The Seed of the Sacred Fig it is the last film shot in Iran by Mohammad Rasoulof before his adventurous escape abroad following yet another sentence received by the Revolutionary Tribunal. And this tense political drama deals with the infamous courts and protests against the central power of Tehran, which causes the contradictions and conflicts of society to explode within the home.
The private is political
Iman has been promoted to investigating judge at the Revolutionary Court in Tehran when a popular protest movement begins to shake the country. The daughters support the movement, while the wife tries to please both parties. [sinossi]
Already in the very first sequence of The Seed of the Sacred Fig Iman, the father of the family who received a promotion and is now an investigating judge at the revolutionary court in Tehran, shows his wife in bed the gun that was given to him to “defend himself”. Anyone who deals even occasionally with cinema knows well that the maxim is in force according to which if a gun is shown in a film sooner or later it will have to fire, and so here is the incipit of the eighth fiction feature film directed by Mohammad Rasoulof it immediately warns viewers about the directions that, in one way or another, this tense story in which the private becomes political and collective will take. Iman is a good man, he has many moral hesitations regarding his new role – which in fact also “forces” him to sign and register execution sentences -, but he obviously doesn’t feel like giving up a position of greater prestige than after all, and it is the strongest reason given by the wife (who is called Najmeh), it could allow the family to finally purchase a larger apartment that allows their two daughters to each sleep in a single room instead of sharing the space with a bed bridged as they do now. On the other hand, the two girls are growing up: Sana is sixteen and goes to high school, and Rezvan is enrolled at university. The news of the possibility of living in a bigger house is also the only reason for joy for the young girls, given that due to their father’s new job – who leaves the house in the morning to return only late at night, and in the first half of the film almost disappears from the eyes of the family – Najmeh asks them to avoid hanging out with friends, not to post anything on social networks, basically to live in a sort of confinement.
Also because the world outside is exploding, the twenty-two-year-old Mahsa Amini was killed (“she had a heart attack, she was ill”, says her mother in front of the television, accepting the information received through the appliance without batting an eyelid) and the youth of the capital is in revolt, especially at university but also in high schools, as evidenced by the fact that Najmeh has to rush to get Sana back to prevent her from getting entangled in the clashes. However, she cannot prevent Rezvan from bringing home her only friend and classmate, who was seriously injured in one eye by the police who intervened to clear the faculty of protesters. How to behave? After quickly treating her, the woman decides to take her to her dormitory, in any case, but the young woman disappears from that moment, and the two girls will realize that asking her father for help is not necessarily the most functional idea. Although I choose a highly symbolic title (the reference is to the way in which the seeds are spread from the Ficus religion tree, also known as the sacred fig) The Seed of the Sacred Fig does not move in the field of metaphor, but by resorting to great trust in the power of narration, it constructs a dull plot, tracing the lines of a path that moves under the skin and under the eye of the spectator, with the intention of making visible what for Iranian film production it is not possible to show. Even apparently small details, such as the fact that none of the women use the hijab when she is at home, actually pursue the same objective. Thus progressively, minute after minute, Rasoulof’s narration slides the film in the direction of a persistent paranoia that exhausts all the characters and concretely undermines the deepest roots of the family system. A system, the director underlines, which can never and for any reason think of itself as outside of what happens in the rest of the nation. “As much as you believe yourselves to be absolved, you are forever involved”, sang Fabrizio De André, taking up a famous 1968 motto, and the statement is also valid today in Tehran.
When the intimacy of the family is already broken, and therefore the system shows its flaws, Rasoulof chooses a path that is surprising in his own way, in fact almost constructing a film within a film, much closer to the concept of “genre” – a term always decline considering the expressive poetics of the filmmaker – than what would be reasonable to expect. And in a genre film, and we return to the opening of this review, a gun can almost never be missing. Very powerful j’accuse against connivance with the system, and the story of how what permeates a nation ends up progressively entering the minds of its citizens to the point of reconfiguring even their moral and ethical limits, The Seed of the Sacred Fig it is a dense, courageous work – Soheila Golestani and Misagh Zare, the only members of the main cast still living in Iran, risk serious repercussions in these days and months to come, even if the state of national confusion following the death of Ebrahim Raisi in the incident of May 19th it could come to the rescue in this sense – which wants to appear heretical in its own way compared to the practice of a good part of Iranian production. It will also be Mohammad Rasoulof’s last Iranian film for who knows how long, we can be sure: it will be interesting to discover how and to what extent the director will be permeated by another system, more democratic but equally fond of “control”.
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