FILM (NYT) - Daughter of Iran, Shades of Her Father
MrMojoMan
Daughter of Iran, Shades of Her Father
By LESLIE CAMHI
During the summer of 1997, in a poor district in southern Tehran, the
authorities learned that a 65-year-old man, together with his blind wife,
had kept his 12-year-old twin daughters locked inside their house since
birth.
Social workers intervened; the girls, unwashed and barely intelligible, were
temporarily removed to a child welfare agency; their parents were taken in
for questioning.
Close by, in another neighborhood, an 18-year-old girl and her father, a
prominent filmmaker, watched these events unfolding on the evening news and
discussed it excitedly. Within days, the girl had borrowed her father's
movie camera and the film stock for his next feature (a precious commodity,
controlled by the government).
With her father's help, and a minimal crew, she began shooting, on location,
the real-life characters in this drama.
"The Apple," an astonishing directorial debut by Samira Makhmalbaf, written
and edited by her father, Mohsen Makhmalbaf, won praise when it screened at
the Cannes International Film Festival last spring, but it also provoked a
certain confusion. "One critic asked: 'What kind of country is Iran?' " Ms.
Makhmalbaf recalled, speaking animatedly in a mixture of English and Farsi.
" 'Is it a place where 12-year-old girls are incarcerated, or where
18-year-old girls make movies?' "
The film, which opened in New York on Friday after screening in the New York
Film Festival last fall, is both a realistic recreation of surreal events
and a subtle allegory about the need for liberty. It mixes simple, potent
symbols -- a mirror, a watch, an apple -- with surprisingly natural
performances and cinematic sophistication, yet its true charm stems from the
extraordinary gentleness and humor with which it surrounds the frail
participants in this social tragedy.
The twins, though largely mute and physically impaired from years of
confinement, nevertheless illuminate the screen with their awkward
intelligence and palpable delight in freedom. Their impoverished, elderly
father quotes from an antiquated parenting manual, describing girls as
flowers, easily faded by the "sun" of strange men's gazes; his wily,
hard-headed simplicity, which produced such calamitous consequences, is also
touching and funny.
Yet the film's most painful and haunting presence is the girls' blind and
severely disturbed mother, a spectral figure who prefers to remain locked in
her home, wrapped in her chador and continually muttering curses.
"It is useless to try to find someone to blame for her condition," said Ms.
Makhmalbaf, sitting in the Manhattan offices of her distributor, New Yorker
Films. "Who is to tell whether it was her husband's wish for her to be
incarcerated, or her own? By the time society intervenes, she has so
radically internalized this norm that even when the door is opened, she
doesn't know what to do. The veil has become her entire universe.
"What I noticed about those two girls is that, the more they came into
contact with society, the more complete they became as human beings. For me
that became a metaphor for all women. The other women in the neighborhood
all have bars in front of their houses. They're all wearing chadors. They
live in the same prison, just a little better. It doesn't mean they are as
free as men, to have a role in society.
"But sometimes I think that women in Iran are like a spring. When you push
them a lot, when they are under pressure, they are closed. But if they want
to be free, and if they try, they burst out with a lot of energy."
Articulate and vivacious, aware of her youth yet utterly self-assured, it's
tempting to see Ms. Makhmalbaf as the embodiment of a new generation. In
fact, her precocious emergence as a filmmaker coincided with the promise of
social change in Iran.
In May 1997 Mohammad Khatami was elected president in a landslide victory;
he pledged openness, tolerance and concern for the aspirations of young
people and women. (Recent assassinations of dissident intellectuals, though
officially condemned by the government, have dampened those hopes
considerably.)
"It was very important that Khatami talked about young people," Ms.
Makhmalbaf said, though she declares herself largely uninterested in
politics. "For 19 years, nobody cared about them."
Yet Ms. Makhmalbaf's startling cinematic vision is also the product of a
unique education and circumstances. Among Iran's New Wave of filmmakers,
Abbas Kiarostami may be the darling of Western critics, but Mohsen
Makhmalbaf (known in this country for "Gabbeh") is more widely admired at
home. Ms. Makhmalbaf practically grew up on sets where she watched her
father direct more than a dozen features.
At age 15, Ms. Makhmalbaf informed her father and other family members that
she wanted to quit high school to devote herself to cinema. "It took some
time to convince them," she said. "That was my first practice in directing."
In response to her requests for guidance, Makhmalbaf suggested books and
films; friends and other family members soon joined their discussions.
"Gradually, our meetings became more systematized, like lessons in a
school," she said. "We studied the history of art, music, architecture,
film, video, photography, literature and poetry."
During that time, Ms. Makhmalbaf made two video shorts, a documentary about
styles of European painting and a fiction about a frustrated young artist.
Home schooling also sparked the cinematic ambitions of Ms. Makhmalbaf's
siblings. Her 19-year-old brother Messam, who worked as a still photographer
on "The Apple," is interested in editing; her little sister Hanna made her
first short film at the age of 8. ("The Day My Aunt Was Ill" was selected to
screen at the Locarno Film Festival.)
The unlikely parallels between the destitute family in "The Apple" and this
highly cultivated but incongruous household of auteurs were not lost on the
film's Iranian viewers.
"Mr. Makhmalbaf also kept his children at home," said Jamsheed Akrami, an
Iranian film critic who teaches at William Paterson University in Wayne,
N.J. "Not as prisoners, of course. But his logic was, I'm not happy with the
educational system, I'm going to educate them myself. Well, it struck me
that the actions of the father in the film were something like his. One act
produced very interesting results. The other resulted in a tragedy. But
their nature was not so different."
How closely did Mohsen Makhmalbaf orchestrate his daughter's emergence as a
director? Reached by fax in Tehran, Makhmalbaf did not return repeated
requests for comment on their collaborative process.
Whatever its debt to her father's esthetic legacy, "The Apple" is guided by
Samira Makhmalbaf's spirit of youth and independence. Yet "The Apple" also
builds upon the contradictions of a country that since its Islamic
revolution has supported a flourishing professional class of women while
enforcing their hijab, or ritual veiling and seclusion; a country that has
seen one of the world's great contemporary cinemas flower amid strict
government censorship.
"I think women directors in Iran have more chances than outside Iran for
professional advancement," asserted Malak Khazai, an art director and
director who divides her time between Paris and Tehran. "Discrimination
comes not from the authorities but from constraints placed upon them by
personal relationships."
Raksheen Bani-Etemad, the most prominent of the half-dozen women directors
currently working in Iran, agrees. Ms. Bani-Etemad's last three films have
centered on subjects of particular concern to women, and she finds Iranian
filmgoers increasingly interested in these issues.
Earlier this month she presented her most recent work, "The May Lady," at
the Rotterdam International Film Festival. Its heroine, a divorced
filmmaker, is researching a documentary on "the exemplary mother" while her
own maternal duties create conflict in her private life.
"These are things people wouldn't even talk about among themselves," she
said in Rotterdam. "So when they're shown on screen, they have a tremendous
force."
Iranian film censors require women's figures to be veiled; male and female
actors are prohibited from touching, and the use of close-ups is
discouraged. Paradoxically, by making naturalistic depictions of romance
difficult for directors to achieve, these restrictions have contributed to
the development of a cinema uniquely engaged with social reality. With its
focus on children and socially dispossessed people, and its self-conscious
mixing of documentary and fiction styles, "The Apple" draws upon several
prevalent Iranian film genres.
"We took the experience we were having while shooting very seriously," Ms.
Makhmalbaf said when describing her method of eliciting remarkably
spontaneous performances from the film's cast of nonprofessionals. "I had
only one camera, and very limited film stock. So I couldn't ask the father
to act in a fictive way, and have 10 takes, and choose one of them. I had to
recreate the real conditions that would generate his dialogue and his
hostility.
"What is being created, in effect, is a Third World, neither real nor
documentary; a conversation, a give-and-take, between my imagination and
their reality. I didn't take my camera and intrude into the family's
privacy. Instead, I generated an atmosphere of trust, in which we made the
film together, collectively."
Ms. Makhmalbaf laughed but acknowledged a reporter's suggestion of yet
another family parallel. Her father also made an early public debut. When he
was 17 and a fervent revolutionary, he attacked one of the Shah's policemen,
and spent five years in prison for his crime. (The policeman survived and
went on to become an aspiring movie actor 20 years later. When he showed up
for an audition, Makhmalbaf decided to restage the attack in "A Moment of
Innocence," a brilliant and poignant work of documentary/fiction.)
The difference between these two gestures -- the father's act of
revolutionary violence, and his daughter's embrace of esthetic freedom --
may also mark the distance Iran has traveled in a single generation.
Leslie Camhi's most recent article for the Arts and Leisure section was
about the French director Benoit Jacquot.