A highly stylized, visceral incursion into an upscale drug dealer’s world set in an eerie nocturnal Tehran, Critical Zone (Mantagheye Bohrani) by Ali Ahmadzadeh is a major shocker.
Reflecting the rage and anger in Iranian society, particularly among young people, in the distorting mirror of speeding cars and strung out toxic excess, here is a film that takes allegory to exciting and frequently uncomfortable extremes. It is hard to believe such a direct screenplay, one filled with harsh obscenities and a protracted female orgasm, could have been shot in Iran. Its frankness can only be compared to last year’s festival hit Holy Spider — but that was a Euro coproduction shot in Jordan.
It is a slippery film to grab hold of in the early scenes, where elegant long takes and repetitions are the order of the day, and a bit puzzling in the middle. But the film gathers momentum as it goes along to culminate in two dazzling, unforgettable scenes of drug trips gone awry. Its ambience and taboo-breaking should speak particularly to young local audiences, who are very unlikely to see it in film theaters.
Sadly, Critical Zone will have its world premiere in Locarno’s international competition without the director and screenwriter Ali Ahmadzadeh (Kami’s Party 2013, Atom Heart Mother 2015). That story is here. But despite mounting pressure from Iran that the film be withdrawn and its screening canceled, the Locarno festival, the director and his German-based producer Sina Ataeian Dena have stood firm. Further festival screenings and possible release through Luxbox can be expected to attract a lot of attention to this bold and disconcerting vision of hell.
There is an air of desperation, even self-destruction in Amir (Amir Pousti), a cocky, single-minded pusher who has something lethal for everyone in his big bag of tricks. Behind his curly brown hair and beard, his pupils are dilated. He races around town in a nondescript car which we barely glimpse, because Ahmadzadeh disconcertingly puts the camera in the driver’s seat. Like a video game, the viewer is behind the wheel with the protagonist as he follows ghostly instructions from a voice navigator (a suave woman’s voice) to turn left and right and make U-turns; sometimes to watch out for police and danger ahead. There is definitely something supernatural about these orders, as he goes about his devilish business.
Despite the evil nestled inside him, we feel close to Amir, thanks to all the narrative devices Ahmadzadeh uses to make us identify with the daredevil pusher. One quintessential shot is over the steering wheel as he navigates the empty highways and streets of the city at high speed, passing cars on the left and right in fast motion cinematography. When Amir is really in an altered state, the camera spins 360°, turning him upside down. The adrenaline is there.
Innovative as it is, the story revolves around that iconic location of modern Iranian art films (Kiarostami, Panahi, etc.): a moving vehicle. In the three-minute opening long take, we recognize another trope, the empty highway tunnel that seems to stretch into infinity in ever-dwindling perspective. Here this familiar backdrop of Iranian drama is particularly mysterious and sinister, desaturated of almost all color and seen from the perspective of a wailing ambulance whose mission remains unclear. Finally the shot shifts to a driver in a car (Amir) nervously smoking a joint as he maneuvers out of range of police cars.
Somewhat bizarrely, the film is listed as “sci fi” in the Locarno press material, which may place a futuristic fig leaf over some of the more unlikely scenes. As Amir meets customers and acquaintances, scenes play out with so little dialogue that it’s mostly a guessing game and hard to know what’s going on. At one point he bakes magic brownies stuffed with either hashish or marijuana and, with the aid of a sultry young nurse, distributes them to the residents of a home for the elderly. Why? They hardly look like returning customers.
His visit to another young woman in a black leotard, who teaches a dance class to children, seems aimed at getting her to return home to him – despite the fact (he hints) that he is unable to make love to her. “Sleep with who you want,” he urges her. “Just come home.” One suspects his own addiction has taken its toll on his body, as it has on several of his emotionally ravaged customers.
The pace picks up dramatically in two long, memorable scenes. After driving a self-assured young woman to the airport and selling her a substantial quantity of drugs, which she nonchalantly throws in her suitcase, Amir picks up an airlines flight assistant. Her initial primness dissolves into something quite different when they drive into an empty field with the headlights off.
After the drugs and alcohol, sex is next on the agenda – but as has been established, Amir is impotent and unable to perform. He can only listen to what she is experiencing (offscreen) on the seat beside him, very vocally and without inhibition, magnified out of all proportion into something between an orgasmic shriek and an existential howl. It is loud enough to attract the police. The chase scene that follows is one of the most extraordinary in Iranian cinema, shot in the dark with perfect timing and manic energy. And this is not the end – Amir will more clearly reveal the man he really is in a dramatic final scene, a scary encounter with a teenage addict whose eyes are already dead.
Much of the film’s impact comes from its visual and audio special effects. Talented D.P. Abbas Rahimi drains every shot of superfluous color, achieving a chilling sort of nighttime uniformity, while composer Milad Movahedi (Endless Dreams, Forbidden Womanhood) surprises with a wide range of lovely contemporary music. The sound team works overtime on the centrality of unexpected repeated sounds, like repeated electronic pings and, of course, the omniscient talking navigator.
The Film Verdict at Locarno Film Festival 2023.
Director, screenwriter: Ali Ahmadzadeh
Cast: Amir Pousti, Shirin Abendinirad, Alireza Keymanesh, Maryam Sadeghyan, Sagar Saharkhiz, Mina Hasanlou, Alireza Rastjou
Producers: Sina Ataeian Dena, Ali Ahmadzadeh
Dramaturgical advisor: Sina Ataeian Dena
Cinematography: Abbas Rahimi
Music: Milad Movahedi
Sound: Mehdi Behboodi
Sound design: Hasan Mahdavi
Production company: Counter Intuitive Film
World sales: Luxbox
Venue: Locarno Film Festival (Concorso internazionale)
In Farsi
99 minutes
