THE PRESIDENT C+
Georgia France Great Britain
Germany (119 mi) 2014 d: Mohsen Makhmalbaf
A film that was inexplicably named the Gold Hugo 1st prize
winner of the 2014 Chicago International Film Festival, "The
President" wins top prize at Chicago film festival ..., despite being
one of the weakest efforts over the director’s career, writing a satiric
caricature of a political dictator, becoming overly obvious, bordering upon
hysterical near the end, lacking the subtlety and poetry of his earlier films. Another Iranian filmmaker in exile, now
living in London, having once spent five years in jail as a youth under the
Shah, subsequently driven out of the country by the Islamic Republic, Makhmalbaf,
along with Kiarostami, are major figures in Iranian cinema, though both left
Iran in 2005 shortly after the election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, whose regime soon began
arresting artists, intellectuals, political dissidents, and anyone expressing
outspoken views in order to preserve an authoritarian rule. Unfortunately, the history of Iran is fraught
with dictatorship, a subject this director knows all too intimately, having
survived years of torture that permanently damaged one of his legs, while the
ensuing revolutionary government was just as despotic. Ostensibly based upon the uprisings of Arab
Spring, where the idea of throwing out old dictatorial regimes based upon
populist uprisings had an element of hope, with stirrings of democracy in the
air, but the nationalist fervor often led to even more harsh repressions, with
orthodox religions filling the void of political leadership, where ultimately
one tyranny was replaced by another. Written
by the director and his wife, Marziyeh Meshkiny, the film unravels like an
extended bedtime story for children, though by the end there is explicit adult
material, as much of it is seen through the innocent eyes of an inquiring young
5-year old (Dachi Orvelashvili), whose grandfather (Mikheil Gomiashvili),
always referred to as “Your Majesty,” happens to be the President, who is a Gaddafi-like
dictator for life. These two
interestingly wear the exact same military uniform, suggesting they are mirror
images of one another. Used to having
everything that he wants, the child is just as spoiled as the President, both
displaying ferocious temper tantrums when things don’t go their way, as the
President can be seen annoyingly ordering death sentences for captured
militants with the ease of swatting a fly, including a young 16-year old,
despite an outcry from international groups.
Life inside the palatial residence is one of neverending
comfort and luxury, where every whim is instantly catered to, where the royal
family is completely shielded from the outside world. Nonetheless, they are used to wielding
complete power, as evidenced by a game the President has with his grandson
sitting in his lap, making a phone call and all the lights of the city go out,
making another call and the lights come back on. But when the child wants to play, the lights
don’t come back on, plunging the city into permanent darkness, a sure sign that
something is not right. Whisking his
family to the airport in a Presidential limousine, they bypass rioters in the
streets in order to be greeted by a military brass band playing at their
behest. At the last minute, his grandson
decides to stay with the President, assuring his family they will both be safe,
that the city would be rid of these rebels by nightfall. Once the jet takes off and his wife and
family fly off to safety, however, things play out in a decidedly different
fashion, as the streets are lined with protesters, where the limousine gets
locked inside a wall of human bodies pounding their fists against the windows,
as they have stormed the Presidential palace, and what’s left of the city has
been reduced to riots and utter mayhem.
Amidst this firestorm of revolt, they flee. As angry mobs stone their car and kill the
driver, the President is forced to steal a motorcycle at gunpoint, eventually
escaping into a row of dilapidated housing projects where he forces a petrified
barber to shave his head and exchange clothes, as they assume a new identity
after hearing the description on the radio of a fleeing President accompanied
by a young boy, where a price has been put on his head, with calls for his
immediate death. From the boy’s point of
view, this is all a bit unnerving, so the President turns it into a game, much
like Roberto Benigni turning the Holocaust death camps into a game for a young
child in LIFE IS BEAUTIFUL (1997). As
they blend into a sea of plagued humanity making their way for the border, they
hear the stories of those who have been impoverished, tortured, and brutalized
by the Presidential regime, where they are forced to witness firsthand the human
damage suffered under his rule, where the anger and hatred directed towards the
President is nothing less than ferocious, where he’s forced to witness each of
these horrifying claims as silently as a ghost, shedding his skin in the
process, where he, like everyone else in the country, has to reinvent
themselves with a new sense of identity.
While this takes place in a nameless country, it’s actually
shot in Georgia, which has its own history of strife and civil war since
breaking away from the Soviet Union, where starting anew is never easy. While there are a combination of things in
play here, this is decidedly new territory for Makhmalbaf, as we don’t normally
associate him with battle scenes, gun shots, bloodshed, and aerial helicopter
shots that are more common in action thrillers, yet at the same time the
President undergoes an internal psychological transformation akin to
Shakespeare’s King Lear, as all
around he sees the enveloping madness that can be attributed to his actions
that set it all in motion. Still the
persistent questioning from the young boy, perplexed at how they have suddenly
assumed the identity of the President’s enemies, subject to venomous talk about
his grandfather as a criminal and a murderer who should be shot on sight,
making it all seem patently absurd in his eyes, as there’s no other way to
understand what he hears and sees. At
every turn the President is nearly exposed by the persistent questioning of
this young child, asking what is a political prisoner, what is torture, and why
would anyone want to kill us, with occasional lapses of calling him “Your
Majesty.” Even worse, we move from one
extreme to the other, from innocence to depravity, as they are traveling with
prisoners who have been brutally tortured for years, where now they can barely
walk, yet they tell stories of friends that were burned alive, or another that
was hanged in front of his own mother.
The tone veers into wretched pathos, eliciting a kind of emotional
manipulation that has simply not been in this director’s vocabulary, but it’s
extremely prevalent here, unfortunately growing more and more pathetic. It’s the biggest drawback of the film, as it
undermines the entire credibility of the film, growing ridiculously hysterical
by the end. The beauty of this
director’s art has been his meticulously crafted subtlety, where he’s never
resorted to over-explaining or a Spielberg style of force-feeding the audience,
but this one tugs at the heartstrings with sentimentality, where he even exhibits a delusory dance
for democracy. Yet it’s unmistakable
here as Makhmalbaf adds at least half a dozen endings, each with a differing
outcome, while attempting a philosophical inquiry into the absence of simple
humanity under the cruel conditions of Middle Eastern political rule. It resembles a theater piece more than a
film, all subject to human speculation, each segment quizzically asking ourselves
what we aspire to be just at the exact moment in time when lynch mob justice is
delivered. Put differently, once a lynch
mob has formed, an association linked to the mentality of these political uprisings,
there’s little chance their actions will have anything to do with justice.
No comments:
Post a Comment