31 January 2011
Review
ROTTERDAM: Filmmakers are fond of tales of adolescence. The coming-of-age predicaments of young adults afford plenty of dramatic and melodramatic fodder for picturesque representations of tender naïfs, exploring themselves and the magical (or abrasive) world they’re meant to navigate.
For writers and directors in the Middle East, these tales of adventure and woe can be made more photogenic by the political and social eccentricities of a region where social mores tend to be conservative, costumes colorful and political regimes repressive.
Occasionally, however, you can find a film that seeks to tune in to a different wavelength.
“Rainy Seasons” is the lone film from the Middle East in International Film Festival Rotterdam’s Tiger Competition this year. Directed by Majid Barzegar from a script he co-wrote with Hamed Rajabi, the story is set in contemporary Tehran, and, by implication, in the youth culture of the city.
The film takes up the story of a young man experiencing the ambivalent freedom accompanying his parents’ divorce. The reasons for the break-up aren’t discussed but the effect of it is that both parents have left the family apartment, leaving 16-year-old Sina the master of his bourgeois domain.
Sina can come and go as he pleases. He’s free to vegetate in front of his parent’s huge flat-screen TV for as long as he wants and his iPod is fully loaded with head-banger tunes that seem to provoke no enthusiasm in him whatsoever. He doesn’t even have to worry about buying groceries yet he doesn’t seem happy about this liberation.
The boy’s relationship with his family is nicely sketched in the opening moments of the film. Sina is awoken in the morning by the sound of his mother, who has dropped by to stock the cupboards with food on her way to work.
As she shakes her head at the mess she finds in the kitchen and tells Sina to take out the garbage on his way to school, mom reminds him that in two weeks they have a court date, when he must say whether he wants to live with her or the father.
Sina demands that she give him some money. She does and he demands more. She refuses and leaves for work but not before pouring him a glass of milk and putting a breakfast pastry in front of him.
When she leaves, Sinan’s professional-looking father immediately shows up with more groceries. He winks that he’s been sitting outside in the car for half an hour waiting for Sina’s mother to leave.
Pop’s effort to invoke a bit of male bonding goes nowhere, and the conversation basically follows the same trajectory as the one the young man had with his mother a few minutes before – the looming court date and the son’s demands for money.
The old man drinks his son’s glass of milk – evidently he’s still a bit of an adolescent himself – tells his son to put the groceries he’s brought into the fridge and leaves.
On his way to school, Sina throws a bag of garbage into the garbage shoot. Then he throws his father’s groceries down the shoot as well.
Sina tries to go to school but, when he’s berated by the school security guard about how late he is, he turns on his heel and wanders off. He meets his pal Ali and the two walk into a conversation between some older kids.
Among them is young woman named Nahid, a student from out of town who needs a place to stay for a few days. Several of the young men in the group offer to take her in, including Sina. She assesses him, clearly the least threatening of the men, and decides to take him up on his offer.
Though circumstances bring Sina and Nahid together under the same roof, there’s no magical chemistry between them. Both are taciturn young people, whose shyness conceals troubling personal problems.
In Sina’s case, the most pressing problem isn’t his parents’ divorce but Massoud, a thug on a motorbike who, for reasons he eventually shares with Nahid, has been extorting pocket money from Sina and his friend Ali.
Nahid eventually tells Sina that she has finished a university degree in statistics and that her family expects her to return to her village, but that she wants to remain in Tehran and find a job.
Naturally, the different strains of Sina’s young life become unfortunately (if not yet tragically) crossed.
Iran’s “baby boom” generation (a segment of it anyway) has been the subject of much political and cultural journalism over the last decade. This generation of 20- and 30-something adults is said to account for somewhere between 60 and 70 percent of the country’s population.
This generation is too young to have any recollection of the Pahlavi regime that the Iranian revolution overthrew in 1979. Consequently, as generational analysis would have it, Iranian youth has an irreverent attitude toward the Islamic Republic’s regime.
For some in the West who dislike the regime in Tehran, this reading of the demographics of Iranian generational discontent – and the hope that it would have an impact upon Iran akin to that of ‘60s-era baby boomers upon America – bore fruit with the Green Revolution demonstrations that erupted on the streets of Tehran in the wake of the 2009 presidential election.
Echoes of this thinking can be heard in David Dusa’s “Fleurs du mal,” a Paris-set love story for globalized youth that works with the Green Revolution – and is also screening at IFFR. Unlike Dusa’s film, Barzegar doesn’t cast Iranian youth as Green revolutionaries. In fact he eschews any reference to this generation as a nascent (or active) political force.
“Rainy Seasons” is a production of Tehran’s Documentary and Experimental Film Center, which inhabits an ambiguous space – being a state-sponsored organization dedicated to cultivating independent film. DEFC has generated a number of very interesting films over the years, many of them documentaries. Some of these exude a nuanced critical sensibility unique to works that have been made inside Iran with an Iranian audience, and other Iranian exigencies, in mind.
There is much in this film’s depiction of life in contemporary Tehran that will be as surprising to a Western audience as it would be familiar to Iranians.
The country’s clerical elite is completely absent from the frame, as are the regime’s paramilitary morality police – to say nothing of the state’s nuclear ambitions.
Yet the story is daringly true to Iran’s social and cultural realities – the prevalence of street-level drug consumption in close proximity to the youngsters’ pop culture pastimes, for instance, the problem of youth homelessness and the profane dangers to which young adults are subject outside the protection of the family, even in an Islamic Republic.
Though messieurs Barzegar and Rajabi do not, perhaps could not, detail the more explicitly partisan aspects of the Iranian state, the plot does glimmer with trace elements of the macho culture that provides the underpinnings of popular politics – Iranian or otherwise – whether the immaturity of Sina’s dad, Massoud’s thuggish-ness or the childlike ineffectualness of Sina himself.
In this “Rainy Seasons” is reminiscent of another Iranian film, Alireza Davoodnejad’s “Salve” (2010), which attracted some critical attention when it premiered in Dubai in December. Though it is set among a more complex social environment – in which the child of a well-off part of a family victimizes a beautiful young woman who happens to be his cousin, albeit from a poor part of the family – the social conscience echoes that of Barzegar’s film.
So “Rainy Seasons” is an interesting anthropological document. It is also a feature film, of course, and at times the understated film language employed by Barzegar and Amin Jafari, his director or photography, serves the film quite well.
Like “Salve,” “Rainy Seasons” makes ample use of the hand-held camera, which tends to ignore the eccentricities of urban morphology in favor of the characters, which gives the film human intimacy.
Little is explicitly told in this story, not least because the characters’ backstories are revealed by the taciturn Sina and Nahid. This show-don’t-tell aesthetic serves the film well.
On the other hand foreign audiences (accustomed to art house films that, if impatient with erotica, have no problem with naked flesh as such) may be left perplexed about the precise nature of Nahid’s relationship with Sina – and Massoud, for that matter.
The want of physical intimacy isn’t a problem in itself, but it is clear that Nahid does make heroically altruistic gestures whose vagueness makes them all the more inexplicable.
The final image of Sina, best not detailed here, underlines that fact that, regardless of where he happens to be located in geopolitical and class terms, the boy at the center of this film is a child, alone in the world.
IFFR continues until Feb 6.
Copyright The Daily Star 2011.
