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.