This is a Festival review of Iranian (2014)
More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2014 (28 August to 7 September)
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6 September
This is a Festival review of Iranian (2014)
As a rarity, Iranian (2014) was interesting, a film dangerous to its maker Mehran Tamadon to have filmed – but could it, for all that, have been better, maybe much better ?
As narrator (over scenes inside a mosque, or of religious veneration on the street), he tells us that he has tried for three years to obtain the agreement of Iranian clerics to spend time in a house together with him, an atheist, so that they can talk about what it is to share a space (the house, which here is his mother’s house, outside Teheran) and what that might be like in The Islamic Republic of Iran – making house rules for the use of the shared parts of the house, which may or may not translate into what should be permissible for people to do generally in that country.
So when four (understandably but regrettably ?) unidentified clerics, two of whom seem more senior to the others (and is referred to as Haji Ali), accept his invitation (and, during the course of settling in, then bring along their families), do we imagine that he would want to be prepared to counter, for example, facile arguments or debating techniques (not least when one of the other men, slighting him comically on camera, asks how he ever read philosophy (when he cannot follow the instructions for ritually washing himself))…?
(Having tried the ritual, he is asked if he felt Incredible joy : twice he took it back to the refreshment of the water (rather than any spiritual quality), and, when he resisted probing as to whether the ritual in itself had been beneficial, he was told Maybe you need to be more attentive, as if the ritual were inherently beneficial and purifying, if he would just notice. Rather pompously and insultingly, around this point, Tamadon is also told (by the cleric on the right (Tamadon is on the left), who is the main interlocutor) You lack knowledge.)
Possibly, grateful that the men are there at all, he falls into the trap of being too nice to them**, and then this felt like a bit of a wasted opportunity, for, although at the level of intelligent undergraduate debate, it was good enough, there are things that anyone should be wise to :
* Not allowing the other participants to define the position that one is defending (or attacking from)
* Not allowing extreme examples or cases to be used, or false dichotomies (as if the choice is only between A and B, and there is no C, etc.)
In this film, Tamadon only weakly defends the assertion that his argument is for ‘secularism’ – the others say the word a few times, and, by attrition, he accepts it, and then ends up with a false label to what he is seeking. This label is then, necessarily, used against him.
For he also allows his guests to refer to the case of naked protesters in Holland (although, to be honest, Das englische Garten in München is where people are allowed to be freely naked outdoors and in public) and then to brand him with dictatorship, under the guise of having made a claim for secularism, because he says that he had not been proposing for nudity to be allowed – this line of argument had, after all, started with the requirement in Iran (whether or not part of Islamic law as such, or of the law of an Islamic Republic – this dis disputed between him and then, and not resolved) of women being veiled.
There was much good humour, not least when, on arrival (and later) the idea of avoiding religious taxes is invoked in relation to Tamadon’s mother’s largely unused property (since his sister and he both live abroad). But too much of the humour is allowed to be at Tamadon’s expense, and the theatricality of one cleric, in getting him to answer a broad Yes or No question, and his then falling into some trap based on the bogus notion of an excluded middle, and even calling him ‘cunning’ more than once.
For, no, if he were even a good debater, let alone a cunning one, Tamadon would say So what if 98% of those who voted 34 years ago voted for The Islamic Republic – two generations have been born since, and how many people who voted then are now alive ? Instead, he weakly says that his parents voted for it, but they did not know what it was going to be (and any such appeal to the individual case, Tamadon’s or anything that was not a generality, was just jumped on).
Against which, science and scientifically established fact kept being invoked – a woman singing (only allowed if a woman sings to an audience only of women) is said to evoke lust in men, and that men are more inspired to lust by, say, seeing a woman’s bare head. Tamadon’s arguments for self-control then sounded regressive, because the high ground had been taken by asserting a scientific basis for the claims, not least when the argument is that it is necessary men’s inclinations must be shielded by women not singing or being unveiled :
We were really in the puerile territory of judges who say that women had it coming with rape or sexual assault because of how they dressed, as if The Accused (1988) had never existed. These debaters are arguing that when a man is attracted to a woman it almost automatically and unavoidably ends in adultery, and this in a society without the loosening effect of (too much) alcohol, and whatever the film may have meant as its message is lost on such thinking.
This film is maybe not the only opportunity that there will be to argue the issues properly, and, when it came to what music could be played in the living-room, with the agreement of the five men, it was interesting that there was not a uniformity of view amongst the other four, and a willingness to allow in that special situation what could not and would not be sanctioned in society as a whole : an indication that, doctrinally, there was more room for movement, with one cleric who stated the official line, and yet what he could personally permit / accept there.
There was a good feel generally to seeing the shared life for these few days, and the prints on canvas, of the men’s libraries, that were used to decorate the walls gave a sense of their influences and viewpoints. However, all of these things were too little to outweigh the substantial poverty of good argument.
End-notes
* Of the fire in the garden, whose flames had been likened just before to those of hell.
** There are, after all, liberties that guests sometimes have, but hosts do not, and vice versa.
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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
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