The overall impact of viewing the Iranian film Goodbye reminds you of another
unrelated film from USA. Way back in 1964, Hollywood produced a film called The Pawnbroker. It was directed by the
late Sidney Lumet. Anyone who has seen that film will not forget actor Rod
Steiger’s scream at the end of the film—a scream so anguished that no sound emanated
from his vocal chords. A silent scream is an oxymoron but that single enigmatic
scene propelled the career of Steiger and the performance won him a Silver Bear
for Acting at the Berlin Film Festival. And Steiger later claimed that he
borrowed the idea after seeing the anguish of the male subject’s skyward cry at
the right extreme of the famous and massive Pablo Picasso painting Guernica.
Good bye is also
about anguish—the silent suffering of the ordinary Iranian, intolerance of
individual and artistic freedom of expression and the insidious backlash
against any who dare to protest against current levels of social, political, and
religious freedom in that country. There is not a word of direct criticism of
the State in the film Good bye—yet
the film is a bold silent scream of protest against everything that is
intolerable in the country. It is an anguish one can relate with any society
surviving under a dictatorship or extreme religious fundamentalism. The ability
of director Mohammad Rasoulof to depict the Kafkaesque life of the sensitive,
educated Iranian with remarkable restraint without resorting to depicting a major
show of on-screen violence makes this work standout among other movies made
over the years etching out similar feelings.
The year 2011 produced two amazing and yet realistic Iranian
films: A Separation and Good bye. The former film was officially
allowed by Iran to compete at the Oscars and won the Best Foreign Film Oscar
and even got nominated for its screenplay as well. Earlier at the 2011 Berlin
Film Festival, it had swept three of the four major awards: best film, best
actor and best actress. The latter film, Good
bye, could never get Iran’s official blessing—in fact in December 2010, an
Iranian court sentenced its director Mohammad Rasoulof along with fellow
prominent director Jafar Panahi, to an year (or was it six?) in jail and barred
him from making films for 20 years. (The two were released on bail pending an
appeal but are banned from travelling abroad.) In spite of this official prosecution
of the director, the film Goodbye was
smuggled out of Iran and entered in the 2011 Cannes film festival in the Un certain
regard section. It eventually went on to win the award for best direction in
that section.
Can we compare and contrast the two Iranian films? In A Separation, the mother of a girl
child wants to leave Iran and live abroad for the sake of the future of her
daughter. The reason for this decision is asked by the magistrate to the mother
and there is no direct answer to the question—only body language gives the
viewer some clues of the unspoken answer. In Goodbye, the film is about a lady lawyer, Noura (played by Leyla Zareh),
married to a photo-journalist. She has been disbarred from legal practice for
having taken part in a civil rights protest. Her husband has been sent off to a
desert for showing his dissent. The well-educated lady is desperate to leave
the country. Both films exhibit the frustration of the Iranian in Iran,
especially of women. Yet the director of the former film is allowed to travel to
Hollywood to receive the Oscar, while the other lives in Iran with the Damocles
sword of a jail term dangling above him.
As the film progresses, we learn from pieces of furtive
conversation that a former client of the lady lawyer Noura (apparently who
Noura could not defend because she had been disbarred) has been hanged. Goodbye (the more accurate translation
of the title would be ‘See you later’) doesn’t criticize the state directly.
The events speak for themselves. The disbarred lawyer wants to immigrate to an
unnamed country; her justification is “if
you feel like a foreigner in your own land, it’s better to be a foreigner abroad.”
Any intelligent viewer can see certain parallels between Noura of this film and the Nobel Peace Prize winning
Iranian lawyer Shirin Ebadi who also worked for human rights of Iranians in
Iran only to find her Nobel Prize medal and diploma has been confiscated from
her locker (according to Ebadi’s page on Wikipedia). In Iran, there are
unofficial agents who facilitate this underhand immigration as the one Noura
plans in this film. The outcome at the end of the film Goodbye makes the film worth your while as the viewer not just savours
a good realistic story but also appreciates the string of silent screams
visually captured by the director and a top-notch team comprising a talented
and yet unknown crew of cinematographer Arastoo Givi and sound editor Hussein Mahdavi.
The “silent scream” pervades the film as you watch Noura,
wearing a ‘chador’, a mandatory cloak for women in public places, busy removing
her nail polish in an all-women public transport at night. The moral police
never confronts Noura in the film, but director Mohammad Rasoulof’s screenplay
captures the fear of Noura and her cleverness to avoid such a confrontation.
Equally important for the viewers to note is the ability of the director and
cinematographer to capture the mood of Noura’s co-passengers as she is busy
removing her nail polish in public. They all know why she is doing it and seem
to silently approve the non-confrontational plan. The viewer is transported
into a world of documentary cinema while you are actually watching fiction. The fact that Noura represents the upper
middle class section of Iranian society is subtly stated but not made obvious
throughout the film.
The “silent scream” pervades the film as Noura’s apartment is
visited by officials checking if she owns a satellite connection to her TV. The
lawyer Noura knows she could get into trouble if she denies the fact. She
answers that she has one such connection but that it does not work. The officials
confiscate it. What the director’s clever screenplay insinuates is that the eyes
and ears of the state is possibly snooping into your homes, to figure out that you have a
facility to access satellite TV, working or not working.
Another “silent scream” of the film is the sudden
unexplained disappearance of a pet turtle that seemed to have suddenly climbed
out of its glass enclosure and disappeared within the closed apartment. Again
the screenplay silently insinuates the long arm of the Big Brother.
The lone direct confrontation that Noura faces is the
sequence of plainclothesmen who question her on her husband in a lift following
which they search her apartment. It is interesting to see the elderly family
member serve the unwelcome guests tea and snacks as they rummage the apartment
for evidence against Noura and her husband. The film has not a single sequence
of physical violence; yet the tension and terror fill each frame. Noura's wistful
gaze towards the Teheran international airport from her apartment’s terrace conveys her
feelings to ultimately flee the country. These are the powerful understatements
that make Good bye worth watching.
After the movie ends the viewer could say that similar tales
were made by directors like Costa-Gavras and several East European directors.
What sets Good bye apart is the subtle
weaving of small encounters that add up to more than their sum—especially when
you notice the entire film revolves around the expertise of Rasoulof and a very
unheralded crew of local talent. And Leyla Zareh as Noura is convincing to the
core, bringing out the emotions of a mother-to-be wondering if she ought to abort
under the unusual circumstances.
It is one thing to make a film like this in a
free world and another to make this film with such admirable camerawork, art
direction, sound mixing, and screenplay writing in Iran itself when Rasoulof is
being asked not to make films. The brave
film presents Iran today that a casual visitor to that country cannot glimpse
but merely suspect of the existence of the daily terror that the braver
sections of society face. Possibly great cinema is always spurred on by state persecution.
P.S. Good bye ranks
as one of 10 best films of 2011 for the author. Asghar Farhadi's A Separation was reviewed earlier on this blog.
