At what point does certainty that things will change for the better become a delusion? How long can you hold onto that hope until you lose your grip on reality?
Iranian filmmaker Aliyar Rasti’s allegorical The Great Yawn of History ponders these questions in his rigorous realist fairy tale that follows two men on a journey that they might never come back from, but from which they’ll be forever changed.
The film opens with a setup that could be ripped from the pages of the Brothers Grimm or Hans Christian Anderson. Beitollah (Mohammad Aghebati) writes his name, address, and an advertisement for a job on $100 bills and casually scatters them around the city. When a group of young men show up at his door with the bills in hand, he promptly conducts interviews with each of them for the unspecified job, asking questions ranging from their background to whether or not they believe in miracles. It’s the meek Shoja (Amirhossein Hosseini), who declares he believes in nothing that gets the gig, but there’s a stipulation: it will involve a long journey for an indeterminate period of time. Unbeknownst to Beitollah, Shoja is broke and unhoused, and he’s content not to ask too many questions. So it’s only when they’re on the train headed into the Iranian countryside that Shoja learns the unbelievable task they’ll embark on: they will search for a cave that Beitollah has seen in his recurring dreams that he believes contains a stash of gold coins. It will be Shoja’s job to enter the cave and retrieve the coins that they’ll split between them evenly.
Unfolding somewhere between a reverse Waiting for Godot and a Biblical parable, Rasti’s patient screenplay sends Beitollah and Shoja drifting through rice fields, up steep rocky slopes, and through desert sands as each prophetic cave proves to be an illusion. Along the way they encounter farmers, orphans, and chiselers trying to squirm a cut of their gold but none provide any moral or spiritual insights. So Beitollah and Shojah soldier on, and it’s only when they become lost and isolated, that the central concerns of Rasti’s film begin to rise to the surface.
“Don’t I deserve the thing I don’t deserve?” Beitollah asks to an uncomprehending Shoja. The film posits a country of people anxious for deliverance to a better future, even though it doesn’t seem possible by just doing your best. Beitollah laments he’s worked his whole life to prove to people he’s capable, and now, wandering across Iran with a stranger, it seems he’s done the opposite. But the picture is also a portrait of two lonely people; Beitollah talks of a wife we never see while Shoja reveals he was raised in an orphanage, and speaks of parents living in Germany who may or may not exist. The father Shoja seeks and the family Beitollah could build might be staring each other in the face, but it seems they are too close to see it.
The cinematography by Soroush Alizadeh presents a vision of Iran both beautiful and desolate, bustling and quiet. Rasti’s film never quite becomes fully involving, revolving around an episodic structure that, once it’s established, sticks its characters within a narrow, yet focused narrative. The tension is less about what will happen to Beitollah and Shoja, than what Rasti will do to resolve their fate. But The Great Yawn of History is nonetheless thoughtful and even if Beitollah believes that he’s “wasted my life in dreams and fantasies,” perhaps it’s even an worse way to live to give up on them entirely.
Director, screenwriter, producer: Aliyar Rasti
Cast: Mohammad Aghebati, Amirhossein Hosseini, Saber Abar, Mahin Sadri, Mehrdad Ziaie, Ramin Alizadeh
Cinematography: Soroush Alizadeh
Production design: Faraz Modiri
Costume design: Elham Moein
Editing: Mohammad Najarian
Music: Ava Rasti
Sound: Vahid Razavian
Production companies: Para-Doxa (Iran)
World sales: Heretic
Venue: Berlinale (Encounters)
In Farsi
93 minutes
