MANUSCRIPTS DON’T BURN (Dast-neveshtehaa nemisoosand) B
Iran (125 mi) 2013
d: Mohammad Rasoulof Cannes
site: Un Certain Regard
Considering the pervasive influence of Iranian films since
the late 70’s, reflecting a revitalized spirit of the post Shah Iranian Revolution, producing such prodigious
talents as Abbas Kiarostami, Mohsen Makhmalbaf, Majid Majidi, Dariush Mehrjui,
Rakhshan Bani-Etemad, Jafar Panahi, and Asghar Farhadi, it’s more than
disheartening to revisit the current state of Iranian cinema. Since the last disputed Iranian Presidential
election in 2009 where it is widely believed President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad
stole the election, the government has cracked down on artists and intellectuals
who alleged widespread vote fraud while retreating into a totalitarian, police
state mentality where freedom of expression has been crushed. Film director Jafar Panahi was arrested and
sentenced to six years in prison and a twenty-year ban on directing movies,
writing screenplays, or giving any form of interview with Iranian or foreign
media, while Mohammad Rasoulof was also arrested and condemned to six years in
prison, which was later reduced to one year, but his passport has been
confiscated. Both have daringly defied
the court’s decisions by continuing to make films surreptitiously and smuggling
them out of the country. Much like The
Act of Killing (2012), the director’s name is prominently featured in the
closing credits of this film while the cast and the rest of the crew remain
anonymous. While Rasoulof’s style has
been severely restricted by shooting on the sly, remaining out of sight, with only
occasional street shots, unable to produce the ravishing imagery of his earlier
films that reflect a visual poetry unto themselves, much of this film is shot
indoors. Like his previous film Goodbye
(Bé omid é didar) (2011), a woman’s descent into a psychological nightmare,
the repressive conditions expressed here have only grown darker as the noose
around the collective intelligentsia has been pulled even tighter. Written and directed by Rasoulof, what’s most
menacing about this film is the shuddering ease with which the government
reaches its arms into the lives of ordinary citizens, where the film becomes an
expression of the Banality of Evil
originally conceived by political theorist Hannah Arendt at the trials of Nazi
SS Officer Adolf Eichmann in 1961-62, where she observed a man displaying
neither guilt nor hatred, claiming he bore no responsibility because he was
simply “doing his job,” writing “He did his duty…he
not only obeyed orders, he also
obeyed the law.”
Winner of the FIPRESCI prize at the 2013 Cannes Film
Festival, the film resurrects a fictional recreation of actual events
surrounding the chain murders of Iran that occurred from 1988
to 1998, a series of murders and disappearances of as many as 100 reformist
writers, intellectuals, poets, political activists, and ordinary citizens who
were critical of the Islamic Republic, where nearly half were discovered
afterwards, their brutalized or mutilated bodies found in the outskirts of
Tehran, where under a cloud of suspicion and repeated government denials, most
of the murders remain unsolved to this day, yet secret government operatives
within the Iranian regime were deemed responsible. Perhaps the most vicious was the killing of Dariush
Forouhar, founder of Iran Nation’s Party, with eleven knife blows while
sitting on his chair in his study, and his wife Parvaneh with twenty-four
stabs. Their bodies were mutilated and
their home ransacked, where Dariush was decapitated while his wife’s breasts
were cut off. In another incident in the
summer of 1995 there was an unsuccessful attempt to kill a busload of
twenty-one writers en route to a poetry festival in Armenia, where the driver
waited until most were sleeping and then attempted to steer the bus off a
mountain cliff, jumping out at the last moment.
However one of the passengers alertly grabbed the steering wheel and
prevented a disaster. The driver tried
it again a second time, running away afterwards, where the bus miraculously hit
a boulder and stopped, preventing a 1000-foot fall. All of the passengers were interrogated and
warned never to discuss the events with anyone.
However the names of many of the assassinated victims were brought to
light by the investigative journalistic work of human rights activist Akbar Ganji,
who was jailed from 2001 to 2006, Iran's Top
Journalist Accuses Authorities of Torture, but wrote a book on the subject,
His Red-Robed Highness and the Grey
Eminence, naming Former President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, considered the
richest man in Iran according to a 2009 BBC
News profile, BBC News Profile: Akbar
Hashemi Rafsanjani, currently serving as the security advisor and possible
successor to the Supreme Leader Ali
Khamenei, as His Red-Robed Highness, while Hojjatoleslam Ali
Fallahian, former Minister of Intelligence, as the Grey Eminence, with both
men implicated in the chain murders, also noting that Gholam Hossein Mohseni
Ejeyi, now Minister of Intelligence under Ahmadinejad’s presidency, was also
allegedly involved in the assassinations.
In addition, Saeed Hajjarian, newspaper editor and former
Minister of Intelligence, believed to have played a key role in providing
damaging information about the chain killings, was shot in the head by an
unknown assailant on March 12, 2000, where he remains paralyzed for life.
While Rasoulof provides none of this background information,
it is front page headline news in Iran where it is presumed to be common
knowledge, not that this film will ever be screened in Iran, as it will be
viewed almost exclusively by Western audiences and therefore given a decidedly
politicized, pro-democracy slant for its daring heroism, yet it is the exact
kind of darkly disturbing story coming out of a repressive Iranian regime that
plays into the hands of stereotypical Western ideals of freedom of speech, much
like Jon Stewart’s recently misguided Rosewater
(2014), which becomes bogged down in its Americanized moral
self-righteousness. Rasoulof’s film is
not like that, coming from an Iranian perspective, where he is more concerned
with expressing his seething indignation at the cloaked invisibility of brutal
interrogation and torture techniques taking place right under the public’s
noses without anyone showing the least bit of concern. The story centers on Kasra, an Iranian poet
and novelist living in Tehran secretly writing his memoirs that the authorities
want to destroy, because in it he describes the incident when the Iranian
government tried to kill twenty-one writers by staging a bus accident, where
the authorities insist upon eliminating all traces of the incident. Told almost entirely through a flashback
mode, the central focus of the film, as it happens, is actually the two secret
government agents, Khosrow and Morteza (surprisingly played by Rasoulof himself,
the only credited actor, as the rest remain anonymous), who are sent to destroy
the manuscript and any surviving copies.
What’s perhaps most startling is how brutal they become in the presence
of Kasra, but in each other’s company, they’re best friends who typically
couldn’t be more ordinary, where their work, which includes torture before
killings, has become mundane and routine to them by now, where they barely give
it a thought, often seen casually smoking a cigarette, waiting for their dirty
actions to take effect, as they’re more wrapped up in the concerns of their own
lives, where Khosrow is constantly seen talking to his wife on his cellphone
while regularly checking for expected payments on his ATM, which is needed to
pay for his ailing child’s operation.
Subject to accusations that he doesn’t care, as he’s not around when his
own child needs him, his wife, a stand-in for the clueless nation, has no idea
what he actually does for a living. His
partner Morteza, on the other hand, has that methodical look of a paid
assassin, where killing a man doesn’t even phase him anymore. The title comes from Mikhail Bulgakov’s
Russian novel The Master and Margarita,
written between 1928 and 1940, but unpublished until 1967, a critique of Soviet
society and its literary establishment in which a manuscript that cannot be
burned plays a central role.
While the fascination with the subject can be overpowering,
the film itself has only mixed results, overaccentuating the banality of the
events, where everything is downplayed, while at times the film tends to be
overly wordy, completely detached, and emotionally underplayed, where there’s
an obvious disconnect with the audience, especially when we realize these are
only the foot soldiers, the neighborhood face of state repression, where far more
disturbing is their superior, a man dressed in designer suits who lets the
other guys get their hands dirty while he remains impeccably spotless
throughout, only arriving on the scene when a significant escalation occurs
that he masterminds. Much like a secret
government within, extremist elements secretly concealed inside a government
use religion and absolute power to intimidate and extinguish their opponents at
will, labeling them dissidents, branding their views as outdated, hostile, and
Western-influenced. From our initial
introduction to Khosrow, where he still has a bloody hand print on his neck,
later learning he was the man driving the bus for the writer’s conference, we
are well aware of their diabolical methods, where the film reeks of torture
porn imagery, people tied up and tortured, black hoods on their heads,
often murdered afterwards. Only here
this is not some sort of exploitive Hollywood stylization, but an unflinching
portrait of state-sponsored evil, where the underlying rage that lies beneath
this film is an angry and supremely pessimistic artist who knows this subject
all too well, having been jailed, interrogated, tortured, and censored, where
cinema becomes a voice for the voiceless, a dying man’s last breath, a plea to
the world to take this subject seriously, as Iran has become a totalitarian
dictatorship, a Stalinist police state intent on arresting and silencing anyone
who disagrees with the official views of the state. While the exterior scenes were shot in Iran,
all the interior scenes were shot in Hamburg, Germany, including visits to
several of Kasra’s friends who (supposedly for protection) have copies of the
manuscript. While they are all under constant
surveillance, living under the threat of intimidation and brutality, where each
of them is visited by the secret agents, only slowly does the film reveal how
easy it is for these otherwise polite and cordial men to kill someone. While this is a look at well-educated upper
and middle class writers and intellectuals, men who have had a hand in shaping
the nation’s identity, and possibly its future, it’s chilling to see what can
happen to them in the blink of an eye, all underplayed throughout, told through
a kind of mundane naturalism, always justifying their actions under Islamic
sharia law, but no courts or laws are involved in what the audience witnesses,
a brief look behind a veil of government secrecy, where villainy and murder
never looked so commonplace.
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