Manuscripts Don't Burn (Dast-neveshtehaa nemisoosand)

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. 

Rosewater

Maziar Bahari (left) whose story inspired Rosewater and director Jon Stewart

 

ROSEWATER             C-              
USA  (103 mi)  2014  d:  Jon Stewart               Official Facebook

For as comically inventive as Jon Stewart is on television, this is an abysmal failure, a film that’s actually hard not to walk out on before it’s halfway done as you already know the outcome, so it’s predictable as hell.  And therein lies the problem, the utter conventionality of the picture, never for a single second rising above preconceived notions and cliché’s, offering zero insight into Islamic culture or the history of Iran, but instead continually reinforcing American stereotypes.  This is as elementary as it gets and is an embarrassment to the intelligence of anyone that sees it.  Without knowing the director, one might even think this was a propaganda piece made by someone from FOX and/or MSNBC News, as it’s so ethically self-righteous in its black and white depictions, showing no moral ambiguity, no gray lines, where the only tone offered is seen through an all right or wrong lens.  Ostensibly the film is about the suspicions of heavy vote fraud in the 2009 Iranian Presidential elections, where the overall western view, based on sources on the ground, is that incumbent President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad stole the election, as Iran has retreated into a totalitarian, police state mentality where freedom of expression has been crushed, which accounts for why the two leading Iranian filmmakers, Abbas Kiarostami and Mohsen Makhmalbaf, continue to live and work outside of the repressive artistic restrictions in Iran.  This pattern of political repression is similar to what the Soviets, Cambodians, and Chinese did under communist regimes through the 70’s, arresting all the students, intelligentsia and professionals that had the capability and insight to understand a better way of life, which in a Kafkaesque sense was frowned upon, as totalitarian systems must systematically enforce control through fear tactics and repressive measures to ensure obedience, not allowing thoughts of democracy or freedom, which are perceived as failed western models.  When the Supreme Leader, a leadership position chosen after the overthrow of the Shah in 1979, remains a religious figure who is both head of state and the highest ranking political and religious authority, in accordance with their constitution, one might expect moral rigidity, as one might imagine Italy overseen by a Catholic Pope ruling over the military and all political matters.  It’s a significantly different concept than what America had in mind when they envisioned democracy.  This distinction is simply never addressed in the film, as if this was too complicated for the audience to fathom. 

Instead we have a fairly wretched example of America’s viewpoint on display throughout, which gets a bit ridiculous after awhile, especially when the cavalry comes to the rescue.  The film is based on the 2011 memoirs of Iranian journalist Maziar Bahari entitled Then They Came for Me:  A Family’s Story of Love, Captivity and Survival, where he was sent into Iran as a Newsweek magazine correspondent for a week to cover the elections.  At least initially, in the run-up to the election, the film expresses the euphoria and elation of Arab Spring (that historically “followed” this event), where demonstrators take to the streets in hopes for a better future.  Bahari is played by Mexican actor Gael García Bernal, seen leaving his pregnant wife in America, arriving for interviews with spokespersons on both sides of the election, where the derisive Ahmadinejad spokesperson is seen as a closeted Stalinist, while the young students placing their hopes on reformist candidate Mir-Hossein Mousavi are young and enthusiastic, proudly demonstrating no fear in front of the camera, where they have obviously subverted the current religious theocracy in their own ways, taking Bahari to a rooftop filled with satellite dishes to western media outlets.  In this manner, they have conceived an idea of what their country might aspire to, but their hopes quickly collapse when the election results show Ahmadinejad with nearly two-thirds of the vote, making him the runaway victor.  Stunned Iranians take to the streets in massive demonstrations claiming the results are fraudulent, but the Supreme Leader calls the voting results valid, labeling the victory a “divine assessment,” while claiming the street protests illegal, leading to extreme measures used to stop the protestors, including several reported deaths and mass arrests, including Bahari, who spends the next 118 days in captivity.  Visited each day by an interrogator, Kim Bodnia, known as Rosewater (for the smell of his scented cologne), who forces him to wear a blindfold while he’s physically and psychologically tortured on a daily basis, where the tone of the film quickly grows predictable, using conventional torture porn methods so popular in Hollywood today, always exaggerating the sadistic element, as if that’s suitable family entertainment these days.  In addition, all the student dissidents filmed by Bahari are arrested as well, as the government attempts to round up and eliminate their opposition. 

While incarcerated, Bahari envisions his dead father, Haluk Bilginer, easily the best thing in the film from Palme d’Or winner Winter Sleep (Kis uykusu), who was arrested and tortured under the Shah in the 50’s for being a communist, who instructs his son to tell them nothing, to hold fast, to give them no satisfaction whatsoever, while also recalling flashbacks of visiting his older sister Maryam (Golshifteh Farahani) in jail, as she was imprisoned under the 1980’s post-revolutionary regime of Ayatollah Khomeini, again for being a communist, where we begin to see how others in his family suffered for his future, where he’s now well-educated and politically sophisticated, living a comfortable life capable of enjoying the freedoms that they never had.  Half the film dwells on the dreariness of his solitary confinement, which is predictably bleak, as they attempt to break his will, effectively cutting off all ties with the outside world, isolating him into a psychological state of humiliation and mental confusion where he loses all hope, where his father encourages him, “Believe in something.  It’s your only hope.”  Initially Bahari finds it absurd, feeling he has nothing to hide, nothing to confess, though they insist he is a western imperialist spy, going through his computer and personal belongings, finding every item an example of hedonism and western ideology.  The loneliness of the ordeal takes its toll, however, where his father acknowledges in a humorous aside, “I forgot how fucking boring this place is.”  Being a relatively good-natured guy, Bahari finds his only plan is to cooperate and give them what they want, memorizing a rehearsed speech where he apologizes and admits to his crimes, which is of course televised across the nation.  But when this doesn’t produce the desired effect, as there is instead worldwide outrage and condemnation at his arrest, they throw him back into solitary, which only emboldens him, as he finally realizes he is not alone.  Of course, this is purely amateur interrogation techniques to reconnect him to the outside world, to throw him a lifeline.  The sight of Hillary Clinton on CNN News expressing her shock and personal condemnation for his arrest is followed by a B-movie montage of all the international media outlets focusing their attention on this single event, where all that’s missing are the flag waving sounds of “Let freedom ring” from “My Country, ‘Tis of Thee,” Kelly Clarkson Sings 'My Country, 'Tis of Thee' at ... - YouTube (3:23).  What follows, of course, is an unlikely scenario for all the others who continue to be held in detention who aren’t so well known, who continue to have to endure this brutalizing sort of Stalinist ordeal.  Unfortunately, it all feels like painting by the numbers, where it’s a film of stereotypes and cliché’s that becomes heavyhanded in its own dogmatic intent.