E-Mail This Article to a Friend Excess of evil (continued)

Perhaps Iran instead is a dinner party with no food hosted by a near-hysterical traditionalist woman and her feckless, movie-buff husband. Veteran director Dariush Mehrjui (The Cow, Leila) may be no Preston Sturges when it comes to ensemble screwball comedy, but his Mama’s Guest (2004; November 12 at 7:45 p.m.) nonetheless delivers a powerful humanist message of common values, redemptive altruism, and tolerance of others. The guest of the title is mama’s nephew "the Colonel" (actually a sergeant in the police force), whose visit with his new bride arouses her to panic and her raffish husband to indifference. Their plight at first annoys their neighbors, who include an old woman who regards her chickens as her children, a chemistry student searching for an immunity shot against unhappiness, and an addict who could use such a drug and who in the meantime beats his pregnant wife. In the end, they’re moved to help out, and the community is vindicated. A lot of the humor seems strained or gets lost in translation; you might wind up feeling like a guest who’s stayed past the right moment to leave.

The film buff in Mama’s Guest is almost the only instance of self-reflexivity in this year’s festival, a situation that’s very uncharacteristic of Iranian films. Abbas Kiarostami makes up for the deficit with his 10 on Ten (2003; November 13 at 10:30 a.m. and November 27 at 4 p.m.), the consummate student film since it’s a textbook for filmmakers that the director draws from his most recent feature, Ten. Like Ten, the film consists of 10 episodes, or lessons, related by Kiarostami in a monologue as he drives around the Tehran landscape that was the setting for his 1997 masterpiece Taste of Cherry. Among the subjects covered are his neo-realistic notions of cinema’s purpose, his use of non-actors, his enthusiasm for digital video, and his obsession with setting his films entirely within the suffocating confines of automobiles. A great introduction to great cinema, 10 on Ten is not great cinema itself (perhaps with deliberate irony), and it’s a relief when the director cuts from himself nattering on behind the wheel of his circling SUV to illustrative excerpts from the earlier films or a shot of a busy anthill.

Mania Akbari, for one, learned Kiarostami’s lessons well. The "non-actor" star of Ten, she has begun her own filmmaking career with the derivative but racier 20 Fingers (2004; December 10 at 8:20 p.m. and December 11 at 1:30 p.m.). It opens in typical Kiarostami fashion with a shot inside an automobile that being driven at night in the outskirts of Tehran. Inside, a man and his fiancée (played by Akbari) chat. She tells him about playing "doctor" with her cousin; he responds with mild disapproval but is turned on. How sexually pathological the situation is becomes more evident when the screen goes black and dialogue and sound suggest the kind of scandalous incident one doesn’t expect in Iranian films.

But the relationship between the man and woman persists through seven more episodes, as the couple apparently marry and have a child and engage in further arguments in a variety of conveyances from a motorbike to a ski lift that almost seem like a parody of Kiarostami’s motifs. Akbari, though, has her own agenda, a spirited feminism like that of a veiled Catherine Breillat as she pits her modern persona (the title comes from an old wives’ tale regarding how many men a woman might sleep with before being considered a whore) against her creepy, intransigent macho counterpart in a seemingly irresolvable conflict.

Speaking of irresolvable conflicts: does anyone remember the Iraq-Iran War of 1980-’89 in which Saddam Hussein was our good buddy and we helped provide the WMDs with which he fought his enemies and ours? As depicted in Azizollah Hamidnezhad’s The Tear of the Cold (2003; November 19 at 6 p.m. and November 20 at noon), that struggle seems a lot like the conflict we’re involved in today in Iraq. In 1983 at an isolated outpost in Iranian Kurdistan, soldiers find themselves unable to tell friend from foe as local insurgents pick them off with improvised explosives and roadside bombs. The Iranians bring in a bomb expert who decides that the key to success is earning the sympathy of the people. This he does by falling in love with a pretty shepherdess who is also a spy for the rebels. The story follows familiar conventions, somewhat clumsily, though with enough of a difference to make them seem newly tragic. So too, it seems, history has followed a familiar pattern, though with a difference that makes it newly tragic as well.