Reconstructing reality

Excerpts from an interview with Iraj Karimi:

GOWRI RAMNARAYAN: Why did you choose the old road movie genre for your debut? Was it not technically and thematically limiting?

IRAJ KARIMI: As a film critic, road movies don't interest me. I never thought I'd make one! One of my short stories revolves around a father and son who's going to die of cancer. (Abbas) Kiarostami wanted to make it into a film, but I decided to make my own. (Also, Kiarostami is such an influential figure in Iran that I hoped to get financed easily if I chose a story he liked!) The other characters came after that, that's the reason they too are under the shadow of death, share the same hopes and fears of the initial pair. From one point of view the road movie format was easy, long pans, long shots, fewer cuts, economic in angles. I put the cars on trailers so that the actors didn't have to drive and act as well. I thought that the form would convey the sense of confinement.

But confinement gives way to release as the landscape changes from dusty scorching plains to the cool rolling hills. Dialogues refer to poetry, painting and philosophy, even to rebirth which is foreign to Islam.

In reconstructing this geographically realistic route I wanted to achieve a sense of reconciliation with death for my characters. Also, to remind audiences of the Iranian visions of paradise through garden landscapes. The garden is an important symbol of paradise for us, a belief of generations. Shia religion has mystical aspects; moreover, some of these emotional archetypes come from pre-Islamic sources.

One of your characters says he hates intellectual film-makers! Is that your own voice?

I identify with the boy who wants to become a film critic, and I know the bitter experience of divorce, a preoccupation in this film. I am influenced by both Kiarostami and Kieslowski. I want neorealism plus more contemporary styles, but I also want a mass audience in my country. So you see some popular elements like melodrama here, which I have tried to treat in a modern way.

Was it not difficult to avoid flashbacks? To create character, situation and changing moods through dialogue alone?

I think that through this treatment I have come close to modern literature, to Ernest Hemingway and his successor Raymond Carver. Also, I felt flashbacks would diminish the sense of imprisonment, my obsession in this film.

The garrulous hearse driver makes you laugh at death. But why those three deliberate shots at the end looking at the driving seat from inside the hearse van?

That is the dead man's perspective. I wanted to come to terms with death. (Smiling) You know, now Kiarostami wants to make a film with that hearse driver as protagonist! In the driver's boasts I was able to joke about our socio-political regime, something that would have been forbidden five years ago. But the obvious jump you would have noted is due to a cut by the censors who objected to showing a man urinating in a standing (not sitting) posture as anti Islamic!

Hollywood films are banned in Iran. How about Indian?

Artistic considerations have nothing to do with such bans. We cannot show Indian films because the saree does not completely cover the waists of the women.

Send this article to Friends by E-Mail

Section  : Entertainment
Previous : Beyond fantasy
Next     : Designing dance