Film review

  • A Hero

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Ghahreman

    Asghar Farhadi (2021)

    A man in his late thirties sits on a chair in a corridor.  A door opens, his name – Rahim Soltani – is called, and he disappears into a room.  Cut to Rahim emerging from an anonymous building and walking briskly away.  After catching a bus, he gets off seemingly in the middle of nowhere.  He clearly knows just where he’s heading, though.  He crosses a short stretch of dry, bare land and ascends numerous flights of steps erected beside a cliff covered in scaffolding; at the top he’s greeted warmly by a group of construction workers.  The accelerating movement of these opening sequences in Asghar Farhadi’s A Hero is close to exhilarating.  Without saying a word but radiating upbeat urgency, Rahim (Amir Jadidi) has made an instantly engaging impression.  You want to know more about him – and feel you like him, too.

    He has the look of a man on a mission, and so he is, but the nature of the mission comes as a surprise.  One of the men on the cliff site (later revealed to be the tomb of Xerxes in Marvdasht, in the Fars Province of Iran) is Rahim’s brother-in-law.  We learn from their conversation that the anonymous building of the earlier scene was a prison, where Rahim has already served three years for an unpaid debt.  The prison authorities have given him two days’ leave, which he plans to use well.  He accompanies his brother-in-law to the latter’s home in Shiraz, where Rahim’s sister cares for the couple’s own children and her brother’s pre-teen son Siavash (Saleh Karimai).  The household dynamic and routines, illustrated briefly but vividly, convey a sense of what Rahim is deprived of in jail.  The protagonist’s backstory is disclosed more gradually but no less efficiently.  At the same time, Farhadi gets into the meat of his narrative (as usual on his films, he has sole screenplay credit[1]).

    A traditional painter and calligrapher, Rahim was finding his livelihood increasingly vulnerable to speedier modern methods of production.  He went into business with a partner, borrowing money from a loan shark.  That loan was paid off by another, from Braham (Mohsen Tanabandeh), who owns and runs an art shop in central Shiraz, but Rahim’s business partner then ran off with the money, leaving him high and dry.  His jail sentence won’t end until he can repay Braham to the latter’s satisfaction.  With the help of his family, Rahim can now manage part-payment of the debt and hopes to persuade his creditor to accept this as sufficient.  Braham won’t have it:  as a result of loaning money to Rahim, he lost the dowry on his daughter Nazanin (Sarina Farhadi).  Rahim returns to prison.  By the time he comes out on another pass, a few weeks later, his financial situation, potentially at least, has been transformed.

    The break-up of his marriage left Rahim as single parent to Siavash.  The boy has a severe speech impediment; his father and his therapist, Farkhondeh (Sahar Goldust), have grown close and hope to marry on Rahim’s eventual release from prison.  Farkhondeh is there to meet him when he emerges on his next parole, and has with her Rahim’s possible passport to freedom.  A handbag left on a bus and which Farkhondeh happened to find, contains seventeen gold coins, which she’s had valued:  the amount is just enough to repay Rahim’s debt entirely.  When the couple takes the coins back to the dealer who valued them, they’re dismayed to learn that gold prices fluctuate and have fallen significantly in a short space of time.

    It’s at this point that Rahim has second thoughts as to what to do with Farkhondeh’s lucky find – and that the ambiguous nature of his actions (and those of others) starts to kick in.  Before returning to jail, he posts flyers about the handbag that give his contact details (in fact, the prison phone number).  A woman who responds to the flyer is plausibly the handbag’s owner; she tearfully, gratefully reclaims it from Rahim’s sister (with whom he’s left the bag and its treasure).  The prison governor and a colleague, although they tick Rahim off for giving out the jail’s number, see in his seemingly principled actions the opportunity for some positive publicity for the prison, which is badly needed.  They make contact with journalists.  Rahim, unnerved, confesses that it was his girlfriend, not he, who actually found the bag.  The prison authorities advise him to keep quiet about this:  after all, he still rose above the temptation to cash in the gold coins.  A respected charity foundation passes round a collection plate for Rahim at one of its public meetings, where he’s invited to speak.  The charity even looks to arrange employment for him, to help him pay his debts.  He becomes a hero of broadcast and social media; then, even more suddenly, he isn’t.

    An HR man who interviews Rahim for his prospective job is immediately sceptical.  He’s heartless (and presumably meant to represent a pernicious national bureaucracy) but he’s also a dogged investigator, insisting that Rahim produce the owner of the handbag to substantiate his story.  The woman in question can’t be tracked down so Farkhondeh impersonates her.  The dyspeptic Braham, abetted by his embittered daughter, still won’t budge an inch until he’s fully reimbursed.  In exasperation, Rahim goes to the art shop to plead with Braham – to badly counterproductive effect.  Their exchange ends in blows, from Rahim, which Nazanin, who helps her father in the shop, records on her phone and posts online.  The charity gets cold feet and gives the funds raised for Rahim to a more deserving case – a woman who’ll use the money to pay for her husband’s death sentence to be commuted.  The desperate Rahim makes claims on social media that foregoing the charity’s help was another act of altruism on his part.

    The drama is both propelled and enriched by the tangled web of mixed motives, half-truths and lies that Farhadi constructs but this is also thought-provoking in a way he may not have intended:  you find yourself wondering if the intricate plotting hasn’t one or two holes.  Reviewing A Hero from this year’s Cannes Film Festival (where it won the Grand Prix), Peter Bradshaw in the Guardian objected that ‘Nobody asks Rahim the obvious question:  if he wanted to be a good citizen, why did he not simply hand the found bag in at a police station?’  The obvious response is that candidates for asking that question aren’t sufficiently disinterested to do so – neither the prison authorities nor the media want to spike a story they can profitably use.  But there is an apparent inconsistency in Rahim’s inviting public attention and, once the prison powers-that-be insist on taking things further, his nervous admission that he didn’t find the bag.  I’m not sure this is a plot flaw, though:  it’s an inconsistency only if you assume that Rahim’s attempt to attract publicity is well considered.  One of A Hero’s virtues is that queries like this don’t detract from the film.  They made this viewer feel, rather, that it will reward a second viewing.

    As in A Separation (2011), which sealed his international reputation, Farhadi expects the audience to concentrate.  You need to retain a firm idea of what has happened and been said in the earlier stages in order to compare this with later accounts given and claims made.   There’s a whiff of the school room and the exam hall about this approach – requiring that you pay attention, devising scenarios which invite an audience to analyse and form judgments on the morality of characters’ actions.  At least, there would be such a whiff if those characters were not as humanly realised, absorbing and well acted as they are.  Amir Jadidi makes Rahim an intriguing, eventually unsettling blend of affable and obstinate.  He’s a man more sinned against than sinning but you get an increasing sense that the ‘hero’ has a history of making bad decisions (he’s a career ‘bullshitter’, according to Braham).  You still root for Rahim, though.  Amir Jadidi’s dazzling smile gets plenty of use but disappears just as often.  Each disappearance causes a palpable change of mood in the scene taking place.

    Minor characters also register – like the cab driver who empathises with Rahim’s predicament (he also has served time for unpaid debts) and comes up with the unwise suggestion that Farkhondeh pretend to be the handbag owner.  For western viewers, the Iranian customs and systems described are often truly outlandish – not least a penal system in which jail terms are open-ended, and one prisoner is allowed regular mini-paroles while the wife of another pays for his reprieve from capital punishment.  In contrast, the economic changes that triggered Rahim’s financial predicament seem culturally specific yet familiar – so, too, the new tyranny of social media that governs life in a way it didn’t in A Separation or The Salesman (2016).

    According to the cast and crew details on IMDb[2], Farhadi worked with two cinematographers on the film, Ali Ghazi and Arash Ramezani.  Although the result is seamless, the predominantly restrained visuals mean that the opening, culminating in that ascent to the construction site, is memorably distinctive:  the contrast between the spring in Rahim’s step at the beginning and his final immobility is powerfully expressive.  To reveal that he ends up in the place where he started gives away everything and nothing because the film has such texture.  The fifth new fictional film I saw at this year’s London Film Festival, this one was in a different class from the preceding four[3] – in terms of story construction, thematic depth and dramatic heft.  (There isn’t any music until the closing credits:  there doesn’t need to be.)  I’m looking forward to seeing A Hero again and trying to do it fuller justice.

    13 October 2021

    [1]  The only, partial exception was his first feature, About Elly (2009), where Azad Jafarian had the ‘story’ credit.

    [2]  These are limited at present – hence the patchy efforts in this note to name supporting characters and the actors playing them.

    [3]  Afternote:  Namely Bergman Island, Last Night in Soho, Passing and The Power of the Dog.  Different class also from the four dramas I saw subsequently at the Festival, though The Lost Daughter has much to recommend it.  The other three were Azor, Benediction and Spencer.

  • The Power of the Dog

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Jane Campion (2021)

    The two films have precious little else in common but watching The Power of the Dog at the London Film Festival brought back the experience of seeing La La Land at the same event five years ago – the sinking feeling that comes with the realisation you’ll soon be seeing plenty more of a film you dislike as awards season rolls around … Jane Campion isn’t a prolific director:  this revisionist western is her eighth cinema feature in thirty-two years and her first since Bright Star (2009).  (In the meantime, she has made the two Top of the Lake TV mini-series.)  The long wait for a new Campion is one reason why The Power of the Dog, which has already won its director the Venice Silver Lion, is being overrated.  Solemnity and a snail’s-pace narrative are other factors.  A film that takes the time this one takes to display its scrupulously composed visuals and insistent performances must be a masterwork, right?

    Campion’s screenplay is an adaptation of a 1967 novel of the same name, by Thomas Savage.  In 1920s Montana, the Burbank brothers, Phil (Benedict Cumberbatch) and George (Jesse Plemons), are the latest generation of an established ranching family.  On a cattle drive, they and their ranch hands stay overnight at a small-town inn, run by the widowed Rose Gordon (Kirsten Dunst) with the help of her teenage son, gawky, transparently sensitive Peter (Kodi Smit-McPhee).  He waits on tables and crafts the paper flower decorations that adorn them.  During the evening meal, Phil makes fun of Peter’s effeminate handiwork and manner, to the amusement of the other cowboys – except for his quiet, incongruously well-dressed brother.  When George goes to the kitchen to settle up, he finds Rose weeping, from overwork and distress at Phil’s treatment of her son.  Before they’ve left the inn, George is lending a hand with waiting duties – the prelude to his courtship of Rose.  It’s not long before, to Phil’s astonished fury, his brother brings her back to the ranch as his wife.

    The opening voiceover to The Power of the Dog announces that:

    ‘When my father passed I wanted nothing more than my mother’s happiness.  For what kind of man would I be if I did not help my mother?  If I did not save her?’

    Within the next fifteen minutes, it’s become clear this young male voice belongs to Peter Gordon (shown visiting the hillside grave of his late father) and that Phil Burbank will be his chief adversary.  We spend the remainder of the film – the best part of two hours – waiting for Peter to realise his saviour responsibilities, with Phil on the receiving end.  There are regular hints of how this will come about.  At the very start, as the cattle drive sets off, Phil spots a dead cow and warns George to ‘keep our cattle away … anthrax – don’t touch!’  Peter in due course switches from paper floristry to medical studies, with an evident specialty in dissecting animals.  In the film’s finale, the symptoms of Phil’s sudden, fatal illness suggest that he died of anthrax.  George and Rose attend his funeral, where Peter is conspicuous by his absence.  From his bedroom window, in The Power of the Dog‘s closing shot, he eerily watches his black-clad mother and her husband returning to the ranch.

    The story isn’t as simple as that makes it sound though it is, the way Jane Campion tells it, deeply obvious.  Phil, from the start, is scornful of ‘Fatso’ George; after the surprise marriage, he treats his new sister-in-law with a colder contempt – except when he wants to tantalise her.  George buys Rose a piano; as she stutters through the Radetzky March, Phil, on the floor above, strums the Strauss music on his banjo more dexterously, looking down on Rose in more ways than one.  She is soon dissatisfied with her dull, well-meaning husband, and seems drawn, in spite of herself, to malignant, smelly Phil. (He rarely changes his clothes or takes a bath, other than by occasionally coating himself in mud and swimming naked in a river.)  You know Rose won’t get anywhere with him, though – not because Phil is the bastard he seems to be but because, hardly less conspicuously, this macho homophobe is a repressed, self-hating homosexual.

    The revelation of his true nature is largely a matter of joining the dots.  It’s very early on when Phil first invokes the memory of ‘Bronco Henry’, who worked for their parents, raising a toast to ‘us, brothers, Romulus and Remus, and the wolf who raised us’.  You could already put money on the brothers’ late, beloved mentor being, to Phil, more than just the ‘greatest rider I ever saw’ (Bronco’s saddle is his most treasured possession).  You can bet, too, that uncouth Phil’s surprising classical reference will be meaningful:  sure enough, he was ‘Phi Beta Kappa at Yale’, where he read classics.  The hostility between him and Peter is replaced by a wary rapport once the young man, hanging around the river where Phil is bathing, discovers in a nearby shack his cache of adult magazines.  Phil eventually tells Peter that Bronco once ‘saved my life… we were way off up in the hills, shooting out and the weather turned mean.  Bronco kept me alive by lying body against body in a bed roll.  Fell off to sleep that way’.  By this stage, I almost expected Peter to reply, ‘Like in Brokeback Mountain?’  (In fact, he comes up with a one-word question – ‘Naked?’  Phil answers in the affirmative.)

    You instantly suspect there’s more to Phil than meets the eye and ear also because Benedict Cumberbatch is playing him.  For as long as Phil is simply vicious and callous, Cumberbatch comes across as an actor acting nasty.  There’s a logic to that, of course:  vulnerable beneath the toxic masculinity, the character, too, is putting on an act.  Yet the act’s unnaturalness makes it hard to believe that Phil is popular with, as well as respected by, the men that he and George employ.  Cumberbatch shows considerable nerve and talent – he has devised a fine, tense gait – but Jane Campion does him no favours.  She tends to keep the camera on all her actors for too long, regardless of whether new things emerge from them during that time.  In the case of the improbably tall, skinny Kodi Smit-McPhee, the camera is merely staring at a curiosity, whose expression doesn’t change much.  In Cumberbatch’s case, it’s observing a gifted performer at work – and evidently so.  Campion’s penchant for dwelling on faces may explain her partiality for the magnetic but emotionally slow-moving Elisabeth Moss, who starred in both Top of the Lake series and was the original choice to play Rose.  Benedict Cumberbatch is naturally equipped to change tone and mood more nimbly than Moss.  As a result, his performance in The Power of the Dog is compelling but artificial.

    Although disadvantaged in a similar way to Cumberbatch, Moss’s replacement Kirsten Dunst does somewhat animate, through the force of youthful glamour, the story’s Freudian aspect (book-ended in the implication of Peter’s opening voiceover and a concluding attribution of the film’s title, a biblical verse -‘Deliver my soul from the sword; my darling from the power of the dog’ – from Psalm 22).  It’s a cliché that Rose, miserable on the ranch, turns to drink but when, in her cups and in her slip, she almost throws herself at Peter, it can hardly assuage Oedipal feelings.  Kodi Smit-McPhee, however, rather confuses the issue – as well as the import of the shifting relationship between him and Phil – by making Peter, more than anything else, asexual.  The Oedipal aspect is also muffled by the increasingly minor importance in the narrative of the man who has become Rose’s new husband.  That Peter chooses to study to be a doctor – as his biological father was – is ambiguous.

    These uncertainties, whether or not intentional, are no bad thing in such an over-controlled piece of cinema.  The problem with The Power of the Dog isn’t with its themes, which are interesting, but with Jane Campion’s approach to them.  Although I’ve made elements in the plot sound silly, their silliness isn’t an intrinsic quality – it’s the effect of ponderous, relentlessly portentous storytelling.  The screening I attended was subtitled for the hard of hearing.  Whenever Jonny Greenwood’s music played, the subtitles supplied an explanatory adjective, nearly always ‘uneasy’.  Too right.  It’s no surprise the cast members who fare best are in smaller roles.  It’s true Jesse Plemons is a consistently strong actor but he’s probably helped by the diminishing attention given to George.  Two days after seeing Last Night in Soho, I again enjoyed watching Thomasin McKenzie, this time in the small role of Lola, a maid at the ranch house.  McKenzie is a fresh, amusing and enlivening presence (especially in a sequence where Lola is unexpectedly asked to umpire an impromptu game of tennis between Peter and his mother).

    The real stars of the film, though, are Montana’s mountains – albeit they’re actually in Campion’s native New Zealand, where shooting took place.  It’s a mark of the physical scale of the landscape the characters inhabit that mountains are often referred to as hills – as when Phil tells Peter that most people looking at them ‘just see a hill’.  Bronco Henry, needless to say, was different.  Phil asks, ‘What do you suppose he saw?’ and is startled by Peter’s immediate reply – ‘a barking dog’.  I couldn’t see the beast but the mountains, as photographed and lit by Ari Wegner, do provoke anthropomorphising thoughts:  they look to have secrets they mean to keep.

    I preferred the second Top of the Lake (subtitled China Girl) to its predecessor, thanks largely to the vivifying contribution of Nicole Kidman (who also did well in Campion’s The Portrait of a Lady (1996)).  Yet it was the first Top of the Lake that won plaudits and prizes.  Of the four Campion films I’ve now seen – the four I haven’t are Sweetie (1989), An Angel at My Table (1990), Holy Smoke (1999) and In the Cut (2003) – Bright Star is not only the best but also, it seems, the least typical.  Campion’s exploration of the relationship of Fanny Brawne and John Keats inventively re-energised period drama; the two hours of screen time passed rapidly; the actors were nuanced and emotionally fluid.  None of those things can be said of this new work.  The Power of the Dog showcases the worst of Jane Campion – a persisting tendency to overstate her themes and luxuriate in the images she has created – to probably Oscar-winning effect.

    12 October 2021

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