Mahboube, the thirty-something artist at the heart of Me, Maryam, the Children and 26 Others, has been passing solitary days with just her pets for company. But financial pressures have forced her to rent out her house as the location for a week-long film shoot, bringing a chaotic intrusion of crew members that disrupts her privacy and any semblance of control she had had over her daily life.
Screening in the Tiger Competition at the Rotterdam International Film Festival, Iranian director Farshad Hashemi’s feature debut is an inventive and droll reflection on the tension between memory and moving forward, and the fragility of our physical moorings to present time and space. It should enjoy further festival spots as a timely exploration of Iranian society in breakdown, with a quiet, rich humanity and poetic lightness of handwriting that signals a promising directorial voice.
On one of the walls hangs Mahboube’s most prized artwork, an unfinished portrait of herself and her sister as children. The place where her mouth should be on the canvas is a blank, as her father didn’t have time to paint in all her features before he died. In another spot of the house, termites have eaten right through the door frame. This house, in which the entire film plays out, is marked by incomplete plans and disintegration, in which time and loss have worked an aggressive war of attrition. The exact circumstances around Mahboube’s seclusion remain vague in this enigmatic, ingeniously multi-layered film, despite her voiceover ruminations. But we gather that the ghosts are ones of emigration and exile, in a Tehran in which hardship undermines everybody’s peace of mind.
We are shifted seamlessly and playfully between the film-within-the-film, about a marriage collapse and a home that is being packed up, and its behind-the-scenes production, in scenes both moving and amusing, which foreground the constructed nature of our memoryscapes. Mahboube is played with a brooding intensity and flickers of long-dormant vitality by Mahboubeh Gholami. A sculptor who has carefully packed her most fragile pieces away but must keep living in the house during the shoot, she is at first watchful and on edge, irritated by the crew’s lack of care in regard to her personal belongings as they take over, rearrange and repaint the space. She complains when the front door is left open despite instructions, a rare book edition becomes mug-stained, and a kitten is trapped in the retractable arm of some equipment. The director, Farshad (played by the actual director, with that teasing, self-referential merging of fiction and reality Iranian cinema is adept at) is for his part understanding, but a tad impatient with this scrutiny. There is bedlam to oversee in the cramped space, after all, and he promises to reimburse her for any damage.
Mahboube’s discomfort is not just about money though. She experiences the incursion into her space as a form of erasure, as this is a house loaded with her own history. As the days go on, the relationships between her and the crew tentatively thaw. Having lost faith in people, a communal urge stirs in her again, in the midst of the crew’s joking warmth. A Kurdish crew member who stays over to keep an eye on the expensive equipment even helps her bury her cancer-ridden dog, who had grown old with her in the home.
Amid the disorienting illusions manufactured during the shoot, and a snow machine that even pumps out a different season, Mahboube experiences a kind of catharsis, as the relationship between on-camera married couple Sheida and Farhad fails to survive the financial strain of their move to Tehran and the difficulty of earning a living from art. Sheida spray paints her face out of the wedding photo that the set designers had hung in the place of Mahboube’s painting, desperate to remove any sign of herself from the house that had once held hope for their future. A surreal, blood-spattered nightmare scene with wedding attire and boxing gloves adds a camp, red-filtered twist of levity to other scenes that mine the sober emotional pain of separation. As Mahboube adapts to the crew’s presence, even becoming curious enough to get involved in their creative process, it seems the solidarity enabled by collaborative art may just be the way out of her isolation, and a bulwark, more than material things ever could be, against mortality and forgetting. It’s a hopeful possibility that turns this very meta film into its own act of resistance.
Director, screenwriter: Farshad Hashemi
Cast: Farshad Hashemi, Mahboubeh Gholami, Ebrahim Azizi, Zahra Aghapour, Navid AghaeI, Arash Deghan Shad, Shahin Karimi
Producers: Farzad Pak, Farshad Hashemi
Cinematographer: Davood Malek HosseiniProduction Design: Siamak KarinejadSound Design: Zohreh Aliakbari
Music: Peyman Yazdanian
Production companies: PakFilm GmbH (Germany), Istadeh Art Group (Iran), Europe Media Nest s.r.o. (Czech Republic)
World sales: PakFilm GmbH
Festival: Rotterdam (Tiger Competition)
In Farsi
102 minutes
