The Bloodshot Eye
By John Beifuss
Boo on me for failing to call your attention until now to the ingenious “Mourning” (or “Soog,” as the title is transliterated from the original Persian), a tidy gem from Iran that is the highlight to date of theIndie Memphis-sponsored 2012 “Global Lens” international film series unspooling this summer at the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art.
The debut feature of director Morteza Farshbaf, the 2011 movie screened last Saturday, July 30. Its second and final screening here is at 2 p.m. Friday (Aug. 3) at the museum.
Also this weekend, a “Global Lens” film makes its Memphis debut: “Pegasus,” from Morocco.
Formally inventive and emotionally potent, “Mourning” opens in darkness; we hear a man and woman arguing, their words translated via subtitles. (The presence of subtitles — the image of the subtitles on the otherwise black screen — automatically makes this a different viewing experience for the non-Iranian than for those in the movie’s native country.)
The next scene also is unusual. We see, on a distant rural road, a small car; we hear no voices, but, again, subtitles present a dialogue between a husband and wife. The lanscape is vast and mostly empty, but lovely; the grass ripples like waves in a green sea. (Fans of Iranian cinema will think of Abbas Kiarostami’s 1997 masterpiece, “Taste of Cherry,” another film in which a man spends a lot of time in a car, among fields and the occasional tree.) The scene lasts almost seven minutes before Farshbaf cuts to the interior of the car; where we discover the reason for the apparent contradictory union of silence and subtitles: The man (Kiomars Giti) and woman (Sharareh Pasha) are deaf, and they are communicating by sign language. In the back seat is a young boy, Arshia (Amir Hossein Maleki), the nephew of the couple in the car and the son of the couple we heard in the dark opening scene. The aunt and uncle think the boy can’t comprehend their conversation, but the kid understands more than they suspect.
The mysteries of the story and the characters’ relationships are revealed during the trio’s drive to Tehran, a journey interrupted by blocked roads, a leaky gas tank, and other obstacles and annoyances. The soundtrack is bare of extraneous sounds; we hear only the noise of the road. The silence — so uncommon for today’s movies, which prefer to caulk over the deficiencies of their narratives with overactive foley work and omnipresent music — is both unnatural and a relief.“Mourning” is one of the better movies to screen in Memphis this year, and it will be a revelation to anyone who thinks of Iran as some sort of alien enemy state.
The next “Global Lens” film is 2010’s “Pegasus”(or “Pegase”), from Morocco, also the work of a first-time writer-director, Mohamed Mouftakir. The movie screens at 2 p.m. Saturday at the Brooks, and again at 2 p.m. Friday, Aug. 10.
Like “Where Do We Go Now?,” from Lebanon (which opens this weekend at the Studio on the Square), “Circumstance” (2011), “My Tehran for Sale” (2009), “Persepolis” (2007), “Offside”(2006), “Osama” (2003), “Kandahar” (2001) and some other films of Muslim/Middle Eastern/North African origin that have screened publicly in Memphis in the past decade, “Pegasus” is a movie with an agenda: It’s a protest film, of sorts, against a patriarchal society that stifles female identity and punishes female independence, placing women in “a world of lies, fear, shame, hypocrisy and denial.” The movie is gritty yet glossy, with enough spooky images — closeups of a horse’s wild eye; a bowl of blood — to stock a horror movie, even if its story of personality fracture is meant to deliver an angry message rather than the shocks to the system of, say, “Repulsion.”
Presented as a mystery, the story unfolds via flashback and unreliable memory, as an apparent therapist (Saadia Ladib) in a remote, underpopulated psychiatric hospital tries to uncover the identity of a traumatized and pregnant young patient, who claims to have drunk the blood of “the Lord of the Horses.” (“Game of Thrones” fans may be reminded of the Dothraki faith in “the Stallion Who Mounts the World.”) We soon learn the story of Rihanna (Majdouline Idrissi), a girl from a remote village who grew up disguised as a boy at the insistence of her dictatorial father, a horseman and tribal chief eager for a son to carry on his lineage.
Cutting the girl’s hair and binding her developing breasts, the chief tells his faux son: “When you’re a man, you can have everything. When you’re a woman, you have nothing.” When the man’s wife complains such behavior is shameful, the chief replies: “The real shame is not having had a son.” When the daughter suggests it’s impossible for her to be a boy, the chief has an answer: “Manhood is earned.” He adds: “The devil speaks through women’s tongues.” “Pegasus” might have had more impact as a straight narrative, without the jigsaw narrative and familiar (at least to Western eyes) booga-booga, mysterioso atmosphere; its sincerity is admirable, however, and — like“Mourning” — it opens a window for American viewers onto a part of the world that too often is distorted by the prism of U.S. politics.
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