Beyond fantasy

Iranian cinema has evolved into an original genre, which is both sensitive and subtle. GOWRI RAMNARAYAN writes on some of the films showcased at the Cinefan festival in Delhi.

WHAT fascinates the world about Iranian cinema today is that the Iranian film-maker owes nothing to the ubiquitous Hollywood model. Avoiding the trap of self encumbering artiness, he has evolved an original genre which relies on subtlety and implication. The delicate touch is girded with steel. Like great poets the world over, the film-maker strives to say the most with a spare economy.

The Iranian package at Cinefan 2001 (August 26 - September 6), New Delhi, the annual festival conducted by Cinemaya (an Asian film quarterly) and NETPAC (Network for the Promotion of Asian Cinema) showcased some significant films of the early 1990s.

Dariush Mehrjui's "Sara"(1993) and "Leila" (1997) critiqued injustice perpetrated on women with social and religious approval. The beautifully crafted "Sara" is Ibsen's Nora ("A Doll's House") in burqa, going through the same agonies of discovering self-righteous chauvinism in the husband she has loved and for whom she has lied. "Leila" is a more complex study of a woman's psyche, brainwashed by centuries of subservience, of the guilt and shame of being "only a woman".

When Leila discovers she cannot have children she yields to her mother-in-law's demand, consenting to a "fruitful" second marriage for her husband. Mehrjui paints his characters with their ambivalences intact. Finally you get to see how every member of society is victimised in a rigid patriarchal system that does not respect its women. The director plays with his medium in shifting tones overt and covert, including the instinctive, irrational, self deceiving and self torturing sides of human emotions and behaviour.

Father and son driving through quake-ravaged North Iran in Abbas Kiarostami's "And Life Goes On" (1992) has a special significance for India in the aftermath of the Gujarat catastrophe. It is amazing to see how the tightlipped documentary mode can be adapted to refract a medley of meanings, and every shade of feeling from the droll to the horrific. The challenging journey becomes a universal ritual of insight and discovery. Abstaining from everything intrusive and voyeuristic, Homayun Pievar's camera invokes a deep empathy for the survivors. The director does not lump his characters into a mass, each retains an individual identity.

Images of destruction are juxtaposed with life signifiers, whether a kettle, spade, water heater, toilet seat or gas cylinder, toted up the road to makeshift shelters. A little boy demands a cool drink in the midst of relief efforts, another talks about the football match on TV that was interrupted by the quake. At the end, when the long shot shows the car pulling itself determinedly uphill, you know that what we have is not a record but a parable. In the hands of a master, cinema has almost become incantation.

Among the newer films, competition entry "Going By" (2001) made a reflective variation on the familiar road movie. What you get from established film scholar and fiction writer Iraj Karimi's debut here, is not ponderous effort, but a delicate feel for the human predicament. In this chuckling account of a single day's journey of four cars from the city plains to the Caspian sea in the north, people of different classes and careers pass through conflicting emotions. They relive intense parts of their lives, interact with companions, intersect with passengers in the other cars. Interestingly, though some achieve better bonding with travelmates in their car, their exchanges with commuters in the other vehicles does not lead to better understanding. Each car remains an island of self-absorbed minds - whether of man, woman or child.

Karimi enjoys playing with the limitations of the form, and scoring as much as he can. Avoiding all diffuseness, he sets out to create his cast, as quickly and clearly as do two of the characters themselves when they draw portraits on table napkins at a roadside eatery. (The woman draws a close up, the man sketches a long shot. Revealing!) The dialogues, even in subtitles, have sparkle and wit. Much is implied in the visuals as well as in the spoken words which have a bristling subtext of their own. The women (widowed wife and mistress) go in for solid melodrama, whereas the hearse driver revels in farce. The divorced film critic has a tough time with his sons, while gentler emotions guide the widower father of the terminally ill son whom he pampers with love.

The opening sequence of a film shoot has a crew member saying in dismay, "I want fantasy, but everything here is so real!" This seems to be the discovery of Karimi himself, as he finds the eternal motifs of human existence: confinement, preoccupation with death, self absorption, the will to survive through misadventure and misfortune. Transcience is a leitmotif that the form underscores effortlessly. As also transcendence, in fleeting, oblique references to landscape painting, metastasis and Rumi's mystic verses. This first feature impresses in its attention to detail and its balance of the concrete and the abstract. As the father says at the end, "We saw the woods, we saw the sea, that is all life is, and truth is."

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Trailblazer

IRAN makes some 70 films a year, out of which at least ten secure top honours across the globe. The latest to blaze the trail is Jafar Panahi's "Dayereh" (The Circle) which has just bagged the Grand Prix for Best Film of the Year from Fipresci, the international association of film critics, to be presented at the San Sebastian Festival. Trained in the Abbas Kiarostami camp, the younger film-maker has managed to find his own style, voice and metier for creative expression, as evident from his winning awards for all his films so far, from the Camera d'Or, Cannes ("The White Balloon") and the Golden Leopard, Locarno ("The Mirror") to the Golden Lion,Venice ("Dayereh").

"Dayereh" weaves a circle where eight nameless women intersect at certain points in time and space, as they rush through a city in a relay race of existence, where surveillance and gender discrimination breed fear and repression. Shot live in the streets of Tehran, the film has crafted a form to match its content. The circle suggests both the fluidity of the spirit which dares to survive, as also menacing, unending, inescapable imprisonment.

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