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.

Shatranj-e-Baad aka Chess of the Wind [dir. Mohd Reza Aslani]

Normally we know Iranian cinema for its realistic human dramas with existential questions - the works of Abbas Kiarostami*, Asghar Farhadi, Jafar Panahi etc exemplify this aspect. Or there is Mohsin Makhmalbaf's poetic flights of fancy. But Mohammed Reza Aslani's 1976 film Chess of the Wind - which had been regarded long lost and was only recently rescued from destruction - is an altogether different beast. This is a stylized and provocative crime noir that harks back to the work of Alfred Hitchcock and Henri-Georges Clouzot. And equally interesting that the film is driven primarily by its women characters.

Going by its look and the feudal nature of relationships, I imagine Chess of the Wind is set somewhere in the early 20th century. It is a time of candlelight crystal chandeliers, enormous glass storage urns, powder-loading pistols and wooden wheelchairs. In a wealthy household, the matriarch has recently died. Her middle-aged spinster daughter Aghdas (Fakhri Khorvash) is handicapped and moves about in a wheel chair. Aghdas is yet to come out of mourning, when the stepfather begins a process of domination to control the family estates. There are other men in the house who sympathize with Aghdas, but for their own ends. Her only close companion seems to be the devoted maid and companion (Shohreh Aghdashloo). A plan is made to do away with the stepfather and it is carried out. But how long can the crime stay hidden?  Apart from the people that live in it, the house is a character in itself. Every claustrophobic corner seethes with whispered intrigue as Aghdas becomes increasingly unsure of who she can trust, including her own sanity.

Apart from an examination of this crime and its aftermath, the film is also an exploration of the decadence of the feudal system. Wealth only begets greed and sin. Banned almost immediately after release, for some surprisingly racy content, Aslani's film is also a sensory marvel. Khorvash and Aghdashloo burn up the screen with their multi-level chemistry. The baroque production design (art director Houri Etesan and costume designer Manouchehr Safarzadeh) is chockful of unique period objects, and the camera (Houshang Baharlou) lovingly lingers over the sight of stained glass windows, rich tapestries, chessboards, chandelier bulbs, ornate flails  - Echoes of the object fetishes seen in the films of Robert Bresson or Walerian Borowczyk. And the visuals are not just eye-candy, they define the mood of the film. Towards the end when the narrative reaches a hellish place, the viewer is carried into the lower depths of the house, the visuals draped in an orange-red tint of perdition. Also of note is the terrific avant-garde score (Sheyda Gharachedagi) that generates a sense of nerve-squeezing dread across several sequences.

From a purely narrative point of view, the climax is almost absurd, but like with Dario Argento's Suspiria, the mood generated by the visuals and sounds carries it through brilliantly, making for a memorable experience.

* This site has previously reviewed Kiarostami's films like The Taste of Cherry and Like Someone in Love (Click the titles to read those reviews).

Taste of Cherry [dir. Abbas Kiarostami]

In  Abbas Kiarostami's Taste of Cherry (1997), Houmayun Ershadi plays Mr. Badii, a man who for a good part of the film's beginning we see as a rather suspicious character. He is cruising around in his car, looking to pick up isolated men. At least one of them openly tells him to scram, falling to the obvious conclusion that Mr. Badii is trying to hook up for a gay tryst. But as we learn later he has a different motive.

You see, Mr. Badii has decided to commit suicide; he has even dug his own grave. What he wants is for someone to confirm his death and then spade in earth to bury him. For this he is willing to pay handsomely. He courts in succession a young Kurdish military cadet, an Afghani seminarian, and a taxidermist among others to do this deed for him. He is not interested to explain his reasons or to listen to justifications about why he shouldn't go ahead with his plan. A good part of Kiarostami's film is about the conversations between Mr. Badii and his prospects; how he inveigles himself to put forth his offer, and how they ultimately respond to him.

Taste of Cherry is not so much about being a character study (right up to the end we do not know anything about the life of Mr. Badii and why he wishes to end it) or being laden with symbolic meaning. It is a rhythmic existential film, and what happens at the end is a lot less important than the interludes along the way. This is also not a film for the impatient or plot-focused. I remember, when I first watched it I was fidgeting through the initial part when he is propositioning various men before we know his purpose. I was better placed on the re-visit since I knew the roads it would travel. I am not certain if it was shot that way, but the finished film does suggest an element of improvisation in the dialog and its use of non-experienced actors in pivotal roles.

It may not have served as direct inspiration, but the long-range visuals of Badii driving his range rover over the dusty hill paths with a purely diegetic soundtrack may have been in auteur Nuri Ceylan's mind when he conceived the magical Once Upon a Time in Anatolia. In its less ponderous way, Taste of Cherry is also a haunting existential fable.

This is an interesting American trailer for the film that gives almost nothing away about the feel of the actual film:

For those interested, a few words about the recent blu-ray release of Taste of Cherry from Criterion:

My previous viewing of the film was more than a decade ago on the Criterion DVD (gifted by a dear friend). Taste of Cherry was one of the early DVD's in the Criterion label, with a non-anamorphic transfer that was not hugely impressive even at the time of release. Not surprisingly, their blu-ray sourced off a new 4K restoration simply blows away the previous release. There are levels of detail and contrast that were entirely absent on the DVD. While there may be some push of blues towards teal in the grading, it does not take away from the overall superiority of the new master and this is a must-have upgrade for fans of the film. The original Farsi audio is presented as LPCM mono and sounds very clear, with surprising presence for ambient effects. I have not checked the extras as yet but they are definitely more than what was present on the previous DVD.