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
