Powered by Google
Home
Listings
Editors' Picks
News
Music
Movies
Food
Life
Arts + Books
Rec Room
Moonsigns
- - - - - - - - - - - -
Personals
Adult Personals
Classifieds
Adult Classifieds
- - - - - - - - - - - -
stuff@night
FNX Radio
Band Guide
MassWeb Printing
- - - - - - - - - - - -
About Us
Contact Us
Advertise With Us
Work For Us
Newsletter
RSS Feeds
- - - - - - - - - - - -
Webmaster
Archives



sponsored links
- - - - - - - - - - - - -
PassionShop.com
Sex Toys - Adult  DVDs - Sexy  Lingerie


   
  E-Mail This Article to a Friend

Excess of evil
Humanism prevails at the MFA’s festival of Iranian film
BY PETER KEOUGH

Funny the difference 25 years can make. In 1979, the Islamic Revolution toppled the shah and established a fundamentalist theocracy under the Ayatollah Khomeini. The ayatollah promptly denounced the United States, hotbed of secularism and humanism, as "The Great Satan." This year in the United States, the electorate has rejected humanism, confirming a fundamentalist trend toward a theocracy of our own, and has returned for a second term a president who denounces Iran as part of the "Axis of Evil." Meanwhile, to judge from its recent output of films, including those in this year’s festival at the MFA, Iran seems to be having second thoughts about the whole fundamentalism thing and finding that secularism and humanism might make sense after all.

Perhaps the turning point for both countries in their parallel but opposite courses has been the example of Osama bin Laden and the Taliban in Afghanistan. For both the US and Iran, these icons of excess represent the epitome of Islamic fanaticism and its consequences. The US has responded with an ideological fanaticism of its own. Iranians — at least those whose ideas get communicated to the rest of the world via cinema — have responded with doubt in their convictions and the direction their country has taken.

Mohsen Makhmalbaf, for example, whose anti-Taliban pseudo-documentary Kandahar enjoyed unexpected interest from Western audiences after September 11. His Afghan Alphabet (2001; December 3 at 6 p.m. and December 11 at 11 a.m.) probably won’t repeat that success because no one is interested in the fate of homeless Afghans any more. This unconventional, poetic documentary roams about a refugee center on the Iranian border, one sheltering a fraction of the millions of Afghans fleeing their homeland. The children there seek an education, but they encounter bureaucratic, cultural, and religious obstacles. To attend the Iranian schools, they must be citizens, so they huddle outside, chanting in response to the lessons they overhear. Or they can attend religious schools, whose educational value is doubtful, as Makhmalbaf points out by baffling pupils with such questions as "What is God?" The UN-sponsored schools offer the most hope, but patriarchal religious tyranny interferes. The film ends with a teacher coaxing a 10-year-old girl to lift her burqa and so be able to see the lessons on the blackboard.

Makhmalbaf’s feelings about women’s rights are pretty clear, since he wrote the screenplay for his daughter Samira’s At Five in the Afternoon (2003; November 13 at 4:30 p.m. and November 26 at 8 p.m.). Set in the apocalyptic landscape of post-invasion Afghanistan, the film follows the wanderings of a traditionalist old man, his spirited daughter, and her bereft sister-in-law, who waits for her missing husband while nursing an ailing infant. Episodic and punctuated with moments of bleak and terrible beauty, it nonetheless offers hope in the form of the young daughter, who resists her father’s oppression with a pair of party shoes and dreams of becoming the future president of the country. The title comes from the first line of a Federico García Lorca poem ("Llanto por Ignacio Sánchez Mejías") that’s recited to her by a blithe Pakistani refugee, one of the few moments of lyricism in a film of Samuel Beckett–like desolation.

A Waiting for Godot atmosphere likewise hangs over Ali-Reza Amini’s Tiny Snowflakes (2003; November 21 at 4 p.m. and November 28 at 12:10 p.m.), in which a pair of unwashed and unbalanced watchmen guard a godforsaken mine in the middle of a snow-swept no man’s land. Or rather, no woman’s land, as the only contact they have with females is a distant glimpse of a passing woman and a handful of fetishistic treasures — a discarded radio, a woman’s shoe. Bewildering, hilarious, and touching, Amini’s vision presents his country as a buffoonish wasteland.

Is Iran a barren mine watched over by a pair of sex-starved bumblers? Or is it a derelict shrine watched over by an idiot with an existential crisis? If Amini seems more inclined to Beckett’s absurdity, Seyyed Reza Mir-Karimi’s Here, a Shining Light (2003; December 4 at 3:30 p.m. and December 12 at 3:45 p.m.) seems inspired by Buñuel’s surreal religiosity. A mentally disabled man must watch over the ramshackle shrine to Sultan Aziz while his uncle, the caretaker, is away for medical treatment. Like Dostoyevsky’s idiot, the nephew, with his lack of common sense, seems in touch with a higher power, or the lack of it. Dismayed by the lost faith of his neighbors, harried by the ghost of a dead miner (perhaps from Tiny Snowflakes) and nocturnal visions of the sultan himself, the temporary caretaker ends up giving the roof over his head to his uncomprehending flock. Reminiscent of Viridiana with a final scene evocative of El ángel exterminador, Here, a Shining Light is an uneven but haunting fable.

page 1  page 2 

Issue Date: November 12 - 18, 2004
Back to the Movies table of contents
  E-Mail This Article to a Friend
 









about the phoenix |  advertising info |  Webmaster |  work for us
Copyright © 2005 Phoenix Media/Communications Group