Monthly Archives: February 2025

  • The Substance

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Coralie Fargeat (2024)

    Striking imagery and succinct storytelling get The Substance off to a strong, funny start.  A close-up shows the contents of a syringe being injected into an egg yolk, which gives birth to a second yolk that sits alongside it.  A star is put in place on Hollywood Boulevard, bearing the name Elisabeth Sparkle:  a passage-of-time montage leaves the star showing signs of wear and tear; the montage culminates with a clumsy pedestrian dropping fast food on it.  Cut to a TV studio, where an aerobics session is taking place.  It’s fronted by aforementioned Elisabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore), flanked by other middle-aged women in leotards, all in quite good shape but none as good as Elisabeth.  She ends the workout looking into the camera, promising viewers she’ll be working on the lateral abs next week and telling her audience to ‘Take care of yourself!’  She leaves the studio and heads down a long corridor, its walls adorned with portraits bearing witness to Elisabeth’s celeb longevity.  Colleagues wish her happy birthday on her journey down the corridor towards the women’s restroom.  It’s out of use so she pops her head round the door of the gents’, sees that it’s empty and slips into one of the cubicles.

    Enter TV boss Harvey (Dennis Quaid), bawling into his mobile phone – about Elisabeth.  He derides her age – today’s her fiftieth birthday – and says she’ll be getting the boot.  Harvey exits the restroom and Elisabeth emerges from the cubicle in a changed frame of mind.  Driving away from the TV studios and distracted by the sight of her image being removed from a roadside billboard, she crashes her car.  In ER, a middle-aged hospital doctor (Tom Morton) assures her no bones are broken, that his wife’s a big fan of Elisabeth.   He discharges her but when the doctor leaves the room, his assistant says there’s one further test to do.  This young male nurse (Robin Greer) feels Elisabeth’s spine, murmuring that she’d be a ‘good candidate’.  He confirms she can go home but not before slipping something into Elisabeth’s coat pocket – a USB stick, inside a piece of folded paper on which are written the words ‘It changed my life’.

    For twenty minutes or so, Coralie Fargeat’s film is excellent – it’s a pity there are still two hours to go.  Those opening visuals anticipate what’s coming in different ways.  The egg yolks neatly summarise the main storyline:  desperate for rejuvenation, Elisabeth Sparkle gets hold of a black-market drug that generates a younger version of herself.  Perhaps the yolks’ colour foresees the golden-mustardy coat in whose pocket she finds the fateful message, and which she’ll wear off and on throughout the story.  But that ketchup-drenched food slopping on her Walk of Fame star, along with the red walls and carpeting of the corridor beyond the TV studio, predict writer-director Fargeat’s bloodthirstiness.  As the elixir’s dreadful consequences pile up, the film’s distinctive look – clinically sinister interiors, tilted camera angles – is subsumed in garish body horror.  Once she injects herself with the single-shot serum, Elisabeth is – to put it mildly – never the same again, and the same goes for The Substance.  From the point at which the protagonist’s convulsed body generates a new body via a deep red slit in her back, Fargeat is almost continuously upping the gruesome ante.

    There’s no shortage of rules attaching to the life-changing drug.  The original body is the matrix for its offspring; the new body requires a regular injection of ‘stabiliser fluid’ to guard against deterioration.  The two bodies must alternate conscious existence for seven days at a time, the active body feeding the unconscious one intravenously during the latter’s week off.  Any deviation from the schedule entails an irreversible physical consequence for the currently inactive body.  When Elisabeth’s younger version, Sue (Margaret Qualley), brings a man (Oliver Lesage) home at the very end of a week’s stint and wants to prolong the bedroom experience, she takes an extra hit of stabiliser and exceeds the time limit (The Substance has echoes of Cinderella as well as Faust).  The index finger on Elisabeth’s right hand immediately transforms into the finger of a wizened crone.  Until now, Sue has, in two ways, been working out just as Elisabeth wanted.  The network TV channel advertises for a new presenter, aged between eighteen and thirty, for the weekly fitness show.  Sue wows at the audition, gets the job and proves an instant hit as the star of what used to be ‘Sparkle Your Life’ and is now ‘Pump It Up’.  But Sue’s infringement of the rules is the turning point in Elisabeth’s relationship with her new self.   Her pre-injection briefing pack contained a card instructing Elisabeth to ‘REMEMBER YOU ARE ONE’; Sue has decided to forget that.

    The trouble is, so does Coralie Fargeat.  Horror movies don’t demand conventional realism but they do need to make sense within the world the film-maker has created.  Elisabeth lives in her vast Los Angeles apartment with only photographs and awards she once won for company; she has no friends or family; we accept her complete social isolation as an expression of the utter loneliness of the fading star.  What’s not acceptable is that Fargeat doesn’t address the nature of Elisabeth-Sue’s supposedly shared consciousness.  It’s hard not to be struck, even in the early stages of Sue’s existence, by her lack of personality – either distinct from or clearly reflecting Elisabeth’s:  Sue is simply an icon of flawless youth.  (You may find yourself wondering too why Elisabeth’s middle-aged fan base is happy with this junior replacement – and with ‘Pump It Up’’s correspondingly youthful support troupe – or how many of Sue’s contemporaries would be glued, even on their phones, to a daytime keep-fit show.)  Fargeat’s indifference to the partnership’s mentality is an elephant in the room once conflict develops between the older and younger woman – as Elisabeth becomes a bitter recluse and Sue determined to break the rules to enjoy her success, making Elisabeth more decrepit each time that she does.  Instead, Fargeat contrives to make the pair simultaneously conscious so that they can physically fight.  By now, Elisabeth is a cadaverous hunchback but she slugs it out with Sue.  There’s a lot of bashing of heads on a tiled bathroom floor.

    Fargeat must be well aware that plenty of people will be happy to take just what they want from The Substance.  There’s one chunk of the audience predisposed to receive it as a searing indictment of Hollywood’s and the wider media’s standards of beauty and demands for how women must look.  Another target group is eager for non-stop horror spectacle, and they’re very well catered for.  Some of the critical plaudits for the movie hail it as ‘gloriously gruesome’, and so on:  the relentless OTT quality seems to be mistaken for genuine wit.  Fargeat has been complimented even by hard-to-please Armond White.  In the latest edition of his notorious annual ‘better than’ list, White commends The Substance because ‘Coralie Fargeat gives the Me Too movement the outrageous treatment it deserves’.  Fargeat may be surprised to learn this is what she was doing and it’s true that White’s judgments are increasingly deranged.  (Trump’s return to power, which White celebrated back in November, seems to have left him madder than before, in both senses of the word.)  Even so, an Armond White endorsement is evidence of just how far you can get manipulating themes as politically suggestive as those of The Substance.

    As well as skewering the age-and-beauty culture of Hollywood etc, Fargeat seems to imply that this is rooted in mercenary misogyny and exploitation, thus opening the door to a more broadly ‘feminist’ interpretation of her film, though this isn’t entirely straightforward for her.  Fargeat’s camera displays and inspects the naked bodies of Demi Moore and Margaret Qualley enough to make you wonder again if the female gaze in cinema is really so unexceptionable (see note on Eva Husson’s Mothering Sunday (2021)).  But Fargeat keeps the feminist door open – or seems to think she does – through the way in which she presents the male characters in the story, who are mostly vile or pathetic or both.

    Their chief representative, of course, is rebarbative media bigshot Harvey (a loaded name) who, after getting rid of Elisabeth, gives her a cookery book to occupy her retirement and Sue the plum job of hosting the TV channel’s upcoming New Year’s Eve extravaganza.  Other men are also worth noting.  There’s awkward, milquetoast Fred (Edward Hamilton Clark), who bumps into Elisabeth just after she gets the push, reminds her they were in tenth grade together, tells her he still thinks she’s the most beautiful girl in the world.  There’s the dimwit neighbour (Gore Abrams) whose face lights up when Sue rather than Elisabeth answers his ring on her doorbell:  he tells Sue to let him know of any jobs she wants doing and that he’s got ‘a big hammer’.  There’s Sue’s hunk boyfriend (Hugo Diego Garcia), who flees the apartment in terror after catching sight of geriatric, deformed Elisabeth in the bathroom.  There’s a decaying old man (Christian Erickson) in a diner, revealed to be the original of the male nurse who slipped Elisabeth the USB stick.  There’s a pair of casting directors (Daniel Knight and Jonathon Carley), who audition and bitch about applicants for ‘Pump It Up’.  A more ominous man-in-charge takes the form of just a voice (belonging to Yann Bean), which answers Elisabeth’s and, in due course, Sue’s desperate calls to the Substance helpline and which is – from their point of view – dispassionately unhelpful.

    Armond White’s list rates The Substance ‘better than’ Wicked and Emilia Pérez, in which ‘hacks John M Chu and Jacques Audiard both exploit ethnic and trans feminism in two perfect parallels of stupid ineptitude’.  Yet Fargeat’s and Audiard’s films have a fair bit in common:  reckless momentum, automatic misandry, and a lead actress whose impact in the role she’s playing derives more from who she is – or, at least, from her public persona – than from characterisation.  Harvey, as he splashes noisily into the restroom urinal, rubbishes Elisabeth’s star reputation – ‘Oscar winner my ass! When was that? Like, in the 30s – for King Kong?!’  Demi Moore isn’t an Oscar winner; in fact, she’d never been nominated for an Academy Award – until The Substance.  She is, however, sixty-one and doesn’t look it:  the demands that Coralie Fargeat makes of her clearly demonstrate how good a body Moore still has.  (How much actress and director see the irony of this, given the film’s subject matter, is less clear.)  Nevertheless, Moore’s own star has fallen a long way since she was Hollywood’s highest-paid actress in the 1990s – so The Substance has comeback power, too, enough perhaps for Moore to win the Oscar.  She gives a good performance (it’s certainly better than Karla Sofia Gascón’s in Emilia Pérez) but it’s inevitably limited, since Elisabeth Sparkle is a woman almost always in extremis.  There are highlights – as when Elisabeth stands at the mirror, preparing for a date with poor old Fred that never happens:  Moore applies make-up then removes it, applies it again then wipes it off more aggressively, making herself look as bad as she can.  But this is a performance – like so much else in The Substance – in block capitals.

    Margaret Qualley, subject to even closer physical inspection by the camera, does as well as can be expected with her underwritten role.  It’s not until the New Year’s Eve TV show – the film’s climactic bloodbath – that Sue seems to have something close to independent life, and then only briefly.  The night before, she runs out of the stabiliser fluid that she’s squandered:  the helpline tells Sue she must revert to Elisabeth if she’s to get a new supply (but why?)  Elisabeth, now hideously aged, orders a serum with which to terminate Sue.  She can’t go through with it because she can’t kick the habit of wanting the star status that Sue now enjoys – this was just about the only time I felt that Fargeat conveyed some idea of Elisabeth’s partaking in Sue’s existence, rather than observing it enviously.  This triggers (but how?) the fight to the death between the two of them.   Sue wins but, deprived of Elisabeth, finds her own body deteriorating rapidly in the minutes before the TV show starts.  She injects herself with some of Elisabeth’s leftover activator serum, which creates a hideous mutated body, introduced by a title card as ‘MONSTRO ELISASUE’.

    At first glance, you think the Elephant Woman; then you realise some of the body parts are in unexpected places.  The nasty casting directors derided the girl immediately before Sue in the ‘Pump It Up’ auditions as, ‘Great dancer … Too bad her boobs aren’t in the middle of her face instead of that nose’.  That’s just where Monstro Elisasue’s boobs are – one of them anyway.  She wears as a mask a cutout of Elisabeth’s face but removes it as the show gets underway:  all hell breaks loose in the TV studio (without, it seems, the plug being pulled on the live broadcast).  The audience bays for blood – ‘Kill the monster, kill the monster!’  One man decapitates Monstro but to no avail:  she instantly grows another, more deformed head; when her arm breaks, it’s enough to soak her assailant and most of the rest of the audience in blood.  Monstro manages to escape but, in the street outside, explodes into a heap of viscera.  Elisabeth’s original face emerges from the gory rubble and finds its way to her Hollywood Boulevard star.   The face breaks into a ready-when-you-are-Mr-DeMille grin before melting into a bloody puddle.

    Coralie Fargeat won the screenplay award at Cannes last year for The Substance.  If she wins other such prizes, it will be reward for an ingenious idea rather than for a script that’s properly worked through.  Late on in the film, Fargeat seems to be catering to yet another constituency – the self-congratulatory spotters of references to other movies.  The film’s original music is by Raffertie but at one point Fargeat plays a bit of Bernard Herrmann’s score for Vertigo – perhaps the most famous cinema treatment of twinned women (and an unusually complicated instance of the male gaze).  The Herrmann melody sparked appreciative laughter in the Prince Charles Cinema where I saw The Substance – as did Fargeat’s quick burst of Also Sprach Zarathustra aka 2001: A Space Odyssey.  I’m afraid I didn’t get the relevance of this, except that the best male voice in Kubrick’s film belongs to HAL and the most interesting male voice in The Substance (the helpline voice) sounds like a computer, too.

    13 February 2025

  • The Seed of the Sacred Fig

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Dāne-ye anjīr-e ma’ābed

    Mohammad Rasoulof (2024)

    Introductory text on the screen explains the title of Iranian writer-director Mohammad Rasoulof’s political-domestic drama.  The fig tree in question – ficus religiosa – propagates its seeds into other trees; those seeds penetrate and eventually strangle the host tree.  Why is the tree ‘sacred’?  It’s significant in several major Eastern religions; for example, the Bo tree under which the Buddha attained enlightenment was supposedly a sacred fig.  Islam isn’t one of the faiths for which the tree is meaningful; for Rasoulof, though, its connotations – religious, permeative, destructive – are analogous to Iran’s Islamist theocracy.  The explanation of the ficus religiosa isn’t the first text seen by viewers of The Seed of the Sacred Fig.  Ahead of those words, of any images, even of the production companies’ and distributors’ logos, we read that ‘This film was made in secret.  Where there is no way, a way must be made’.

    It’s far from the first time that a present-day Iranian director has made a film in embattled circumstances and put themselves in personal danger by making it:  Maryam Moghaddam and Behtash Sanaeeha’s My Favourite Cake  – first shown at the 2024 Berlin Film Festival, just a few months before The Seed of the Sacred Fig premiered at Cannes – was a recent such example.  I watched My Favourite Cake unaware of Moghaddam and Sanaeeha’s particular difficulties; the opening note obviously made that impossible in the case of Sacred Fig.  Besides, Mohammad Rasoulof, over the years, has been arrested repeatedly and had his passport confiscated by the Iranian authorities.  In May 2024, just as this latest film was about to screen at Cannes, Rasoulof was ‘sentenced by the Islamic Republic to 8 years in prison, whipping and a fine’ (Wikipedia).  He managed to flee to Germany and now lives in exile.  Against this background, it’s hard to apply standard critical criteria to The Seed of the Sacred Fig – especially when the film is decidedly a polemic – but here goes.

    Iman (Missagh Zareh), an able, scrupulous lawyer with twenty years’ experience in the Iranian legal system, is promoted to the position of ‘investigator’ in the Revolutionary Court in Tehran.  As well as meaning an increased salary and larger living accommodation for Iman and his family, his promotion is an important stage in career progress towards appointment as a senior judge in the Court.  Iman’s wife Najmeh (Soheila Golestani) is devoted to supporting her husband and raising their two teenage daughters, Rezvan (Mahsa Rostami) and Sana (Setarah Maleki).  Iman and Najmeh have a loving marriage; they and their daughters appear to be a strong family unit.  Potentially divisive generational differences – Iman and Najmeh are devout Muslims, Rezvan and Sana enthusiastic followers of social media – are held in check partly by the confidential nature of Iman’s work:  he doesn’t talk shop at home and the girls know not to ask questions.  Rasoulof’s narrative describes a rupturing of the domestic status quo, resulting from the interplay of Iman’s new professional responsibilities; increasing anti-government public protests taking place in Tehran, which mean larger numbers of prosecutions for Iman to deal with; and his daughters’ nascent political awareness and support for the street demonstrations.

    Iman (the name means ‘faith’) soon learns that it’s not part of his new role to make independent legal decisions.  He’s expected to rubber-stamp judgments, including death sentences, already made by his superiors in the Revolutionary Court hierarchy.  He expresses surprise and dismay to a senior colleague, Ghaderi (Reza Akhlaghirad), who confirms that’s just how things work.  (It’s surprising Iman doesn’t know this beforehand.)  His work is even more confidential than before; he’s also issued by the authorities with a handgun for his and his family’s protection.  Iman shows the weapon in confidence to Najmeh, who’s uncomfortable about the gun, but he doesn’t tell his daughters.  They, meanwhile, are appalled by what they’re learning about the street protests – especially the elder daughter, Rezvan, who’s in higher education and whose best friend, fellow student Sadaf (Niousha Akhshi), takes part in demonstrations.

    When Iman’s not at home, Rezvan and Sana argue politics with Najmeh, who’s as glued to government-controlled news reports on television as they are to what their phones tell them.  But when police fire into the crowd at a demonstration against compulsory hijab, Sadaf is hit and Rezvan brings her injured friend back to the family apartment, it’s Najmeh who administers first aid, removing buckshot fragments from Sadaf’s face and dressing her wounds.  Iman’s wife and daughters agree not to mention this to him.  He’s working increasingly long hours and Najmeh is concerned that the four of them are spending less time together; when her husband makes a special effort to get home in time for a family dinner it’s a disaster.  For the first time, Rezvan rows openly with her father, who deplores her feminist views, warning that Rezvan and her friends are being influenced by ‘enemy’ propaganda.  The following morning, as he prepares to leave for work, Iman finds that his gun has disappeared from the drawer in which he keeps it overnight.

    As in My Favourite Cake, the domestic details are remarkable – both in how normal and how abnormal they look to Western eyes:  we might not recognise exactly what Najmeh is cooking in her well-appointed kitchen but the ritual of preparation is familiar; what’s showing on the apartment TV, on the other hand, is never light entertainment.  The family in The Seed of the Sacred Fig is much more affluent than the widow protagonist of My Favourite Cake:  when Najmeh removes her head covering indoors, you’re struck by her expensive-looking hairdo as well as by her simply elegant wardrobe; from the clothes they wear at home, Rezvan and Sana could pass for students in Europe or America.  Rasoulof’s depiction of securely routinised family life effectively prepares the ground for its destruction, and that too is well dramatised.  The scenes in the apartment, as the atmosphere there worsens, are increasingly claustrophobic – chiming with the ‘locked room mystery’ of the gun’s disappearance.  Except for the seriously injured Sadaf, there have been no visitors to the family home and there’s no sign of forced entry to it.  The gun thief must be one or more of Najmeh, Rezvan and Sana.

    As a symbol of Iman’s new professional standing, and its precarity, the handgun is crucial to Rasoulof’s purposes.  If the authorities find out he has mislaid the weapon, Iman will be liable to a prison sentence and his career will be over.  The loss of the gun drives Iman into spiralling paranoia – a state of mind that Rasoulof surely also means to reflect the Iranian regime.  Iman confides in Ghaderi, whose reaction is both sympathetic and pragmatic.  He has a spare handgun, which he lends to Iman; Ghaderi also advises him to arrange for a mutual colleague to interrogate Najmeh and her daughters.  The interrogator, Alireza, is also remarkable, for two reasons.  Another notable costume detail:  he may have dressed down deliberately for the occasion – to put a colleague’s wife and children at their ease (!) – but this interrogator doesn’t wear a uniform or clerical garb but jeans and an open-necked shirt with leather patches on the elbows (he too wouldn’t look out of a place in a Western university).  The actor playing Alireza isn’t just uncredited but, according to Variety, ‘prefers to remain anonymous’.

    Yet there are aspects of the gun theft that aren’t so convincing and which predict the larger problems that develop in the second half of The Seed of the Sacred Fig (the whole film runs not much short of three hours).  Nafteh’s immediate reaction is to tell Iman he must have forgotten where in the apartment he put the gun; she reminds him that, just a few days previously, he left it in the bathroom.  He did do that – it’s not clear why such a conscientious servant of the state would be so careless.  A bigger issue is Rasoulof’s handling of the mystery element.  Iman and Nafteh naturally suspect Rezvan and disbelieve her vehement denials but we know she’s too obvious a culprit.  It’s possible that Nafteh has been hiding a subversive streak – she was unhappy from the start about the weapon and prepared to help Sadaf without telling Iman.  Even so, she seems too emphatically conformist for this to make sense.  Which leaves only one other possibility.

    From the start, Sana is presented as the relatively frivolous younger sister.  It comes as news to her father that she wants to dye her hair blue and paint her nails; Iman, in desperation, offers to let her do so if only she’ll snitch on Rezvan.  Yet although Mahsa Rostami (Rezvan) is taller and a stronger presence than Setarah Maleki (Sana), the latter doesn’t have the face of a young girl; it crossed my mind, well before the gun disappeared, that Maleki might have been cast to suggest an old head on young shoulders.  Whether or not that’s Rasoulof’s intention, he makes Sana, as the missing gun takes over the family’s lives, virtually beyond suspicion.  By process of elimination and precisely because her parents don’t repeatedly accuse her, it’s soon clear that Sana must be the thief.  She’s not a child – she’s presumably sixteen or so – so why shouldn’t she have taken the gun?  An obvious answer to that question is that she didn’t know Iman had the weapon – but nor did her elder sister.  I didn’t understand how they found out that he did.

    Mohammad Rasoulof’s priority wasn’t, of course, to construct an ingenious who-took-it plot but it’s in his treatment of the gun’s disappearance that he starts to sacrifice broadly realistic drama on the altar of political metaphor.  (In this sense, his film’s trajectory echoes that of The Brutalist albeit Rasoulof has more powerful personal reasons for taking this direction than Brady Corbet.)   Sana reveals to Rezvan that she has Iman’s gun well before the film’s end but she never explains why she stole it.  And we don’t need to be told.  Firearms have served as movie emblems of male potency since well before Mae West (allegedly) said, ‘Is that a gun in your pocket or are you pleased to see me?’  Iman loses his gun because, as a paterfamilias working for a vicious regime, he represents both Iran’s time-honoured patriarchy and its extreme form, theocracy.  Sana (although Rasoulof does almost nothing to suggest she’s disposed as an individual to do this) is acting in defiance of misogyny and repression.

    The Seed of the Sacred Fig concludes with mobile phone footage of women protesting in the streets of Tehran.  In the meantime, though, Rasoulof does veer from chamber drama into suspenseful thriller territory.  When Iman’s contact details somehow get posted on social media, he drives his household to a remote mountain location – the place where he grew up and where he and Najmeh once spent family holidays with Rezvan and Sana that they all enjoyed.  En route there’s a car chase, the other vehicle containing a young man and woman, who recognise Iman and whom he realises are anti-government activists.   He eventually runs them off the road and, with Najmeh at his side, threatens the young couple.  It’s while the parents are out of the car that Sana shows Rezvan the missing gun, which she then conceals in the back of the passenger seat.  Once the family is in the holiday home, Iman begins his own interrogation of Najmeh, Rezvan and Sana, recording what they say.  For the sake of her daughters, Najmeh confesses to stealing the gun but Iman doesn’t believe her; his paranoia is now so dominant that he doesn’t even believe prime suspect Rezvan, when she then confesses.  The situation is intensely grim and frightening to an extent that makes it hard to accept that neither of the terrified daughters spills the beans but they don’t.  Iman locks up Najmeh and Rezvan.  Sana escapes from the house and takes the gun from the car.

    In the episode that follows, the narrative verges on ridiculous.  While hiding from her father, Sana embarks on a crash course of (American) YouTube videos on her phone showing how to use a gun.  She then unearths a cache of video recordings of the family holidays and, with a megaphone, rigs up a kind of PA system so that Iman can hear at high volume the soundtrack of these happy memories.  The message here is confusing:  Sana’s impulse to show and shame Iman with evidence that he was once a good husband and father, seems nostalgic rather than political.  (And he hasn’t really changed – or hadn’t until the gun went missing; it’s rather that Sana now understands things she didn’t understand a few years ago.)  Sana contrives to lock Iman in a shed before releasing her mother and sister; he forces his way out of the shed; the stage is set for a climactic showdown, involving all four family members but chiefly the pair with guns (Iman still has Ghaderi’s).  This takes place in a visually extraordinary setting – a rocky maze, with perilously narrow footways, high above the holiday home.  As her father, threatening to shoot, moves towards Sana, she panics and fires her gun, though towards the ground on which he’s standing.  The ground gives way and Iman falls, as if through a trap door, presumably to his death.

    It seems impertinent or worse to suggest that Mohammad Rasoulof should have ended this always compelling and well-acted film differently but I can’t help thinking he should have.  The Seed of the Sacred Fig might have been less ostensibly ‘dramatic’ but would also have been more credible and more suffocatingly powerful if Iman had retrieved his gun and so been enabled to resume his career, though irreparably damaged in the eyes of those he loved.  That would have maintained a more cogent parallel between this family and the country they represent, and that Rasoulof no doubt loves too.  He could still have ended on the phone footage of political protests, and with greater impact.

    7 February 2025

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