A family grappling with a breakdown of domestic peace, just as Iran is experiencing the protests of the women’s revolution against the regime. No more metaphors, Rasoulof delivers a drama straight to the heart of the dictatorship. Mauro Donzelli’s review.
Now there are no more metaphors, let’s go straight against the Iranian regime, in support of a revolution born from women and within every family unit, with the hope that it will overwhelm the blind patriarchal dictatorship of the mullahs. It’s difficult to ignore what happened outside of his last set and the big screen a Mohammad Rasoulofamong the best Iranian authors, who after completing the editing of The Seed of the Sacred Fig he fled the country to present it in competition at the Cannes Film Festival, after a crazy sentence of eight years in prison, complete with lashes. Because for years, for a career, Rasoulof has been an artist on the edge of revenge against the regime for his films, like the previous one, Evil does not exista splendid story in four episodes about the death penalty in Iran, for which he was banned from leaving the country, and therefore from collecting the Golden Bear won in Berlin in 2020.
But first of all, The Seed of the Sacred Figit’s a excellent example of cinema between drama and paranoia, along that steep ridge where small, apparently marginal situations can easily lead a family to completely derail, bringing with it a patriarchal figure who evidently also represents the power system of the mullahs, paranoid and closed to the outside, far from every need and request of a young and vital people, increasingly fed up of accepting impositions that restrict the sphere of every freedom, private and even more public. If the primary organizational nucleus of every society is the family, Rasoulof tells of a father, a mother and wife and three young daughters, busy with high school and university.
An apparently happy news, to be celebrated, as the promotion of the patriarch to a role as investigator in the Iranian legal system, a precursor to the promotion to judge, coincides with the explosion of the revolution Woman, life, freedom. An opportunity to let his daughters participate in his work, previously kept secret, while the young people experience tension on the street and in their daily lives, less and less willing to follow the rigid house rules perfectly aligned with the regime. The disappearance of his father’s gun is enough to trigger an increasingly unreasonable paranoia, while his career change – with home and financial benefits included – seems at risk. His public role, in fact only as a paper-smuggler and executioner ready to put a signature on sentences already decided elsewhere, seems to break down in a small domestic revolt, up to a thriller-like showdown full of suspensein a suggestive and ancient context like the history of Persia.
Rasoulof makes extensive use of images taken from social media of the many demonstrations of immense courage by women across Iranready to accompany one awareness of the two girls, when the facts are no longer raised at dinner or on the regime’s television channels, but are before their eyes. They realize that those who are beaten and arrested are ordinary youth, and they are certainly not troublesome criminals. The Seed of the Sacred Fig continues as a spiral journey, generating a tension of a classy thriller, while one’s stomach tightens to see a courage in the rebellion in search of freedom which certainly does not remain confined to the screen, but generates an emotional short circuit with what happens in the drama of reality. It may not be Rasoulof’s best film, but it is certainly his most political and courageous.
