For Rana

Baraye Rana

(c) Madakto Pictures

VERDICT: Iranian director Iman Yazdi offers predictable melodrama with his first feature ‘For Rana’, which is in the running for Busan’s New Currents award.

Of the five Iranian features making their bow at the Busan International Film Festival this year, For Rana is perhaps the most accessible – or, in other words, conventional. In a story that revolves around a couple’s desperate attempt to get a heart transplant for their comatose daughter, director Iman Yazdi throws all the melodramatic tropes available to stir up the viewer’s emotions. While universalist in its emphasis on parental sacrifice, the film hardly addresses any issue specific to Iranian society of the here and now.

For Rana begins with motorcycle stuntman Aref (Hamed Behdad) entering a darkened circus tent to perform the notorious “globe of death” act. He whirls round and round in a spherical metal cage with only his blue headlights on, producing a sensorial spectacle that is at once scintillating and ominous. As opening sequences go, this is certainly a shock to the senses.

This opening salvo is proof that first-time feature film director Iman Yazdi has technical savvy, after nearly two decades of experience as an assistant director, production manager and directing shorts. But that’s as original the film is going to get, and it quickly spirals into sentimental territory. What’s lacking in For Rana is the edge that could propel this conventional melodrama to loftier artistic heights. In a story smacking of déjà vu twists and turns, an array of archetypal characters and a finale that offers all-too-convenient closure, the film lacks that spark of originality that could make it stand from many similar films on the market after its premiere at Busan.

While the first motorcycle sequence seems to suggest Aref is hard-boiled to the core, we soon get to see the man’s softer side. No soon has he finished his daredevil act that we see him having fun on a racetrack with his toddler daughter Rana. They drive to a hospital to pick up Aref’s wife Soodabeh (Pantea Panahiha) and head for a hearty al fresco dinner to celebrate the girl’s birthday.

When Rana puts a sticker on Aref’s motorcycle, however, even the uninitiated know tragedy is bound to follow. Cue Rana falling ill, the doctor informing the parents of her need for a new heart, and their discovery of a potentially compatible organ in the body of a terminally ill old man who has been kept in a vegetative state for some time. But the elderly man’s young fiancée (Hediyeh Bazvand) refuses to pull the plug. The parents’ discussions with her and the dying man’s middle-aged son (Payam Ahmadinia) turn the narrative towards inheritance-related intrigue between the son and his stepmother.

So it is that For Rana runs on these two parallel tracks, as the working-class couple goes to extremes to cobble together enough cash in exchange for the old man’s heart, while the well-off family fights each other to make themselves even richer. For the former, Yazdi employs every artistic trick in the book – a confused Aref hearing voices in his head, a crying Soodabeh running in slow motion, the tension-filled denouement – to illustrate the pair’s desperation; the latter, meanwhile, slowly descends into soap-opera territory, as the two heirs-to-be wage war on each other with minders by their side and murder on their minds.

It’s perhaps interesting to note how For Rana represents Iran in a drastically different light than, say, other Iranian films doing the rounds on the festival circuit. Here, religion is conspicuous by its total absence, and Soodabeh’s (female) colleague’s second marriage is greeted with nothing but words of congratulations from all around, a situation one would never expect to see in films by  Ashgar Farhadi or Maryam Moghadam and Behtash Sanaeeha. The nearest the film gets to broaching the patriarchal nature of Iranian society is when Aref learns of his father’s refusal to acknowledge Rana as his granddaughter because he deems her parents’ marriage “illegitimate”. (It’s never explicitly spelt out why this is the case – not even in the most intense of rows the couple has during the film.)

In For Rana, the main problematic seems to be corruption of both the moral and economical kind. Iranian society is shown as a network of transactions where everything can be bought and sold. The sight of cheques (and cash) changing hands remains a dominant visual motif throughout, the one nod towards symbolism Yazdi and his co-screenwriter Hossein Mahkam subtly include in a film notable for its histrionics.

Director: Iman Yazdi  
Screenplay: Hossein Mahkam, Iman Yazdi
Cast: Hamed Behdad, Pantea Panahiha, Nader Fallah, Payam Ahmadinia
Producer: Morteza Shaysteh
Executive producer: Amin Asadi
Cinematography: Roozbeh Rayga
Editing: Samaneh Sezavar
Music: Arman Mousapour
Sound designer: Amir Hossein Sadeghi
Production company: Hedayet Film
World sales: Madakto Pictures
Venue: Busan International Film Festival (New Currents)
In Persian
87 minutes