There’s a simple pitch in Iranian-born Swedish director Milad Alami’s second feature, Opponent (Motståndaren), that becomes anything but simple as the story progresses.
Following the travails of a professional Greco-Roman wrestler named Iman (Payman Maadi), who’s forced to flee Iran with his family and winds up in the snow-capped hills of northern Sweden, the film could very much have been a sports inspiration flick about immigration, assimilation and overcoming the odds to win the gold medal.
But Alami has other things in mind for his sophomore effort, which is truer to life and bleaker in what it proposes, revealing the bureaucratic hell and cultural dissonance many refugees experience when fleeing to faraway lands. The film then doubles-down on that dissonance by unveiling a whole other subplot involving its character’s past that, without giving away major spoilers, reframes the story in a different light. By the end, there’s perhaps too much happening in Opponent for it all to work, but this is still an ambitious and timely movie carried by a terrific lead.
Maadi has proved himself to be one of our Iran’s greatest living actors, beginning with his work on Asghar Farhadi’s About Elly and A Separation and continuing through his turns in Saeed Roustayi’s Just 6.5 and Leila’s Brothers (the latter premiered in Cannes’ main competition last year). Here he gets convincingly in shape to play a man whose athletic feats are belied by an inner turmoil and precarious migrant status, and his performance is the main selling point in a Berlin premiere that should find some attention in international markets.
After a brief Iran-set opening where we not only see how tough Iman can be, but how he’s been forced to leave his homeland, the film jumps to Sweden a few years later, where the wrestler now lives with his wife Maryam (Marall Nasiri) and their two daughters (Nicole Mehrbod, Diana Farzami). Along with a host of other refugees, they occupy a clean if crowded temporary shelter where they wait for their papers and constantly fear deportation. To make ends meet, Iman delivers pizza on a snowmobile, riding through the wintry landscapes where wolves sometimes roam, and where the local Swedes all live in tasteful lodges.
Alami, who also penned the script, paints a credible portrait of the risky life Iman and his family lead abroad, never settling down (they’re constantly moved from one room or shelter to another) and hoping to get approved for asylum. This takes a toll on the marriage of the couple, who hardly have any privacy in the tiny apartment they share with their girls. And yet that doesn’t prevent Maryam from getting pregnant, which adds still another layer of complication, even if they seem happy enough about having a third child.
When a fellow Iranian refugee, Abbas (Ardalan Esmaili, who starred in Alami’s well-received debut, The Charmer), recognizes him as a respected wrestler from their homeland, Iman decides to start training again, hoping that his athletic prowess will help with his immigration status, especially if he gets selected for a competition. He immediately reveals his skills at a first session with the local team, where he makes fast friends with Thomas (Björn Elgerd), a younger local whose interest in Iman seems to go beyond the man’s mere talents on the mat.
At this point Opponent veers in a new direction, deepening the complexity of Iman’s situation, including his touchy relationship with his wife, but in some ways diluting the tension. Iman’s renewed career not only brings him face-to-face with the Iranian team he once wrestled for, but it introduces the rather obvious theme of homoeroticism, in a sport where men in tights firmly grip each other until one of them goes down. The latter element feels, at times, like it belongs in another movie, and Alami doesn’t quite manage to reconcile his multiple storylines.
In the end his film functions better as a character study, and as a study of refugees waylaid in Sweden, than as arresting drama. The best scenes in Opponent take place outside the wrestling ring or locker room, revealing Iman and his family trying to live normally in an abnormal situation. One memorable sequence has them test-driving an SUV just so they can all sit in a car again, and for a few hours they movingly pretend that they’re another family from the neighborhood. A latter scene shows Maryam, who was a piano teacher back in Iran, giving a recital that nearly moves Iman to tears, as he suddenly realizes all his wife has given up to flee with him overseas.
Opponent is fascinating when it shows people’s lives — lives filled with ambitions and accomplishments, with dreams and deceptions — upended by migration, and much of the film is about Iman coming to terms with his own life as he desperately tries to find a new home. If the movie doesn’t exactly grip the viewer from start to finish, it’s an honest look at what exile can do to anyone propelled into a strange land and forced to make concessions to survive. For Iman, it means deciding between who he is and who he needs be, which isn’t always the same thing.
Director, screenplay: Milad Alami
Cast: Payman Maadi, Marall Nasiri, Björn Elgerd, Ardalan Esmaili
Producers: Annika Rogell, Sandra Wang, Peter Possne
Cinematography: Sebastian Winterø
Production design: Thomas Øyjordsbakken
Costume design: Ingjerd Meland
Editing: Olivia Neergaard-Holm
Music: Jon Ekstrand, Carl-Johan Sevedag
Production company: Tangy (Sweden)
World sales: Indie Sales
Venue: Berlin Film Festival (Panorama)
In Swedish, Farsi, English
119 minutes
