murder if found responsible for Razieh's miscarriage. The case evolves like a detective movie without a detective, as new evidence throws both versions of events into question and Simin's efforts to resolve the trouble through compromise threaten to make matters much worse....

We can say that we might ignore the same story if an American told it, but would Americans tell it? An American Separation was more likely at some times in Hollywood history than others. I can easily imagine a Pre-Code version, for instance, though it would probably be much more hard-boiled yet have an unambiguous happy ending. It might have been done in the Seventies, too, and even today someone might try it, though I'd bet it'd more likely be a Lifetime Original Movie than a theatrical release. In Hollywood, I suspect we're at a low ebb of humanism; it would take at least one bankable star as one of the spouses to get such a movie made and get it attention. In the U.S., humanism often has to be imported under the guise of exoticism. Sometimes that has unexpected benefits. If people go to Separation to learn about Iran, they might also learn something about people in general, and not just that Iranians are people, too. They would have some of the year's best acting from the Iranian cast to thank for that -- more so than Farhadi's efficient, sympathetic direction, the performers make A Separation a worthy challenger to The Artist for Best Film of 2011 -- period.

SEPTEMBER 11 (11'9"01, 2002)

Has it been nine years already? Was it that long ago that Alain Brigand's portmanteau production premiered around the world. Maybe it doesn't seem that long ago to me, as an American, because it didn't premiere in my country until the summer of 2003. I remember that there was some concern that certain episodes might offend overly sensitive Americans, or that some were downright anti-American. I've had the DVD for awhile but haven't gotten around to watching it until this oppressively commemorative weekend. The anthology's reputation promised an antidote to the monotony of mood prevailing during the extended observance of what the vulgar call the "ten year anniversary" of the 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States. I dimly remembered what the various segments were about from the reviews I read, but I wasn't sure what attitude I might encounter. I ended up being surprised at the prevalence of irreverence over solemnity or stridency. Brigand promised his eleven directors "complete freedom of expression" as long as their segments wrapped up in eleven minutes, nine seconds and one frame of film. It wasn't nine minutes, eleven seconds and one frame because this was a European project and they put the day before the month, sensibly enough, and that gave the directors more time to work with. As for complete freedom of expression, judge for yourselves.

Brigand opens provocatively with a segment by an Iranian director, Samira Makhmalbaf, which sets the irreverent tone that keeps creeping into the proceedings. Her episode is a kind of thematic sequel to her movie Blackboards, since it focuses on a teacher desperate to impart knowledge to people mainly concerned with survival. It takes place in an Iranian refugee camp for Afghans where the children help make bricks in biblical fashion until a teacher lures them into a makeshift classroom. The day, of course, is September 11, 2001, and the teacher wants to tell her students that something of global importance has happened. But they know already: two people fell down a deep well, and one or both may be dead. She's clearly freaked out and expecting nuclear war ("You can't stop atom bombs with bricks," she tells the workers) but her explanation of what's happened in New York, and her insistence on a moment of silence only inspires a childish debate on whether God actually kills people and why he might be crazy enough to do so. Finally, to get them to at least visualize the enormity of the event, she takes them to the base of a tall brick-kiln smokestack and hopes they can imagine it falling. Whether they do remains uncertain.

How many heavyweight French directors turned Brigand down, do you imagine, before he finally recruited Claude Lelouch? He had his moment in the sun with A Man and a Woman back in the Sixties, but I doubt anyone would automatically think of him representing his country in this sort of project. Nor does he do his nation much credit with a gimmicky segment about the stormy romance of two French deaf-mutes living in New York and apparently breaking up on the dread day. In a gambit that makes his episode a bookend to another we'll see later, Lelouch films without sound to emphasize his characters' obliviousness to the awful events playing out on a nearby TV screen. He aims at empathy with the bereaved by teasing a lover's regret at wishing her beloved gone without realizing that he may well be very gone -- but the sooty reappearance of the beloved, who's apparently had a very eventful day, allows for a cheap, happyish ending. This may be the lamest segment of the film.

But it has competition from Egypt's Youssef Chahine, the only director narcissist enough to put himself in his segment. He's just returned from New York as the disaster happens, and is pressed by a female reporter to comment on it at a press conference. He begs off, needing time to think, and goes to Lebanon, where he meets the ghost of an American soldier killed in the 1983 Beirut barracks bombing. The ghost, who proves to have once been the fiance of the reporter, asks for empathy for his and other Americans' suffering, while the director is torn between his humanist instinct and his desire to reprimand an American for his insensitivity toward the victims of American violence. Still, he finally feels compelled to visit the soldier's grave at Arlington, where he meets the reporter again, as well as the soldier's father and the ghost of a suicide bomber who chides Chahine for showing sympathy to an enemy. Sometimes you try to do the right thing and you just can't win, and that pretty much describes Chahine's segment. But his heart was in the right place.

Bosnian director Denis Tanovic (of No Man's Land fame) contributes a trifle that takes the news from New York to a small town that holds a vigil on the 11th of each month to remember the Srebrenica massacre. It focuses on the friendship of a wheelchair-bound man and a young woman who lost loved ones in the massacre. It's one of several episodes that implicitly deny the centrality of the attacks on America by emphasizing the preoccupations, rational and irrational, of other peoples and nations. In this case, there's a call to cancel the monthly vigil because of the atrocities in America, but the protagonists insist on carrying on as usual to honor both their own losses and those of the Americans. The episode is well-meaning and unobjectionable but is also probably the least memorable of all the segments.

The goofiest segment by a wide margin comes from Burkina Faso and director Idrissa Ouedraogo. It has the naive absurdity of an Our Gang short, as a group of young protagonists become convinced that Osama bin Laden is hiding in their town and hope to collect the $25,000,000 bounty by capturing the terrorist leader. The kids seem to have some visual basis for their suspicion, but their target, whoever he may be, proves slippery, altering his itinerary whenever they plan an ambush. The boys rush about hoping to nab him with spears and machetes, only to see him disappear into an airport, where a guard insists firmly that bin Laden is not in the country. But as far as they're concerned, their chance at fame and fortune is flying away. Hope springs eternal, however, since President Bush may visit the country soon. Surely he'd be worth a large ransom, wouldn't he?... I'm not sure what point Ouedraogo wanted to make with that apparition of bin Laden, but I found this episode charmingly silly and admired its inclusion in the anthology.

A couple of the directors are ringers insofar as they don't actually represent their nation's reaction to or reflections on the terror attacks. One of these is the U.K.'s Ken Loach, who uses his time to commemorate the events of September 11, 1973 -- the day when a military coup overthrew the democratically elected Marxist government of Chile. Narrated by a Chilean exile in London, this is a mostly documentary segment with stark, dramatic footage of the Chilean upheaval, perpetrated with American encouragement, climaxing with black and white footage of a burning building, the presidential palace blasted by bombs from a seditious air force. This is the sort of segment Americans were probably expected to bristle at, but Loach's point is not to suggest that the U.S. deserved what it got because of its role in the Chilean coup. Instead, we should take its closing lines at face value; the Chileans will empathize with Americans every September 11, and hope that Americans will someday reciprocate.

If Claude Lelouch can get away with a silent segment, then Mexico's Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu will try to top him with a mostly sightless segment. He confronts us with a black screen as he builds a tower of found sounds from September 11, from the noise of explosions and crashes to the angry words of call-in ranters. Every so often the screen will flicker to life with footage of people jumping from the twin towers, and it will roar to life with footage of the towers falling -- only then the screen goes silent. The screen finally lightens so Inarritu can close with the textual question, in Arabic and English, "Does the light of God guide or blind us?" His is probably the sort of segment most people would have expected from this film. It's the only one that confronts the attacks directly or tries to convey the horror of them without a mediating personal or national perspective. As such, apart from the technical gimmickry, it's one of the least imaginative segments, though it may well have the purest raw power.

Israeli director Amos Gitai takes a "welcome to our world" stance, showing us a car bombing in his own country that gets upstaged by the news from New York to the chagrin of a pushy TV reporter. In a hard-boiled segment shot in a single take, Gitai illustrates the terrible normality of violence in Israel by showing reporters, first responders, police and bystanders all jostling for space and attention in the absence of the awe Americans felt during their own admittedly much larger disaster. The overall effect is blackly comic, though I'm not sure if Gitai really meant it that way.

The other ringer in the picture is Mira Nair, who while officially representing India contributes what's really the first of two American episodes. Based on true events, it follows an Indian Muslim family's trauma as their son goes missing on September 11 and becomes a terror suspect. His family is questioned by the FBI and increasingly shunned by their New York neighbors until the truth is recovered from the Ground Zero wreckage. The son, a onetime police cadet, had volunteered on the spot to aid rescue efforts and had fallen with the towers, dying a hero. This is the one segment I can envision being expanded into a feature film and improved by the expansion. As it is, Nair's segment is no great exercise in style, but the story has a truthful simplicity that's impossible to botch.

The official American episode comes from Sean Penn, who directs arguably the most crassly audacious segment of all. It is likely to offend, not because it makes any provocative political statement of the sort you might expect from Penn, but because it commits a twofold atrocity. It uses the destruction of the towers as a sight gag, and it compels us to look at Ernest Borgnine, admittedly then still a spring chicken of 85 years, in his underwear.  The mighty Borgnine plays a slightly senile widower who talks to his dead wife regularly and seems to live mostly in his own little skyscraper-shadowed world where he can't get a potted plant to grow. In a daringly obscene bit of magical realism, the fall of the first tower allows a strong ray of sunlight to shine into Borgnine's bedroom (the historic pall of smoke notwithstanding) and not only wake him but bring his potted plant to fully blooming life. The old man is overjoyed at the miracle and tries to share his joy with his beloved wife, but in a moment of illumination, if you will, he tearfully acknowledges that she simply isn't there. You may not believe what you've seen -- that is, you may not believe that Penn actually conceived and directed such an outlandish anecdote, but the episode has a primitive power in its preposterous play for pathos like something out of classic silent film.

The elder statesman of the creative team was Japan's Shohei Imamura, and that earns him the chance to top the Penn segment. In his final cinematic work, the great man tops the project with a dollop of "WTF???" in the form of a period piece set at the end of World War II. His protagonist is a demobilized Japanese soldier who's Kafkaesque reaction to the horrors of war is to become a snake. That is, he crawls about on his belly, never uses his hands, swallows rats and tries to bite people. It's all very interesting in a demented way, but its relevance to the overall project is tenuous or tangential at best. The problem isn't that it doesn't refer to the 2001 attacks directly, but that Imamura imposes relevance simply by inserting a sentence in which an officer declares the Japanese aggression a "holy war" and closing his segment, and the film, with the bald statement (pay attention, Muslims!) that "there is no such thing as a holy war." Thanks for clearing that up, Imamura-san!

So did you expect something besides a mixed bag? Had every segment been as sensitive and appropriate as some may yet think correct, had the whole film been about heroism or resilience or whatever the official theme of the decade is, it would have been intolerable. Instead, it's as wild and erratic an anthology film as you'll probably ever see, and that, the faults of individual episodes notwithstanding, is a good thing. Does it do justice to the event? I'm not sure. Does it honor people's losses? That doesn't matter. September 11 succeeds as a cinematic event and a collective, kaleidoscopic portrait of a moment in history, and it should have been part of somebody's television schedule during the commemorative weekend. Of course, you can watch it whenever you want if you can find a copy, and its historical value alone makes it worth your effort.

MEN AT WORK (Kargaran Mashghoole Karand, 2006)

Iranian cinema has come into its own since the 1990s. Critics dig it because of the general neo-realist vibe and, I suspect, because of the vivid contrast the movies offer to the western world's imagination of the Islamic Republic as some dystopian desert bastard of Islam and Orwell. I've liked what I've seen from Iran so far, particularly the work of Jafar Panahi, whose Crimson Gold and Offside I'd rank among the best films of this decade. But I've always wondered whether we're seeing what the average Iranian does. My understanding is that the government bans certain films from domestic distribution, but lets them circulate internationally for the sake of prestige and, probably, revenue. So how well do the art-house dissidents represent Iranian cinema as a whole? I imagine there has to be a popular cinema of slapstick comedies and heroic action films with manly Iranian heroes blowing away 1)Americans 2)Israelis 3)Iraqis or Sunni Muslims in general or4)All of the Above.

Men At Work seems to be halfway between the art cinema we usually get from Iran and the trash that's got to be out there. To my knowledge, this film was not banned or censored in its home country. While the story comes from art-cinema kingpin Abbas Kiarostami, director Mani Haghighi probably deserves credit for the film's misanthropic goofiness. For all I know, Kiarostami probably scribbled a bare concept -- "a group of idiots try to push a big rock off a cliff" -- and Haghghigi came up with the rest.

What we have here are four middle-aged idiots eager to watch an Iran vs Japan soccer game. They stop on a mountain road so one of them can relieve himself. He's mesmerized by the site of a strange upright rock formation at the side of the road and the edge of a cliff. All of a sudden the foursome, guys of the sort you might see anywhere on earth, get the notion of knocking the thing down.

They try pushing it. They try charging it with a large tree branch as if they could joust it off the cliff. They buy a donkey from a passing peasant on the theory that if it pulls while they push, the rock will wobble and fall. The peasant is concerned that the rock falling might take the poor beast over the edge, but money seems to calm him.

One of their wives shows up and seems to have the right idea.

But she's soon caught up in the mania. She makes the sensible suggestion that a lever might tip the rock, but some of our crew, in the midst of their determination to throw down a rock formation of who knows what geological or historic value, balk at the notion of chopping a tree down for the lever. Later, one of our heroes has a better idea: uproot a municipal road sign!

In the meantime, the woman goes off to get a chainsaw for the tree, and another group of travelers briefly become a competing demolition team, equally futile. If the rock formation immediately evokes the 2001 monolith, inviting an alternative title of "2006: A Roadside Travesty," and the attack on the rock reminds one of Shane or Pale Rider, the escalation of obsessions on a mountain road suggests It's A Mad Mad Mad Mad World in microcosm. Except that the comedy in Men At Work isn't as broad or over-the-top. It works because you know the types of idiots who might embark on such an asinine project. In the end, Haghighi opts for a realistic dwindling of enthusiasm until there's one madman left, first trying to ram the rock with his car, then staying in danger of freezing to death in order to dig and undermine the damned thing until it topples....

The easiest way to appreciate the virtues of Men At Work is to imagine how Hollywood would remake it. Most if not all the scenes you're imagining with trepidation are not in the Iranian film. Strange to say, a more faithful adaption might look a little like a Jackass movie in its cinema-verite style and because the characters are jackasses -- just not as completely as their American counterparts might be.

Men At Work is part of the Film Movement international DVD-of-the-month club, which serves up a foreign or independent feature plus a short subject every month. The Albany Public Library has a bunch of these, and this was the first one I tried out. Thanks to this movie, I may try more.