Crimson Gold [dir. Jafer Panahi]

Iranian movie-maker Jafer Panahi first garnered an international name in 1995 with The White Balloon, a soul-warming realist fable with children. While White Balloon was a hopeful humanist film,  his 2003 feature Crimson Gold (scripted by his mentor and Iranian cinema giant Abbas Kiarostami) tells a far bleaker tale.

The film opens with a jewelry shop robbery in which the perpetrator attacks the owner, while his accomplice waits outside with a bike. He demands to see a jewel, and then asks for the safe keys. The attempt ends in the shop owner's murder, after which the criminal is pointing the gun to his own head.

The film shifts to a few days earlier: we see the to-be criminals Hossein (Hossein Emadeddin) and his sycophantic companion Ali (Kamyar Sheisi). They are wage workers at a pizza delivery. Hossein is a war veteran and is apparently taking medication for PTSD. Ali's sister is to marry Hossein. When they go to a high-end jewelry store they are turned out by the proprietor, advised to go to cheaper gold stores. We see that Hossein is deeply offended by the owner's condescension.

We then follow Hossein in various situations as he makes his deliveries: One customer turns out to be a former war comrade, who embarrassedly hands him a huge tip. In another place he is held up by the police staking out an apartment to arrest party-goers. One day, on his way to work, he sees a fellow pizza delivery man killed in an accident.

He then makes a delivery to a posh apartment, only for the customer to tell him that the girls he ordered pizza for have abruptly left. The young man (Pourang Nakhael) invites Hossein to come in and share the pizza, and proceeds to tell him his woes. He whines about the fickleness of women. He has come from America where his parents have shifted because he felt homesick for Tehran, and now finds himself a stranger in this country, living alone in an all too large house. For a while Hossein experiences the life of the rich, drinking wine from the man's fridge, even jumping into his swimming pool. Something triggers in him, and the next scene we see is the beginning of the robbery attempt that the film opened with, before the credits roll.

Panahi's film looks at class differences in his country and suggests that each class feels isolated and disenfranchised in its own way. There is an entropy that arises from a sense of collective hopelessness. This is a dark film - none of the characters seem to have any scope of real happiness. Hossein as a medicine-dazed ex-soldier slaving in a low-paying job where he is hassled by the police is representative of the abandonment of the people by those in power.

Kiarostami's script includes his favored motif of people driving around, and several scenes are conducted as bike rides through the city. Crimson Gold is definitely not a cheerful experience, but it's an interesting watch.